dotDoomed.com

» see dotdoomed.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The mechanic was one slider and one company. dotDoomed.com showed you a dot-com, a paragraph of its own marketing copy, and a row of numbers from 1 to 5, with "dot DOOMED!" printed under the 1 and "dot COOL" under the 5. You picked a number, it showed you what everyone else had picked, and it moved you on to the next company. There was no login and no expertise test.

Around that sat the apparatus of a real financial site, which is most of the joke. A company directory ran A to Z. There were Top 20 and Bottom 20 tables, plus Today's Winners and Today's Losers and the same split again by week. You could submit a site that was missing or add comments to a company's page. Each entry carried a link to the live site and a note of whether the company was public or private, under a block of the company's own press-release prose.

It kept score on itself too. The footer of every page carried a running vote count and the average rating across the whole database, which on 2 August 2001 stood at 80,379 ratings and 2.6416. It also published something called the doomIndex, 10566.4 on that same day, a made-up aggregate of national dot-com confidence that nobody asked for and that reads, from here, like a reasonably honest instrument.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the baboons ~

Nobody put a name on it. The About page is four sentences long and all of them are a bit: "This site was created by a pack of Shining Baboons. We remain grateful to all those people who donated hardware to the San Francisco Zoo, as you can see we put it to good use. The 'Boons". Every page footer reads "© 2001 Shining Baboons. A Rats in the Engine Production."

The 404 page kept the same voice and added surveillance. It greeted you with "ERROR FOUR 'OH' FOUR! Uhhh... you (or your computer 209.247.40.108) asked for" whatever you had asked for, then reported your operating system and browser back at you. When the Internet Archive's crawler hit it on 2 August 2001, the browser field printed ia_archiver, which means the only surviving copy of that page is also a record of the archive being told it had been spotted.

~ the goodbye ~

On 2 August 2001 the whole machine was still running, stats and directory and comment forms. By 23 August the front page was a 507 byte file, and it stayed byte-identical through the end of November. The misspellings are deliberate and theirs:

"Welcume to dot Doomed .com! dotDoomed is no moore (for the time bieng), The devolupers have choosen to drop the praject and go too werk with various web compinies (Webvun and Pets.com being the choosen compinies). Thank ewe for the mamories! - teh shining boons"

Pets.com had been liquidated in November 2000. Webvan filed for Chapter 11 on 9 July 2001, about six weeks before that page went up. A site built to let strangers guess which dot-coms were going to die signed off by naming two that already had, which is the only exit note in this archive that is also a final score.

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