DreamBook

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

~ the obit ~

DreamBook went up in 1997 as one of the first things New Dream Network ever built, years before that company was widely known as DreamHost. It was free and it needed no account on the host site. It did exactly one job: it gave you a page where strangers could leave a message, plus a snippet of HTML to paste at the bottom of your own page so they could find it.

At its height it held more than half a million guestbooks and was the second largest guestbook host anywhere. That number is worth sitting with. Half a million separate people, most of them running a hobby page about a band or a cat, all pointing their visitors at the same rented back room.

The hosting ended on 31 March 2014. DreamHost's reasoning was not dramatic. The thing a guestbook did had been absorbed by blog comment systems first, then wholesale by the social networks. Today dreambook.com resolves, then bounces you to dreamhost.com, which is the corporate version of a sign on a door saying the tenant moved out.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the book was for ~

A guestbook was not a comment section, because it was not attached to anything. It sat below the whole site rather than below a post, which meant the messages in it were about the site itself, or about nothing at all. People wrote "nice page" and left a URL. People wrote in from Indonesia or Brazil to say they had found you through a webring. The genre was closer to a hotel register than to a discussion.

The other half of it was the hit counter, which usually sat right next to the guestbook link in the same table cell. A counter told you how many people came. A guestbook told you that at least one of them was real. For a personal page in 1999 those two numbers were the entire analytics stack.

Every page I landed on in those first dial-up years had one, and the Turkish pages were no different. A personal site written in a language almost no foreign visitor could read still carried the link, in English, in the same spot under the counter. That was just the shape a website came in.

~ the spam ~

What killed the format in practice, well before DreamHost pulled the plug, was automated posting. An open form that took a message and a link from anyone, usually with no account behind it, is precisely what a link-selling script wants. By the mid 2000s a large share of the world's guestbooks had become pure spam sediment, page after page of pharmacy URLs under one genuine entry from 2001 that said hi from Manchester.

Most owners never noticed, because most owners had stopped visiting their own sites. The book kept accepting entries for another decade regardless.

~ closing the books ~

There was no campaign and no petition. DreamHost announced the retirement, ran out the clock, then stopped serving on 31 March 2014. Half a million guestbooks went with it. What went with them was the handwriting of the early web's audience rather than of its authors. Archived homepages survive in fair numbers. The strangers who wrote three words underneath them mostly do not.

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