eGroups

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

~ the obit ~

Before there was Yahoo Groups there was eGroups, and before that there was FindMail. Scott Hassan, an engineer who had written a large part of the early Google search code, started FindMail in 1997 as a way to archive and search email lists. it became eGroups once the point shifted from archiving to hosting, and the point was simple, let anyone start a mailing list without running mail software of their own.

this sat in a part of the web I arrived at late. in 1997 I was a teenager on a dial-up modem in turkey, online since '98, and american email-list culture was not something that reached me at that age. mailing lists were how a lot of the english-speaking internet organized itself before forums and social networks took over, and eGroups was one of the biggest engines running them, quietly, in the background of other people's inboxes.

eGroups grew the way dot-com-era companies grew, fast and by merger. it took venture money in 1998, turned down a forty-million-dollar offer from Excite, then merged with a rival called ONElist in 1999 to become one service with thirteen million users. by august 2000 it had eighteen million, and Yahoo bought the whole thing for four hundred and thirty-two million dollars in stock and renamed it Yahoo Groups.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it became ~

as Yahoo Groups the service ran for another twenty years and became the thing people actually remember, the home of countless fan communities and family mailing lists. Yahoo let it rot slowly, deleted the uploaded files in early 2020, and shut the whole thing down in december 2020. eGroups the company died the day it became Yahoo's. the mailing list, as an idea, outlived almost everything that replaced it. it sits beside [[yahoo-groups]] and [[msn-groups]] in the record of places that hosted other people's conversations until the owner lost interest.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »