Gooey

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

~ the goodbye ~

The messenger everybody around me was on in 1999 came out of Israel. ICQ traveled, reached Turkey early, and became the default before MSN took the country off it a few years later. Gooey came out of the same small industry with a stranger idea and never left the english language web. i have no memory of it whatsoever, and i was exactly the demographic it was built for.

It was a free Windows download from getgooey.com, made by a company called Hypernix. Once installed it watched the address bar. Land on a page and you were dropped into a chat with everybody else running Gooey on that same page, in a small separate window rather than on top of the site. Log off and the conversation was gone. There was a running list of which sites currently had people talking on them, which was the closest thing the web of 1999 had to a map of where the crowd was.

MIT Technology Review counted 46,000 registrations in the first month and around 1,600 people online at any given moment, and noted the part that gave the game away: the busiest Gooey rooms were on portals rather than on pages about anything. Shai Adler, the co-chief executive, argued that chat tied to a page would produce exchanges with more depth than the inanity of a chat room. What actually happened is that people gathered where people already were.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the other one ~

Third Voice was doing the adjacent thing at the same time and taking all the incoming fire for it. It let you stick notes onto the page itself, visible to anybody else with the plug-in, and webmasters called that vandalism loudly enough to organize against it. Gooey kept its window to the side and touched nothing, so nobody accused it of defacing anything.

Both were answering the same absence. The web had no idea who else was in the room with you and no way to tell you. The answer the web settled on is that the room lives on somebody else's site, in a comment box or a subreddit, owned by whoever runs it. The 1999 answer was a layer that belonged to the reader, and no version of that layer has ever survived contact with the money.

~ the day the buyer walked ~

Hypernix had raised at an $85 million valuation in september 1999. CNET held 4.25 percent of it, Allen and Company held 1.8, and the rest of the register was Israeli private money, including a couple of basketball internationals: Nadav Henefeld was on the list, so was Doron Sheffer. SIGA Technologies had agreed to buy the company.

On 14 august 2000 Globes reported that SIGA had backed out, saying that various circumstances and alternatives had developed which contributed to re-examining whether the acquisition was in the company's best interests. Hypernix was left close to bankruptcy with about $1.25 million of debt, most of it owed to CNET, its own shareholder. Wikipedia still records flatly that Hypernix was acquired by SIGA in 2000, and cites for it a CNET story dated 2 january 2002 headlined "Maker of Gooey chat finds buyer". The contemporary business reporting and the encyclopedia do not agree, and this grave does not pretend they do.

~ what happened to the address ~

The Internet Archive's last capture of a working Gooey site is 29 september 2000. Then nothing for a year and a half. By may 2002 gooey.com had become a link farm calling itself a guide to information on the internet and firing popup windows at whoever landed on it.

Today the domain answers with a bot check that asks whether you are really a browser and never gets around to showing you anything. A name that once meant a window full of strangers reading the same page as you now serves a machine interrogating a machine.

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