htmlGEAR

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

~ the obituary ~

Search the exact phrase "Html Gear - Guest Gear View Guestbook" and you get a small graveyard of other people's websites: a Zork fan archive from the late 1990s, somebody's Angelfire subdomain. They are serving the same page title because the guestbook got saved to disk or simply never deleted, and the title tag came along with it. The service that generated those pages was switched off in 2012 and the pages did not notice.

Lycos launched htmlGEAR in May 2000 with five things you could add to a web page for free, on any host, whether or not that host was Lycos. That last part was the whole pitch. Tripod and GeoCities both had their own add-ons that only worked inside their own walls, and htmlGEAR was a set of widgets that worked on any URL you happened to own.

The launch numbers give the game away about what was actually being announced. Lycos said GuestGEAR was already on 2.5 million sites and picking up 70,000 new users a month, which means the guestbook was an existing service being rebranded into a suite rather than a new product. Everything else in the box was there to keep it company.

This is the widget that assumed you had a page. In Turkey between 2000 and 2005 that assumption mostly did not hold for people my age: the personal homepage with a hit counter and a guestbook was an English-language web habit, and here the object that carried your identity online was a forum signature. You built one out of your hardware list and whatever image the board's rules allowed, and it appeared under every post you made without anyone having to visit anything. Same instinct, different container, and nobody had to sign anything.

~ the case file ~

~ five gears ~

GuestGEAR was the guestbook, with a screening manager so you could delete what people wrote and automatic email when they wrote it. PollGEAR let you put a question on your page and watch the bar chart move. The other three are the ones nobody remembers. LinkGEAR tracked which of your outbound links people actually clicked and sorted them by popularity. Pass-it-onGEAR gave visitors a form to email your page to a friend, and TextGEAR rotated a quote or a tip on every load.

Read that list now and it is a content management system split into five pieces, each one a snippet of markup rather than an install. LinkGEAR was analytics and Pass-it-onGEAR was the share button, four years before either word meant that. None of it needed a database or a server on your side, because all of it ran on somebody else's.

~ the letter from lycos ~

The notice that replaced the service is short enough to quote in full and it stayed on the server for years after the thing it announced. In February 2012, we announced the retirement of HTML Gear to focus our development team on improving our website building tools and services. As of April 2, 2012, HTML Gear has officially retired and is no longer available. Then a pointer to Tripod's builder, Zeeblio, which it promised included all the features of HTML Gear and many more. Signed: Chris Cummings, Vice President, Product Development, Lycos, Inc.

That page was still being served in January 2014, which is longer than most companies leave a farewell up. Today htmlgear.com belongs to a domain registrar, and the parking page says the address is a totally awesome idea still being worked on, and invites you to buy a domain for your own great idea. The guestbooks on other people's servers have now outlived both the service and the sentence announcing its end.

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