iKeepBookmarks
» see ikeepbookmarks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the eulogy ~
In the Turkish internet cafes of 2002 to 2005 nothing you saved stayed saved. You paid for an hour and sat at whatever machine was free, and its favorites menu belonged to a hundred strangers before you. iKeepBookmarks was built for exactly that condition, two years before I ever walked into one of those places, and it was built in the plainest possible way.
The pitch on its front page never changed: put your bookmarks on the web and reach them from any computer anywhere. You made an account and imported your links, and you got back a page of folders that opened in any browser on earth. Accounts could be made public, which meant you could hand somebody an account name with no password and let them browse your links. Schools used that. So did people who wanted a link page without learning HTML.
It ran on classic ASP against Microsoft IIS, with URLs like browse.asp and golink.asp, and it was still running on that stack in 2023. The layout in the final year is recognizably the layout from 2003: a login form under a row of nav links, with a Member Spotlight off to one side. Del.icio.us launched in 2003, got sold twice and was finished by 2017. This one was still answering in 2023.
~ the dossier ~
| Born | By October 1999, when the Internet Archive takes its first capture |
|---|---|
| Peak | Free and paid accounts, public bookmark pages, school accounts, a guestbook and a forum |
| Killed | February 2023, between a working capture on the 4th and a placeholder page on 7 March |
| Lifespan | ~23 years |
| Made by | Never named a company or an owner anywhere on the site |
| Killed by | Nothing announced; the server stopped and the domain went to a parking page |
~ the shape of the thing ~
Underneath the free accounts there was a small business. The admin pages the Internet Archive caught include payment info and membership updates, so somebody was charging for something, probably the ad-free or larger accounts. Nowhere on the site, in any year, is there a company name or an owner. The press release page it linked to from its own navigation does not survive in any capture.
~ twenty-three years of the same page ~
The outbound link handler is the detail that dates it. Every link you saved was rewritten to go through golink.asp, which counted the click and then redirected you. In 2004 those redirects were pointing at About.com guides and Tripod pages. By 2022 the same handler was being used by SEO spammers, who had worked out that a twenty-year-old open redirect on a trusted domain is worth something to them.
That is most of what the final captures contain, and it is machine traffic rather than readers.
~ the last February ~
On 3 and 4 February 2023 the Internet Archive was still pulling real pages off it, public bookmark folders at thirteen to sixteen kilobytes, one of them still carrying a timestamp from 2011 in the query string. On 7 March the same address returned four hundred and thirty bytes: a heading with the domain name on it and the words "Coming soon."
By July 2023 the domain was serving a parking template with slots for dental plans and vacation packages. In 2024 and 2025 it answered 410 Gone, which is the one HTTP status that means a server has been told to say this is over.
~ leave a rose ~
an anonymous tribute. one rose per visitor per day.
@}-->-- ... roses left here
~ leave a wreath ~
a rose fades by morning. a wreath stays on this grave for good, with your name on it.
from $1, paid once through stripe. it keeps the graveyard running: the hosting and the nightly digging. adopt it and the headstone reads "maintained in memory by" you. the groundskeeper plants new wreaths at the next tending, usually within a day.
» one email a week: new graves and the anniversaries of the dead. subscribe
other bookmarking: Furl, Clipboard, FFFFOUND!, Delicious / del.icio.us
also died in the 2020s: Scout.com, Mesosphere DC/OS, XTube
~ leave a note ~
visitors before you have left these graveside notes. anonymous welcome.