It Died

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

~ the goodbye ~

It Died opened in November 2008 under a one-line masthead: a compendium of what services and companies are no longer available for our Internet pleasure and use. It was written by Glenn Fleishman, a Seattle technology journalist, on Movable Type, and the first month's entries read like an inventory of things being taken away that winter: Google's Lively dying on 31 December 2008, MSN Groups disbanding on 21 February 2009, AOL Pictures gone on New Year's Eve, Tabula Rasa wiped clean at the end of February.

The format never moved. Fleishman put the closing date in the headline, quoted the operator's own announcement underneath, then added a paragraph on what the thing had been for and who was absorbing the people who built it. The Pownce entry from 1 December 2008 is the template. Its founders were shutting the service and going to work for Six Apart, which was buying the technology in the same deal, and Fleishman noted that this was starting to look like a trend rather than a coincidence.

A month in, the Wall Street Journal's technology blog noticed him. He posted about it on 2 December 2008, quoting the line that It Died was part of a growing community of blogs covering the deaths of companies and services, and added two words of his own underneath. Sad, really.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the compendium ~

Read now, the archive turns out to have been cataloging the right deaths. Lively, Pownce, MSN Groups, AOL Pictures, Stikkit, Yahoo! Live and Tabula Rasa all have graves on this site, and several of them are hard to date from anywhere else, because the announcements Fleishman quoted went offline along with the services that had posted them.

The last entry went up on 2 February 2010 and it is about Blogger switching off FTP publishing on 26 March 2010. His reading was that the feature had always been tweaky to set up and that Google had said only half a percent of blogs used it, so the removal was not the surprising part. Then nothing. The site kept serving that post as its front page for twenty months, through the whole of 2010 and most of 2011, to the last normal capture on 27 October 2011.

~ who took the address ~

On 26 November 2011 the page was 1,250 bytes, and replaying it gives you four words: "Click here to proceed." That is the interstitial a parked or transferred domain serves, and no other notice was ever posted.

In January 2012 itdied.com came back at roughly its old size, which from the capture lengths alone looks like a revival. It was not. The thing behind the address was a Drupal install in English and French with a menu item reading Dead animals, publishing photographs of exactly that: a mouse in France that had met a cat, two porpoises washed up on a beach at Paracas in Peru. By 2023 the same address was a private detective agency in Tokyo advertising address tracing and infidelity work, and today it serves a page saying the domain is for sale.

~ the msn groups entry ~

Of everything in It Died's first month, the entry that landed where I was reading is MSN Groups, disbanded on 21 February 2009. MSN was the whole of chat in Turkey through the 2000s in a way AIM never was anywhere near here, the thing already open on every machine in every internet cafe, and the groups bolted onto it were where a lot of people kept their first page on the web.

Fleishman filed it the way he filed everything, with the date in the headline and somebody else's notice quoted below. What his archive is actually good for is the timestamp: he wrote down when, while the announcements were still up, which is why a blog that stopped posting in 2010 remains the best citation for several closures nobody else bothered to record.

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