Macteens

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

~ the obit ~

Macteens began in late 1998 as a collaborative weblog run by Neil Sroka and Jonathan Claydon. The premise is in the name: Macintosh coverage written by people too young for anyone to be paying them. The first version had no interactive features of its own and borrowed its community by hosting forums jointly with a site called MacParty.

It shut down inside two years, the stated reason being that interest in the idea had drifted. Chris Saribay and Andrew Wilkinson brought it back in December 2001 and relaunched properly in 2002 with reporting from Macworld Expo. The second Macteens grew into something larger than a weblog, with its own forums and image galleries, and its reporting occasionally surfaced in places that paid their writers, including the Baltimore Sun. Contributors ended up being interviewed by CBC and MSNBC.

Macteens and my first internet connection date from the same year. Past the year itself we had nothing in common. A Macintosh was not something a teenager in Turkey had access to in 1998, or for a long time after. The machines were import-priced into irrelevance and the internet cafes that taught my generation how to use a computer were wall-to-wall PC clones. So people my exact age were filing reviews of machines that stayed about ten years out of my reach, and we were doing it across the same web.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cube ~

In 2000 Macteens got ahead of Apple's own announcement on the Power Mac G4 Cube, having found the specifications posted by accident on ATI's website. That is a genuine scoop by any standard, and it was pulled off by a weblog of teenagers against a press operation famous for leaking nothing. The Cube itself turned into one of Apple's more expensive misreadings of its own customers, with production suspended a year after launch.

~ rebirth, october 2009 ~

By the summer of 2008 the newest item on the front page was dated September 2007. Then on 8 October 2009 Daniel Hollister posted a piece titled "rebirth." which said the quiet part plainly: Macteens had been neglected, the people who created and ran it had grown up and moved on to other things, and new content had simply stopped. The site had sat like that for a year. The post ended with two words, "Not anymore."

That was the last article ever published on macteens.com.

~ returning soon, seriously ~

At twenty past midnight on 3 January 2010 a status blog appeared at status.macteens.com to track the promised rebuild. "Well, we've finally officially put up the status page, forums, and blog for the relaunch of Macteens," the first post reads. "This blog will chronicle the rebuild and relaunch of the website, as progress is made." Twelve hours later a second entry explained that taking the main site offline had been necessary, but that a handful of old articles were still pulling daily traffic and the 404s had become unbearable to watch, so the most-read ones had been ported across by hand.

There were two more posts that month and in February, both about finding a designer and approving a mockup. The fourth and final one is dated 9 April 2010 and opens "Greetings from my new iPad": the designs were finished and the forums were next. Nothing followed it.

By July 2011 the main domain and the status subdomain were serving the identical 800-byte page, a heading and one line of body text reading "returning soon. seriously." It stayed up in that state until early 2016, when the address began answering with a registrar notice that macteens.com had expired and an offer to renew it. The footer on the last working status page reads 1998 to 2010. Nobody else ever wrote the dates down.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »