MatMice

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

~ the obituary ~

Emily Boyd was sixteen when she wrote the software that ran MatMice. I was sixteen in the same window, on a dial-up line in Turkey, and what I was doing with my HTML was making signature images for forum posts with my hardware list in them. That is the honest comparison between us and it does not flatter me.

MatMice started in 2000 out of Newcastle, New South Wales. Emily wrote every line of it. Her sisters Sarah and Elise, two and six years younger, did the graphics. There were no adults in this, no company behind it and no funding round, which is a sentence that stops being writable about the web at roughly the point MatMice stopped existing.

The product was free homepages for children. You signed up and got a page to fill with whatever a ten year old fills a page with. CBS covered the sisters in April 2002 when the site had 80,000 children on it from more than a hundred countries, and the comparison the article reached for was GeoCities and Tripod, which is exactly right except that those were built by companies with several hundred employees.

It kept growing, and the awards followed it. MatMice took top prize at the Cable and Wireless Childnet Awards and picked up the SIGTel Online Learning Award. In 2003 Emily was made NSW Young Australian of the Year and given the Centenary Medal for it. By the time the site was rebuilt in February 2007 the counter stood at 1,758,660 members, with hundreds more arriving daily.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

The design decision that mattered was the ladder. There were templates and a form, so a child who had never seen a website could pick a background and be finished in four minutes. Underneath that, the thing accepted raw HTML. So you would start by choosing a background color, then notice that somebody else's page had a scrolling marquee on it. One afternoon of finding out how later, you were typing tags on purpose.

That progression is how most people my age learned markup, but almost nowhere was it deliberately built for someone who was nine. GeoCities let children in; MatMice was designed around them, by people barely older than they were, which is why it did not talk down. In February 2007 it was rebuilt as an invite-only social network rather than an open page host, following the traffic of the era, and the members number stopped being the headline after that.

~ the funny part ~

It closed on Monday 22 September 2008. Members lost access to their pages and got redirected to a notice, and the notice said this: MatMice has been a big part of our lives, but unfortunately the three of us no longer have the time that's needed to keep the site running smoothly or add new stuff. There was no acquirer in it and no runway that ran out. Three people, by then in their twenties and late teens, simply had other things to be doing.

Emily had already built the other thing. In 2004 she and Omar Kilani wrote Remember The Milk, a to-do list that went live in October 2005 and is still up and still taking money in 2026. So the founder of a dead children's homepage host is running a task manager that has outlived her first site by nearly twenty years, and the first site is the one that had 1.7 million members. matmice.com does not resolve at all now, which is the cleanest ending a website gets.

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