Mefeedia

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

~ the eulogy ~

Mefeedia had no upload button and that was the design. Everything in it arrived as a media RSS feed that somebody had pasted into a form, which is what the name is about, and the index built itself out of whatever people pointed at it. By the late 2000s that covered more than twenty thousand video sites and blogs, and if a thing had a feed it was findable, without a deal or an account at the far end.

This was the native architecture of the videoblogging years. Before anyone had settled the question of whether online video would be a platform you uploaded to or a format you published, there was a window where the answer looked like RSS, and the people answering it were a few thousand enthusiasts with camcorders and a Movable Type install. Mefeedia was their directory. The first capture of it, 16 February 2005, is two thousand two hundred and thirty-four bytes.

It survived the window. By 2008 Frank Sinton's company had partnerships pulling in from YouTube and Hulu alongside the broadcast networks, and in March 2009 the site ranked inside the top 750 American domains with roughly 6.8 million global visitors a month. Those numbers are the top of the curve, and they arrive at the same moment the scene underneath them is already losing to one video platform that had no use for feeds.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the index was ~

The useful way to think about Mefeedia is as a search engine with no crawler. It knew about a video because a human had told it where the feed was, which made its coverage weird in a way a crawler's coverage never is: deep on anything with an obsessive publisher behind it, blank on everything else. A directory assembled entirely out of volunteered pointers has a shape, and the shape is whoever bothered.

Nothing in my own history touches this. Online video around me arrived as a forum embed or as whatever an internet cafe would let you install, and an American aggregator fed by hand-submitted RSS had no path into that at all. So I am writing about the mechanism rather than the habit, and the mechanism is the better half anyway.

~ sixteen years, no notice ~

Frank Sinton's own run as chief executive is recorded as ending in December 2013, and the parent company turned into an advertising-technology business under the Beachfront name. The site stayed up anyway, quietly, in the condition a lot of 2000s properties end up in: nobody using it and nobody closing it, with a hosting bill small enough that nobody went looking for it.

Its ending is dated by a capture calendar and by nothing else. The Internet Archive holds working pages of mefeedia.com at around ten and a half kilobytes all the way through 15 September 2020. After that date every single request in the record comes back 403 or a redirect, for seven weeks, and then on 6 November 2020 the homepage returns a seven-hundred-and-seventy-three-byte parking page. Between 15 September and 10 November there are one thousand and fifty-nine captures of that domain, and not one of them is a goodbye.

There is no DNS record for mefeedia.com today. Sixteen years of an index that existed only because strangers kept handing it the addresses of their own feeds, and what it left behind as a death certificate is a status code.

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