Megite

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

~ the obituary ~

On 2 January 2006 megite.com was still a thing called Megite Automatic Directory Creator, which is exactly as interesting as it sounds. A month later the same address was serving a page titled Megite, Up To Minute Blog Digest, and by 3 February TechCrunch had written it up as a possible contender against memeorandum. Whatever happened in between was one person deciding to rebuild the site into something else.

The something else was a meme tracker. A crawler pulled in blog posts and news articles, some language processing worked out which of them were about the same thing, and the resulting clusters got ranked by how many people were linking and how recently. What you saw was a numbered list of the twenty arguments happening in tech that hour, each with the posts arguing underneath it. Gabe Rivera had shipped memeorandum the year before and proved the format worked. Megite was one of several answers to it.

Matthew Chen described the operation plainly in a 2006 interview: he was a software engineer who did consulting on the side, and his partner was the one doing it full time. Two people, one of them part time, running a crawler against the entire English-language tech blogosphere. That is roughly the staffing level of a hobby, and it produced something that got compared seriously to the category leader for about three years.

The distance from here is easy enough to state without reaching for a feeling. Megite's front page carried verticals running from gadgets through to gardening, alongside a Chinese edition and personalized feeds sitting at addresses named after bloggers like Doc Searls and Keso. Nothing in there was Turkish and nothing in it was meant to be. This was a machine for a specific readership that read twenty American tech blogs before lunch, and it was built for them.

~ the case file ~

~ your own front page ~

The feature Megite got credit for, and got there first with, was personalization. You uploaded the OPML file your feed reader exported, and Megite gave you back a private edition at megite.com followed by your name. It refetched that file on every run, so editing your subscriptions edited your front page. Richard MacManus wrote it up in February 2006 as the first personalized meme tracker anyone had shipped.

That was the part with a business behind it. There was a link in the footer offering to license the software to anyone who wanted a Megite-shaped thing of their own, and branded editions were built for TechCrunch and for a marketing firm. The company that could not win on traffic was selling the engine instead.

~ the meme tracker war ~

The competitive set was small and everyone in it knew each other's uptime. Memeorandum became Techmeme and pulled away. TailRank came at it from the OPML angle too and traded second place back and forth with Megite through 2006. In December of that year both of them launched video verticals within a day of each other, which tells you how closely they were watching.

None of them lost to a better tracker. What happened is that the job stopped needing a dedicated machine. Once the same people were posting the same links to Twitter within seconds, the ranked list of what the blogosphere was arguing about arrived for free in a timeline, and the crawler that had to infer it from trackbacks and link graphs was solving a problem nobody had anymore.

~ the last live page ~

Nobody announced anything. The archive has megite.com working normally on 25 October 2012, twenty numbered stories deep with timestamps reading four hours ago and eight hours ago, exactly as it had for six years. The next capture is 2 March 2013 and it is not Megite at all: a blank title, a stylesheet called winxp.blue.css, and scripts loading from port 8880 on the same host. Somebody had put a completely different application there.

After that the address gave 500s for most of 2014 and 2015, then came back as a series of parking pages and redirects that are still going. The wordmark survives only as a favicon, two overlapping speech bubbles in orange and pink, which was as close to a logo as a two-person crawler ever needed.

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