Metababy

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

~ the last words ~

type any word after the slash and you had a page. type the same word tomorrow and somebody else had rewritten it. metababy shipped that in november 1998 with no accounts and no record of who had changed anything, and it let you paste working javascript into the box. three years later wikipedia arrived with the same core move and spent the next two decades building the machinery to survive it.

this one is told entirely from the outside. metababy belonged to the american personal-web scene of the late nineties, the small circle of people who wrote html for fun and read each other, and i was not in it or anywhere near it. i found the name in a category listing while looking for things this site was missing, which is a fair description of how most people meet it now.

greg knauss wrote the code and leslie harpold did the design. it was nominated for a webby in 2000, at the point where a webby still meant a jury had gone looking through the odd corners of the web rather than through a submission queue. for a while it also turned every message sent to [email protected] into a page, so the site could be written to by email from anywhere, by anyone.

~ the record ~

~ the edit bar ~

the whole interface was a strip fifty six pixels tall pinned to the bottom of the window in its own frame. wordmark on the left. in the middle, six links reading about, newest, oldest, map, random and options. on the right, a submit button labeled edit, which posted the address you were currently looking at back to the server and gave you a text area containing whatever was there. that is the entire product.

what people did with it was what you would expect. a lot of pages were shouting and a lot were long unsigned confessionals. the rest were experiments in what raw markup could be made to do inside somebody else's frame. one page from 2006 rebuilt its own contents into four nested copies of itself with javascript, with a comment in the source explaining that this was remixing the page inside the page. an early capture from 2000 is somebody typing about whether hoping is any use compared to planning, addressed to nobody.

~ the two endings ~

the first ending was 22 may 2003. the front page stopped serving live pages and started serving frozen ones out of a directory called mbv1, and the filename it pointed at was a unix timestamp for that morning. what killed version one was volume: spam and abuse arriving faster than a site with no accounts and no rollback could absorb, which is what always happens to a page anybody can rewrite once enough people can find it.

then it came back, and it ran for years. captures from 2004 through 2008 show the edit bar still sitting under fresh addresses and still accepting html. the second ending has no announcement attached to it at all. on 31 march 2009 the frameset is serving normally, and by 16 october the domain answers with a single html file containing one line of monospaced text, centered vertically, that reads "i think we could all probably use a rest." it is still saying that today.

@}-->--

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

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