MyLinkVault

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

~ the eulogy ~

MyLinkVault's pitch fit on one line and the line was its page title: "online links made easy, store your links online, access them anytime." You made an account, saved URLs into a tree of folders, and reached them from any machine. In December 2005 that solved a real problem, because your bookmarks lived in one browser on one computer and there was no sync.

It was free, with no obvious business model and no named company behind it. The first Wayback capture is 8 December 2005. The homepage carried a sign-in box and a short FAQ, and underneath them a public feed called Newest Links showing what everybody had been saving. That feed is how you can watch it die.

In April 2006 the feed holds what you would expect: a business collaboration tool, somebody's web design studio, a handful of small sites somebody wanted to keep. In January 2013 the same feed is showing a Texas Instruments calculator affiliate page with a paragraph of keyword filler attached, and the archived link records from the site's last years run to nulled24.com software cracks and Blogspot SEO posts. The vault had been filled by people who were not using it to store anything.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a public feed costs ~

This was not a MyLinkVault problem, it was the structural weakness of the whole social bookmarking category. A page that publishes user-submitted links, with no editorial check and a PageRank above zero, is a backlink farm that pays for its own hosting. Delicious had the same pressure and survived it on scale and on staff. Ma.gnolia and Spurl had the same pressure with neither.

I kept a Delicious account through the university years and the appeal was exactly this: you wanted your links on the network instead of in a Favorites folder on one machine at home. The dozen smaller clones were interchangeable and I had no reason to pick this one over any of the others. What makes MyLinkVault legible now is that the Internet Archive crawled its public feed often enough to record the decay.

~ the bracket ~

There is no shutdown post to date this from, so the dating is done on page sizes. The homepage ran between 3,300 and 4,900 bytes for its entire working life, from 2008 through to a capture on 22 January 2013 at 3,713 bytes with the spam feed still rendering. The next capture, on 2 March 2013, is 436 bytes. From 27 March it is 272 bytes and renders nothing at all.

So the site died somewhere between 22 January and 2 March 2013, and February is the only full month inside the bracket. The two-step collapse is the interesting part: something was still serving 436 bytes in early March, and then even that was replaced five weeks later. That is a hosting account being cleaned up in stages, not a product switched off on a date somebody chose.

~ eleven years of a 404 ~

By August 2017 the domain was answering with DreamHost's house error page: "Site Not Found. Well, this is awkward. The site you're looking for is not here." The Internet Archive kept crawling it in that state for another seven years, through to 16 October 2024. Somebody was paying to renew a domain registration for more than a decade after the site behind it stopped existing.

Today mylinkvault.com has no DNS record. The registration lapsed sometime after October 2024. The bookmarks themselves were gone in 2013, in whatever database that hosting account held, and nobody announced that either.

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