Netsgo

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

~ the goodbye ~

Netsgo and I were fighting the same modem war on opposite sides of the world. Its main selling point in Korea was that it supported V.90 before anyone else there did, so you got 56k down and 33.6k up, and SK Telecom put that number on the advertising because in 1997 that number was the product. In Turkey I was climbing the same ladder on TTNet, 14.4 to 33.6 to 56, and it never once occurred to me that a phone company somewhere else was selling the exact same increment as a brand.

The service launched in June 1997 as something with no good English name: an internet portal and a Korean PC communication network in one place. PC communication was the local version of what CompuServe and the French Minitel had been, a dial-up world of boards and file libraries that you reached with dedicated software rather than a browser. Korea had several of them and they were large. Netsgo's angle was that you would not have to choose.

The way it did that was a browser of its own. NETSGO Browser 1.0 for Windows 95 and NT shipped on a black CD with the logo on it and a line underneath: Let's go to the network. Inside the one window you had the boards and the web at the same time. SK Telecom made the disc and it owned the phone line the disc dialed out on, which is a degree of vertical integration that no western consumer service of that era managed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was inside it ~

Clubs and societies, personal homepages through a thing called My Home Center, file libraries, address books, a personal start page called My Netsgo. The bulletin boards were the center of gravity and were called the Plaza. Search worked across the boards and across the file libraries as separate things, which tells you how much of the content lived inside the walls rather than out on the web.

SK Telecom spun the operation out as its own company on 18 August 2000, a wholly owned subsidiary named after the service. Two years later that subsidiary would be the vehicle for something else entirely, but at the time it looked like a phone company deciding its online arm was big enough to stand up on its own.

~ the day it died ~

Korean broadband arrived faster and harder than almost anywhere on earth, and a business built on holding a phone line has nothing to sell once the line is always on. Revenue fell for a couple of years. In late February 2002 the notices went up.

The homepage on 1 April 2002 is a farewell page. The title reads thank you for using Netsgo all this time. Underneath it sits a stack of notices in the ordinary bulletin format the site had always used: the service ends as of 31 March, apply for mail forwarding, all functions of the Plaza boards will be kept until the end of June, you can keep using your Netsgo mail, the help desk phone hours are being shortened. Down at the bottom, next to the copyright line, a link to NATE.

The trade press noted what this actually was. Netsgo was the first Korean PC communication service to shut down, in an industry that had been watching its revenue decline for years and had not yet said so out loud.

~ what came after ~

Nate was SK Telecom's combined wired and wireless portal, and in 2002 the parent handed its operating rights to the Netsgo subsidiary. On 2 November that year the subsidiary merged with Lycos Korea and immediately renamed itself SK Communications.

That company went on to run NateOn and Cyworld, which is to say it ran the dominant Korean messenger and the dominant Korean social network for most of a decade. The farewell page had already pointed at the door. The 2.3 million people who walked through it became the founding population of something considerably larger, and the name on the CD stopped being used by anybody.

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