OKNOtizie

» see oknotizie.virgilio.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Salvatore Sanfilippo can tell you when his first web product was born to the second, because he kept the file: Sat Nov 26 03:09:01 CET 2005. That was Segnalo, an Italian social bookmarking site written because Delicious existed and was, in his words, very cold about explaining itself to people who had never tagged anything. A year later Segnalo held 51,396 public sites and had 2,162 users.

OKNOtizie was the second thing, built in 2006 on the same instinct applied to news instead of bookmarks. You submitted a link, other users voted OK or NO, and the front page was whatever survived the voting. Digg had proved the shape worked in English the year before, and OKNOtizie became the Italian-language one for about ten years.

The turn came when Matrix, the Telecom Italia subsidiary that ran the Virgilio portal, got in touch. The deal put the service in front of portal-scale traffic while leaving it recognizably its own site, with its original accounts still working and its own team still shipping code daily. That combination is rare. Most portal deals of the era ended with the product being digested.

The notice that killed it was corporate and short. By 2017 Virgilio belonged to Italiaonline, and the message told users that as of 1 February 2017, in accordance with the general terms of contract, Italiaonline S.p.A. would cease providing the service known as OKNOtizie. Users who still wanted the daily argument about politics and football were pointed at Reddit, where a small Italian community kept the name alive.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the file dated 2005 ~

Segnalo is worth its own paragraph because it is the better artifact. It did tag intersection and search suggestions as you typed, and it separated Italian-language sites from English ones automatically, which no American competitor had any reason to build. Sanfilippo reckoned at the time that a site needed 50,000 unique users a day before advertising could pay for it, which is roughly the calculation that pushed him toward a portal.

~ the portal years ~

What OKNOtizie actually did for Italy was discovery. Before it, a small Italian blog had no route to an audience that was not word of mouth, and after it there was one place where a good post could be voted onto a page that Virgilio's traffic walked past. That made it the first serious ranking authority in the Italian web, and it made it a battleground, in the way every voting site becomes one once people notice the votes are worth money.

I was not reading it. Italian-language social news was outside my internet entirely, and the equivalent function in Turkey was being done by forums rather than by a voting site, which is why I learned about new hardware from donanimhaber and frmtr threads instead of from a front page. The portals here never built this layer at all.

~ the name you know him by ~

Three years into OKNOtizie's run, Sanfilippo wrote a small in-memory data structure server for another project of his and released it in 2009. That was Redis, and it is now inside a very large fraction of the backends on the internet, including plenty that have never heard of an Italian news aggregator. Neither OKNOtizie nor Segnalo has so much as an Italian Wikipedia article today.

What does survive is a crawl. ArchiveBot pulled roughly 72 GB off oknotizie.virgilio.it in January 2017, weeks before the shutoff, and that copy is on archive.org. The live address now performs a silent redirect to the Virgilio homepage, and oknotizie.it, where it was supposed to continue, does not answer at all.

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