Pathfinder.gr

» see pathfinder.gr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

on 10 april 2018 a greek portal deleted twenty years of its own members' writing and gave data protection as the reason. the regulation written to stop companies sitting on people's information turned out to also be a perfectly good reason to throw the information away.

pathfinder.gr went online in october 1998, made by phaistos networks, a company founded the year before in mires, a town on the messara plain in crete. it was the first greek portal and for a decade it was the greek internet's front page, in roughly the way yahoo was for the english-speaking one. it ran its own search engine over greek pages at a time when greek text on the web was a mess of competing character encodings and half of it was typed in latin letters anyway.

underneath the portal sat a whole community layer, which is the part that mattered. mail addresses at pathfinder.gr, forums, clubs, blogs, guestbooks, counters you pasted onto your own page, horoscopes, a dictionary. the list reads like an inventory of everything a portal was expected to hand out free in 2002, and it is worth holding on to the fact that all of it was one company, in greek, for a country of eleven million people.

i have no memory of this site and no way to fake one. greece is next door on a map and its internet was a separate room. the greek web was in greek, and nothing in ankara ever had a reason to point at pathfinder.gr. what i recognize is the shape, because turkey built the same thing at the same time and ours is still trading.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

phaistos networks is the detail that makes this one worth writing down. the company that built greece's first portal was not in athens. it was in mires, a small town in the heraklion district of crete, a couple of hours from anything anyone would have called a tech scene. it is still there and still run by the same people, which is rarer than the portal surviving would have been.

the portal made its money the way all of them did, on advertising, and phaistos built its own ad platform to serve it. that platform, adman, outlived the portal by a decade and is still the company's business. so is bestprice.gr, the price comparison site they launched in 2011, which is a bigger name in greece now than pathfinder was by the end.

~ the regulation ~

in early 2018 the notice went up, addressed to the members and visitors of pathfinder.gr. the general data protection regulation came into force on 25 may, and rather than work out how to keep two decades of user accounts on the right side of it, phaistos closed the accounts. registration stopped immediately. members had until 10 april 2018 to download whatever they wanted to keep. after that date the data was deleted permanently.

this is the honest version of what gdpr did to a lot of small european services, and it does not get written about much because it does not suit either side of the argument. the regulation is good. it is also a compliance bill, and for a fifteen-year-old forum with no revenue attached to it the cheapest available compliance is deletion. the portal stayed up. the tv section stayed up. the people were the expensive part.

~ what got buried with it ~

what went on 10 april 2018 was not a product, it was the record. greek internet users had been writing in those forums and clubs since around 2000, which covers the entire period in which the country went online, and none of it existed anywhere else. there were no crossposts to somewhere newer to fall back on, because the whole thing predates the platforms people would have crossposted to.

the mail is the sharper loss. an address at pathfinder.gr had been somebody's identity for twenty years, wired into registrations on other sites and known to people who had no other way to reach them. when a webmail closes, everything it was ever the key to closes a little as well.

~ the long tail ~

the portal itself carried on another six years as a news shell, the front page filling with the sort of automated aggregation a site runs when nobody is really editing it anymore. it finished in january 2024, twenty-five years and a few months after october 1998, without much of a notice.

phaistos networks did not die with it, and that is the unusual ending here. a company built a national portal, ran it until portals stopped being a category, and is still profitable in 2026 on the advertising machinery it built to feed the thing. the portal is what everybody remembers and it was never the business.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »