ReadWriteWeb

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

~ the last words ~

readwriteweb was on my rss reader from about 2007. it sat in the same google reader folder as techcrunch and gigaom and arstechnica, the four tabs you opened in the morning to see what had happened to the web overnight. it was not the loudest of the four, but it was the one that took the actual technology seriously. when ajax was a thing, readwriteweb explained ajax. when openid was a thing, readwriteweb explained openid. when the term "web 2.0" needed pinning down beyond rounded corners and gradients, readwriteweb was the place that tried.

richard macmanus started it in april 2003 from wellington, new zealand, alone, as a personal blog. by 2007 it had a small staff. by 2008 the new york times was syndicating its posts. the name itself was a thesis: the web of the 2000s was no longer a read-only document space, it was read-write, comments and wikis and tagging and api mashups. macmanus held that frame for nine years.

say media bought it in 2011. the brand stuck around. but on february 5 2015, say sold it to wearable world, a hardware-incubator in san francisco. owen thomas stayed on as editor for a while. then he left, then the wearable-world owner renamed itself wearable iot world, then readwrite labs, then the publication coasted on the brand. the version of readwriteweb that mattered was the macmanus-then-say editorial machine, and that machine ended that day.

~ the record ~

~ the rss tab decade ~

for anyone who read the tech web through rss between 2005 and 2012, readwriteweb was a fixture. it ran serious posts about openid, oauth, the semantic web, foaf, microformats, opensocial. half of those words mean nothing now. that is the whole point. readwriteweb was the publication that covered the standards web of the late 2000s while it was still being argued out.

it was the third tab. techcrunch covered the funding round; readwriteweb covered the actual standard the funded startup was supposed to be building on. the four blogs together were the whole tech press of the era, before mobile took the conversation and twitter took the news cycle.

~ the slow soul-death ~

the brand still publishes. as of 2026 the url is mostly ai and crypto seo posts under the readwrite name. there is no continuity with the macmanus era. the staff and the editorial rhythm are nothing like the original. it is one of those zombie publications where the url is alive but the publication of record is dead.

the kind reading is that the original readwriteweb did its job. by 2015 the web 2.0 fight was over: ajax had won and mobile apps had buried the read-write web idea the name pointed at. the publication outlived its own thesis. when the editorial team was sold off, there was not a strong-enough mission left to defend.

~ the legacy ~

the macmanus-era archive is mostly still indexable but a lot of it depends on internet archive copies now. ten years of careful posts about how the web was supposed to work, mostly readable as a sketch of an alternative future where the standards-based open web kept winning. it did not keep winning. but the archive is one of the better records we have of what the open web sounded like when it still felt like the obvious next thing.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »