StartAid

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

~ the last words ~

StartAid published its own demo account on the front page. Username demo, password demo, printed in the middle of the marketing copy under a line that said "Curious? Sign In With The Demo Account!" You could look around the product without filling in a form, which in 2005 counted as unusually generous and by 2015 counted as an open invitation. It stayed printed there until the site stopped answering.

What it did was keep your bookmarks on a server instead of in a Favorites folder. Tags and categories both, thumbnail previews of every link, import from whatever browser you were leaving, share groups so a set could be handed to specific people rather than to everybody. There was a personal start page you could lay out yourself, a search box that would fire your query at whichever engine you picked, and a discussion board bolted on the side. For a one-operator site competing against del.icio.us it was a surprising amount of product.

Then nothing happened for a very long time. The last capture that returns a working page is dated 15 August 2021, roughly nine kilobytes, identical in structure to the capture from 2009 and very nearly identical to the one from 2005. After that the Internet Archive has nothing, and startaid.com has had no DNS record since. No closing post, no redirect, no apology page.

~ the record ~

~ what the page was still saying in 2021 ~

Two lines on that final capture do the work of a whole obituary. The first is the footer: copyright 2005-2006, startaid, all rights reserved. Fifteen calendar years of serving pages under a date range that ended before most of them happened.

The second sits in the feature list, next to a button offering a browser plugin. "Version 0.2, released on Feb 18, 2007." Seventeen kilobytes, still the current release in August 2021, still described in the present tense. Whoever was paying the hosting bill had not opened the marketing copy since the second Bush administration.

~ a slot that was already taken ~

Nothing about this one reached me, and the timing explains why. StartAid turned up in 2005, by which point I was a university student with a broadband line and exactly one machine that mattered, so the problem it existed to fix had already stopped being a problem I had. The people who did still want their bookmarks on a server were overwhelmingly on del.icio.us, which Yahoo bought that December. StartAid walked into a category with a winner already standing in it, and competed by offering more features than the winner, which has never once worked.

~ the lists outlived the site ~

Search for StartAid today and you get dozens of SEO articles with titles like "200 Free Social Bookmarking Sites" and "1000+ High DA Social Bookmarking Sites." One of them, last updated a month ago, lists startaid.com three separate times in the same post. Another publishes a domain authority score for it. These pages are written for people who want somewhere to drop a link, and they are copied from each other rather than from anything checked.

So the recommendation is in better health than the thing recommended. Five years after the server went quiet and the hostname left DNS, an industry that exists to find live pages is still sending people to a dead one, with a number next to it.

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