Swoon

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

~ the goodbye ~

CondeNet had five websites in November 2000 and decided to keep three. Swoon was one of the two that went, alongside a health site called Phys. Jennifer Owens wrote it up for Adweek IQ and Editor & Publisher carried it on Thursday 16 November: the online arm of Advance Publications would concentrate on the verticals it could sell against, which meant travel and food.

Swoon had been there since 1996. The oldest copy in the Wayback Machine is from 28 December that year and the markup opens with a comment reading copyright 1996 CondeNet, HTML design by Michael Kay. The description tag inside the same file calls it a dating, mating and relating magazine, then adds: online host to Details, Glamour, GQ and Mademoiselle magazines.

It ran free personal advertisements and forums, with daily relationship news and advice columns over the top. The homepage was an image map, the way homepages were, with a mag rack graphic down one side linking into the four magazines' corners of the site. Conde Nast's print glossies had almost no web presence of their own in 1996, and for a few years this was where several of them lived.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

A magazine site with a dating product bolted on is a different animal from a dating site. The personals were free, which in 1996 was the default and would stop being the default inside three years, and the editorial wrapped around them came out of print inventory the company had already paid for. That is cheap to run and hard to grow. When the parent started asking which of its five properties could carry advertising at scale, a relationships magazine for twenty and thirty somethings did not have an answer ready.

~ the announcement ~

Here is the part the announcement does not cover. Swoon did not leave the web in November 2000. On 4 December the homepage was still the magazine, seven and a half kilobytes, titled SWOON Dating, Mating, Relating. The next capture, 18 January 2001, is four point seven kilobytes and the title reads SWOON: Your Everyday Oracle.

Everything that cost money to produce was gone. What was left was horoscopes. A daily sign reading and a set of Astro-Matches with Love Match and Sex Match in a dropdown, plus a dreams section. The page was still calling CondeNet's ad server at rm.condenet.com, so somebody was still selling inventory against it. It held at roughly six point three kilobytes, essentially unchanged, from 2001 through to the start of 2005.

~ the afterlife ~

None of this reached me. In 1997 I was thirteen and a year off my first modem, and an American magazine publisher's dating site was not something I would have found or wanted. I came to Swoon because it is a filename in a museum of dead websites.

In February 2006 swoon.com stopped serving anything of its own and began returning a 301 to www.glamour.com/swoon, which is how a brand gets filed as a subdirectory of a bigger brand. Today the domain does not resolve at all. No parking page, no squatter, no lander, just no answer, which among dead sites is close to dignified.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »