TerraVista

» see terravista.pt as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

TerraVista sits in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. By the time it died i was already on broadband in ankara, never typing terravista.pt into anything. The portuguese-internet was its own room with its own door and its own quiet handful of years.

It opened on 23 March 1997 as a state initiative. The portuguese government wanted a place where portuguese people could put a personal homepage without paying anyone. Free space, 12 MB per user, a portal layered on top of it. The accented original spelling was Terràvista, with the à that fell off later when the project changed hands. Jonas Nogueira, who built the first version, called it his "first professional child" in a 20-year retrospective.

The state sold the portal to the forum group, who later folded it into jazztel. On 4 September 2000, jazztel sold its ya.com internet factory unit to t-online, the deutsche telekom subsidiary, for 414.3 million euros. The portuguese homepage host now belonged to a german telecom that had no real reason to keep running unprofitable free space for portuguese teenagers.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what really happened ~

The personal pages service went offline for more than a week in August 2004. When the administration finally posted a notice on 30 August, the words were corporate and final. The hosting systems were too old. The traffic was massive and unidentifiable. The economics did not work. Users had until 20 September to log in and pull their files. After that the pages were gone.

The reasoning was honest in its way. A free homepage host inherited from a state project, in a small european language, did not survive contact with a deutsche telekom spreadsheet. The administration left the door open for a "professionalized" paid version, which never really came.

~ what got buried with it ~

What disappeared on that august afternoon was the portuguese-language version of the geocities feeling. First websites, awkward html, animated gifs, mirror lists of band lyrics, fan pages for the seleção, school project leftovers. Comments in the archived blog posts about terravista read like comments about any other early-web hosting service: people remembering friends they met through the chat, websites they made as teenagers, a community that ended without ceremony.

SAPO became the portuguese portal that mattered after 2000, but the personal-pages tradition that terravista carried did not really get a successor in portugal. The next generation of portuguese users went straight to hi5 and then facebook, like everyone else.

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