TheSpark.com

1999 - 2004

dead us

thespark was four harvard students being funny on the web in 1999. it ran snarky personality quizzes and humor pieces, and almost as a side project it published study guides it called sparknotes. the study guides outgrew the jokes. barnes & noble bought the lot for about three thousand dollars, kept the study guides that made money and closed the humor site that did not. the same four people took the quiz-matching math and built okcupid out of it.

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

~ the last words ~

in 1999 i was a teenager in turkey on a dial-up modem that topped out at 33.6k. thespark was four harvard students being funny in english, an ocean away, on connections i could not really load. i did not read it then. i found the trail of it much later, working backwards from okcupid.

thespark.com went up on january 7, 1999. it made its name on personality quizzes, the kind that gave you a four-letter type or told you how you scored against some scale, wrapped in a tone that did not take any of it seriously. that same april, almost as an afterthought, the founders posted six literature study guides and called them sparknotes. the guides were meant to pull traffic to the jokes. instead they became the thing.

the money story is small and a little sad. the founders sold the site to iturf in 2000. in march 2001 thespark and sparknotes together went to barnes & noble for about three thousand five hundred dollars, which even then was almost nothing. barnes & noble wanted the study guides, which students actually paid attention to. in june 2004 it shut thespark.com down and pointed the address at sparknotes. by then the four founders had already taken the matching math out of their quizzes and used it to start okcupid.

~ the record ~

Born	7 January 1999, made by four Harvard students
Peak	personality quizzes and the Match Test, plus the SparkNotes guides it spun off in April 1999
Killed	June 2004, shut down by Barnes & Noble
Lifespan	about five years
Made by	Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder, Sam Yagan and Max Krohn
Killed by	a corporate owner that only wanted the study guides

~ what it became ~

almost nobody remembers thespark, and almost everybody has touched what came out of it. sparknotes is still the site students open the night before an exam. okcupid ran for years as one of the big dating sites, on a matching idea that started as a joke quiz on a humor page. two large, long-lived things grew out of one small site that got sold for pocket change and switched off.

~ the distance ~

i have no memory of the site itself, only of its children. that is the honest version. thespark lived in the american college web of 1999, funny in a register and a bandwidth that did not reach a turkish teenager on a slow modem. i met the family later, from the okcupid end, and traced it back to a page i never actually saw load.

~ leave a rose ~

an anonymous tribute. one rose per visitor per day.

@}-->-- ... roses left here

@}-->--

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

~ leave a wreath ~

a rose fades by morning. a wreath stays on this grave for good, with your name on it.

paid once through stripe. payments are handled by OÜ Lakeview, the small company that keeps rip.so running. the money pays for the hosting and the nightly digging. adopt it and the headstone reads "maintained in memory by" you. the groundskeeper plants new wreaths at the next tending, usually within a day.

» one email a week: new graves and the anniversaries of the dead. subscribe

~ leave a note ~

visitors before you have left these graveside notes. anonymous welcome.

other phenomena: PC World (print), HQ Trivia, Yahoo Answers, TeleGarden

also died in the 2000s: POWDER, World Chess Network, AllPeers

« back to the graveyard · search · wander by decade

« previous · random · next »