Urban Desires

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

~ the obit ~

Urban Desires was an arts and culture magazine that existed only on the web, started in 1994 by Gabrielle Shannon as editor in chief, with Chan Suh and Kyle Shannon. The three of them incorporated Agency.com on 10 February 1995 and it became one of the defining interactive shops of the dot-com years, with an IPO on NASDAQ in December 1999 and Omnicom holding a large stake. The zine was the thing they made because they wanted to, and the agency paid for it.

Look at the front page from November 1996 and the sections tell you what a webzine meant before anybody had settled on the word. THE ISSUES, for the current one. THE TUNNEL, described as an n-dimensional data space that had to be seen to be believed. UD PALACE, temporarily down for renovations. THE STORE, a digital repository for cool analog stuff, get out yer checkbook. TALKING FEDS, an e-comic by Andrew Watts that had gotten big enough to move to its own domain. The whole navigation was one image map, a drawing of a subway tunnel seen in cutaway with a manhole cover in the street above it, and the line running along the bottom read "an interactive magazine of metropolitan passions." Copyright 1996 Urban Desires (TM) Inc, a production of AGENCY.COM (TM).

Shannon put it at around half a million homepage impressions a month, which in 1997 made it one of the larger magazines on the web. It was nominated in the Books and Magazines category at the first Webby Awards, held at Bimbo's in San Francisco on 6 March 1997 in front of seven hundred people. New issues stopped going up after late 1997 and Shannon told Adweek she had gotten bored with the old structure and was rebuilding around visual art instead.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rebuild that half happened ~

The relaunch was real. By April 1999 the front page was serving a feature called safetyman with rollover buttons preloaded in JavaScript, one per section, and Internet Explorer 4 or Netscape Navigator 4 highly recommended in the footer. By early 2000 it had become eleven eighty two, which opened in a window sized exactly 603 by 433 pixels and centered on your screen by a script that measured screen.availWidth and did the arithmetic itself.

That page never changed again. eleven eighty two sat on desires.com through the whole of 2000, copyright line still reading 1999, the enter button still preloading its rollover state for a visitor who was going to see the same thing they saw last month.

Sometime between December 2000 and April 2001 the front page was replaced with a Flash detector. The whole document is an OBJECT tag pointing at the Shockwave cab file on download.macromedia.com, width 550, height 400, page title "detect", and nothing behind it. Whoever put it there presumably meant to build the next thing on top of it. That single page answered every request to desires.com for the next decade, through 2003, through 2006, still there in December 2011.

By 1 January 2012 even that was gone and the server returned a two-line placeholder reading Coming Soon page, please come back later. Around 2018 the domain started bouncing to a registrar's sale page. It still does.

~ the bandwidth problem ~

I was not a reader. I came online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, into an internet where a magazine built out of tiled GIFs and preloaded rollover states was something you waited for rather than something you browsed. Urban Desires was made for a fast American office connection and the people making it knew that, which is why the Netscape 4 advisory sat in the footer where an apology would go.

Agency.com's US operations were dismantled by Omnicom in 2010, so the parent outlived the zine by about nine years and then went too. What survives of Urban Desires is the shape of the arrangement: a commercial web shop keeping an unprofitable magazine running because the people who owned the shop wanted to read it. That stopped being available roughly the moment the agency became a public company.

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