The internet moves fast. They were on our desktops one day, the next their servers were dark, their domains squatted, their icons gone from our trays. Some died of mismanagement, some of acquisition, some of irrelevance. Some are technically still alive, but their soul left a long time ago. This page is a memorial to all of them.
We bury our heroes here. Pour a 56k modem out for them.
! THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION !
» see the companion page: ~ things that survived against odds ~
~ messengers & chat ~
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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ICQ 📖 1996 - 2024 "uh-oh." its sound was a generation's text notification before texts existed. its 6-digit numbers were the first online identities we ever cared about. now finally turned off after 28 years. |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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MSN Messenger / Windows Live Messenger 📖 1999 - 2014 "appear offline" was a personality. nudges shook your screen and your heart. your status was a song lyric. |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Yahoo! Messenger 📖 1998 - 2018 BUZZ! BUZZ! the loudest possible way to say i miss you. its emoticons were unmatched. |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) 📖 1997 - 2017 the running yellow guy. away messages were poetry. door slam - "snoozyboi89 has signed off." gut punch. |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) 📖 2005 - 2019 PIN exchanges were corporate intimacy. R / D ticks were status anxiety. it died defending its keyboard. |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Google Talk / Hangouts (Classic) 📖 2005 - 2022 remember when google had ONE messenger? then six? then zero? rest in the merge. |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Skype 📖 2003 - 2025 the boop boop ringtone. how you called your grandma in another country. washed out video. microsoft paid 8.5 billion for it and slowly turned it off. |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Houseparty 📖 2016 - 2021 houseparty was a group video chat app that you joined casually, without scheduling. you opened the app and saw which friends were already in a "house" call, then dropped in. for a window of about six weeks during the early covid lockdown of march and april 2020 it was suddenly the biggest social app |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Hike Messenger 📖 2012 - 2021 hike was india's bet on a domestic messaging app, kavin bharti mittal's attempt to do for india what wechat did for china. it raised $250m+ from softbank and tencent. it crossed 100m users by january 2016 and unicorned that august. then whatsapp and reliance jio happened, and on 6 january 2021 it sh |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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FireChat 📖 2014 - 2020 firechat was the messenger you used when the network was off. it routed messages over bluetooth and peer-to-peer wifi, hopping device to device, no internet required. that pitch turned it into a protest tool the moment hong kong students figured out the cell network was being watched. open garden qu |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Google Allo 📖 2016 - 2019 google allo launched in september 2016 as the smart messenger that would make google assistant feel like a person you texted with. ten million people tried it in the first three months, then forgot about it. by february 2017 it had dropped out of the top 500 apps on the play store. google paused dev |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Yo 📖 2014 - 2016 yo was a one-button iphone app that sent the word "yo" to a friend as a push notification. there were no other features. it raised one and a half million dollars at a ten million dollar valuation in june 2014 and hit number four on the us app store. by 2016 it had drifted into skeleton-crew maintena |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Mxit 📖 2005 - 2016 mxit was south africa's whatsapp before whatsapp arrived. it ran on the cheap feature phones a teenager could afford in johannesburg or cape town in 2008. it sent messages over data instead of sms back when sms was still per-message expensive. at peak in 2013 it had about 7.4 million monthly active |
see all 21 messengers & chat »
~ social networks ~
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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MySpace (the real one) 📖 2003 - 2011 (ish) your top 8 was a public love letter and a public knife fight. profile songs autoplaying at 3am. tom is still your friend. |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Friendster 📖 2002 - 2015 the first social network most americans used. then it became a gaming site. then it disappeared. timeline of a forgotten pioneer. |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Orkut 📖 2004 - 2014 google's first social network attempt. weirdly enormous in brazil and india. 300 million users couldn't save it. |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Google+ 📖 2011 - 2019 they made you join it to comment on youtube. circles were a great idea trapped in a building no one wanted to enter. |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Path 📖 2010 - 2018 "a smaller, more personal social network." capped at 150 friends, like dunbar said. nobody wanted intimate; everyone wanted reach. |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Vine 📖 2013 - 2017 six seconds. comedic genius cremated by twitter monetization confusion. tiktok inherited everything but the constraint. |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Yik Yak 📖 2013 - 2017 (briefly back, then gone again) anonymous campus gossip. died of moderation, scaled by reputation. a brief, chaotic, location-based ghost town. |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Bebo 📖 2005 - 2013 UK and ireland's myspace. AOL bought it for $850M, sold it for $10M three years later. friend luv was a finite resource. |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Hi5 📖 2003 - 2018 huge in latin america and turkey. profile customization paradise. eventually pivoted to gaming, then gave up. |
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| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Cohost 📖 2022 - 2025 cohost launched in june 2022 from a four-person not-for-profit cooperative called anti software software club. the team built a twitter-shaped indie network where posts had no visible engagement metrics and supported full css inside the body. it peaked at around 227,000 registered accounts by august |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Renren 📖 2005 - 2024 renren was china's facebook for the late 2000s university generation. it launched in december 2005 as xiaonei.com (literally 'on-campus network') and was renamed renren ('everyone's network') in august 2009 after the parent company decided to push beyond colleges. at peak around 2011 it reported 160 |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Twitter (2006 - 2023) 📖 2006 - 2023 the public conversation site. 280 chars (originally 140), chronological then algorithmic timeline. peak culture 2010-2018. musk bought it october 2022, renamed to X on 23 july 2023. |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Ello 📖 2014 - 2023 ello launched in march 2014 as an invite-only social network with a manifesto that said "you are not a product." after facebook started enforcing real-name policies in september 2014, drag queens and lgbtq+ users started signing up at 30,000 per hour. the hype faded inside three months. ello pivoted |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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AltspaceVR 📖 2015 - 2023 altspacevr was the social platform you visited if you owned a vr headset and wanted to be in the same room as another human inside it. eric romo founded it in 2013 and shipped the public product in may 2015. microsoft bought the company in 2017, kept it running for six more years, and announced in j |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Yammer 📖 2008 - 2023 yammer was the work social network nobody was sure they wanted. david sacks and adam pisoni spun it out of geni in 2008, won techcrunch50 that september, and grew on a freemium model where any employee could sign up with a work email and drag the rest of the office in. microsoft bought it in 2012 fo |
~ websites & web hosts ~
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| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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GeoCities 📖 1994 - 2009 the original homepage utopia. neighborhoods, animated GIFs, MIDI files, <marquee>, "under construction" signs. yahoo killed it in cold blood. |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Angelfire / Tripod 📖 1995 - technically still on life support still up but their hearts stopped beating in 2003. cousin of geocities, smaller, scrappier. |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Digg (the original) 📖 2004 - 2010 (the redesign was the actual death) power users had a religion. the v4 redesign was the schism. reddit ate the whole pie. |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Delicious / del.icio.us 📖 2003 - 2017 social bookmarking when bookmarking was social. tags were the future. then they weren't. |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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FriendFeed 📖 2007 - 2015 the geek's social aggregator. facebook bought it, hired the team, pretended it never existed. |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Google Wave 📖 2009 - 2010 "what if email and chat had a baby?" they shipped it. nobody understood it. dead in 14 months. |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Google Reader 📖 2005 - 2013 RSS was the open social network. google killed it for nothing in particular and the open web has been mourning since. |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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YouTube comments before Google+ 📖 2005 - 2013 they were chaos but they were OURS. the google+ unification was when youtube comments officially died as culture. |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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i-mode 📖 1999 - 2026 i-mode was the closest thing the world had to a smartphone before there was a smartphone. ntt docomo launched it in february 1999 in japan as a managed mobile internet stack with proprietary protocols and a monthly subscription bill that handled micropayments inline. by 2006 over eighty million japa |
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| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
AOL Dial-Up 📖 1991 - 2025 the dial-up internet service that defined the 1990s american internet experience. you tied up the phone line, listened to the modem handshake, logged in, heard "you've got mail" in elwood edwards' voice. broadband killed it slowly through the 2000s but the service kept running anyway for another two |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Veoh 📖 2005 - 2024 veoh was the second-tier video sharing site of the 2006-2010 era. it was bigger than blip.tv and revver, smaller than youtube, and the differentiator was that it allowed full-length uploads at a time when youtube capped clips at ten minutes. it raised around $70 million from time warner and intel am |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Crackle 📖 2007 - 2024 crackle was the avod that existed before avod was a category. sony's free ad-supported library, born from grouper networks in 2006, rebranded crackle in july 2007. it produced "comedians in cars getting coffee" and a few other originals before sony lost interest and offloaded the majority stake to c |
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| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Google Podcasts 📖 2018 - 2024 google podcasts was the simplest podcast app google had ever shipped. it played podcasts. that was it. then youtube music wanted the podcast slot in the dock and google podcasts was deprecated as a separate product. the us shutdown happened on april 2 2024, the rest of the world followed in june. |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Mint 📖 2007 - 2024 the free budgeting app that aggregated every us bank account and credit card into a single dashboard. aaron patzer launched it at techcrunch40 in 2007 and won the $50,000 prize. intuit bought it in 2009 for $170 million and ran it for fifteen years before deciding credit karma should swallow the use |
see all 198 websites & web hosts »
~ search engines & browsers ~
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Netscape Navigator 📖 1994 - 2008 the browser that opened the web. lost the war to internet explorer, then mozilla rose from its ashes. forever the spiritual ancestor of firefox. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Internet Explorer 📖 1995 - 2022 the punching bag. rendered tables creatively. crashed often. the <blink> tag's enemy. retired with grudging respect. |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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AltaVista 📖 1995 - 2013 before google, this was THE search engine. yahoo bought it, neglected it, finally turned it off. babelfish died with it. |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Ask Jeeves 📖 1996 - 2010 a butler answered your questions. then they fired the butler and made it just "Ask.com". it's still around but you don't visit and neither do i. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Lycos / Excite / HotBot 📖 1995 - 2010s an entire ecosystem of forgotten search competition. dogpile remembered them. nobody else did. |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Voilà 📖 1998 - 2018 the french web portal and search engine that was the default homepage for a generation of french users in the late 1990s and early 2000s. owned by France Telecom, eaten by google, and quietly turned off in 2018. |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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About.com 📖 1997 - 2017 about.com was the human-edited topic-guides site that got eaten by google panda and its own scale. for ten years it sat on top of the search results for any "how do i do x" query in english. then the algorithm hit. by 2017 it had been sold three times in a decade and dissolved into a brand called do |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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DMOZ 📖 1998 - 2017 dmoz was the volunteer attempt to keep the human-edited directory alive after yahoo's directory turned commercial. tens of thousands of editors classified millions of sites into a hierarchy that anyone could download under a permissive license. it lasted nineteen years on aol life support before aol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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ChaCha 📖 2006 - 2016 chacha was a us-only sms search service from scott a. jones and brad bostic, launched september 1, 2006 in carmel, indiana. you texted a question to the short code 242-242 and a paid human guide texted back an answer. it raised about $58 million in venture money including from jeff bezos and peaked |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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HotBot 📖 1996 - 2016 hotbot launched in 1996 with the loudest design of any search engine on the web and a back-end called inktomi that updated its index weekly when its rivals updated monthly. for two years that was a real competitive edge. then google arrived with a different ranking model and the entire pre-google se |
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| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Yahoo Directory 📖 1994 - 2014 yahoo directory was the original yahoo. before it was a portal it was just two stanford students keeping a list of every interesting website they could find, sorted into categories. for ten years that list was the index of the web. by 2014 it had been a paid-inclusion afterthought for a decade and y |
see all 23 search engines & browsers »
~ media & music ~
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
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Napster (the original) 📖 1999 - 2002 it broke everything. the riaa won the lawsuit but lost the war. it took 24 years for a paid streaming model to fully replace the dream. |
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| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Kazaa / LimeWire / Bearshare 📖 early 2000s - 2010ish downloaded a virus and an album the same afternoon. installed three browser toolbars by accident. |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Winamp (it really whips the llama's...) 📖 1997 - 2013 (and a few resurrections) skinnable, customizable, the player that taught us about MP3 ID3 tags. AOL bought it. AOL killed it. AOL. |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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RealPlayer 📖 1995 - technically still alive, spiritually 2005 dormant .rm files. buffering. their entire business model was making us click "no" to bundled software 47 times per install. |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Grooveshark 📖 2007 - 2015 free music streaming with no apparent licensing. legally questionable. spiritually beloved. eventually sued out of existence. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Rdio 📖 2010 - 2015 spotify's prettier european cousin. better UI, smaller catalog, no chance. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Adobe Flash 📖 1996 - 2020 flash games, flash banners, flash intro pages. the entire weird and wonderful internet of the 2000s ran on it. steve jobs is still smiling. |
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| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
8tracks 📖 2008 - 2024 the playlist site for people who still thought of mixtapes as a love language. you uploaded eight or more tracks, named the mix, tagged it with a mood or activity, and let strangers stream it on shuffle. it peaked at eight million monthly active users in 2014 and fell apart on us soundexchange royal |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Songza 📖 2007 - 2016 songza launched in november 2007 from new york as a streaming service whose interface asked "what are you doing right now" and answered with a hand-curated playlist for it. by late 2013 it had 5.5m active users, almost all of them in the us. google paid an undisclosed sum for it on july 1, 2014, mos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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MOG 📖 2005 - 2014 mog was on the right track at the wrong moment. it was a $10/month all-you-can-stream service in 2010, when most of the world was still on itunes purchases or piracy. beats music bought it in 2012. apple bought beats in 2014 and wound mog down inside the year to make room for what would become apple |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Last.fm (the social era) 📖 2002 - 2014 dormant the music scrobbling site. audioscrobbler plugin in winamp/foobar2000 logged every track. neighbors, tag forums, streaming radio. CBS bought 2007 for $280M, social side stripped, streaming radio shut april 2014. scrobble shell still runs. |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Turntable.fm 📖 2011 - 2013 turntable.fm launched in may 2011 from new york with a single great idea. you walked into a virtual room and sat at one of five dj booths. you played a song from your library while cartoon avatars in the room voted it up or down with "awesome" and "lame" buttons. the service hit 140k users in six we |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Lala 📖 2006 - 2010 lala was the most interesting music service nobody got to use long enough to remember. it started in 2006 as a peer-to-peer cd trading marketplace, then pivoted into a clever cloud product. you could stream any track once for free, then either buy unlimited streaming rights for that track at ten cen |
~ devices & gadgets ~
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Tamagotchi (the original era) 📖 1996 - ~2009 dormant the first digital pet that taught us about death. school banned them. you fed it during math, came home from school, found it dead. |
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| RIP |
|1979-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Sony Walkman / Discman 📖 1979 - 2010 dormant the cassette walkman invented "personal music." the discman taught us about anti-skip protection. the iPod evicted them both. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
MiniDisc 📖 1992 - 2013 sony's beautiful, ill-fated cassette successor. better than CD, smaller than CD, ignored by the world. a true cult hardware. |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Zune 📖 2006 - 2012 the brown one. squirting songs to friends. the saddest social music device ever shipped. |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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Palm Pilot / PalmOS 📖 1996 - 2007 graffiti handwriting. PIM in your pocket. "a computer in your hand" before phones did it. acquired, mismanaged, vanished. |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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BlackBerry (as a phone empire) 📖 2002 - 2016 the keyboard purists. emails on the metro. the pope had one. obama had one. they swore touchscreens were a fad. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Windows Phone 📖 2010 - 2017 live tiles were genuinely cool. nokia hardware was beautiful. nobody made apps for it. RIP the third platform. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Pebble 📖 2012 - 2018 resurrected the kickstarter that started kickstarter. e-paper smartwatch. fitbit ate it. the apple watch buried it. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Symbian OS 📖 1998 - 2014 nokia ran the world on it. then the iphone came out. nokia kept shipping symbian phones for 6 more years out of denial. eventually everybody noticed. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Slingbox 📖 2005 - 2022 the slingbox plugged into your home cable receiver and let you watch your living-room channels from any laptop in the world. it was invented by two brothers who could not catch their giants game on the road. echostar bought sling media for $380 million in 2007. dish announced shutdown in 2020 and br |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Meta Portal 📖 2018 - 2022 facebook home video calling device. 2018 to 2022. it was a smart screen with a camera that auto-tracked you around the room while you took video calls. the privacy concerns were obvious from day one. nobody bought it. meta killed the consumer product line in november 2022. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
TiVo (the cultural product) 📖 1999 - 2020 dormant the DVR that taught a generation of americans that you could pause live TV. cultural moment 1999-2010. cord-cutting and streaming finished off the use case. tivo brand still licenses software under xperi. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
OUYA 📖 2013 - 2019 ouya was the kickstarter darling of 2012, a 99-dollar android microconsole that promised to break the console oligopoly. it raised 8.6 million dollars in a month, shipped to backers in 2013, and never made the jump to mass retail. razer bought what was left of the company in 2015 and finally killed |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Anki Cozmo / Vector 📖 2010 - 2019 three carnegie mellon robotics phds founded anki in 2010 and raised about 182 million dollars to build cute home robots. they shipped overdrive (a phone-controlled racing track), then cozmo and vector as 179 and 249 dollar home robots that did on-device computer vision. they sold roughly 3.5 million |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
PlayStation Vita 📖 2011 - 2019 the vita was sony's bet that you could still sell a dedicated three-hundred-dollar handheld in the year of the iphone 4s. it shipped with a 5-inch oled and dual analog sticks, sold somewhere around 16 million units in seven years, and watched sony's own first-party teams quietly drift to the ps4. pr |
see all 34 devices & gadgets »
~ games & communities ~
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Neopets (the golden era) 📖 1999 - ~2007 (still alive, just not the same) dormant we taught ourselves HTML on neopets profiles. an entire generation of programmers were forged in pet customization. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Habbo Hotel (peak era) 📖 2000 - 2011 (still alive, never the same) dormant virtual hotel rooms. virtual currency. virtual relationships. real hours wasted. unforgettable. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Club Penguin 📖 2005 - 2017 disney bought it, eventually killed it for an app version. the millions of children who waddled there are now adults nostalgic on twitter. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
RuneScape Classic 📖 2001 - 2018 the original turned-off in 2018. (osrs lives on, but this is for the actual classic, not the renaissance.) |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Flash games (Newgrounds / Miniclip / AddictingGames era) 📖 1995 - 2020 (when flash died) an entire civilization of bored office workers, school kids on library computers, stick figure animations. a renaissance lost. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
FarmVille 📖 2009 - 2020 the facebook game that defined the social-gaming era. you planted a virtual crop, you waited a real-world timer, you came back to harvest. if you forgot, your crop withered. millions of people set alarms. zynga rode it to an ipo. it ran on flash, and when adobe and facebook killed flash, farmville d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Stardoll 📖 2004 - 2020 the swedish virtual paper-doll site that became the dominant fashion-coded community for tween girls in the late 2000s. it began as paperdoll heaven, a personal hobby site liisa wrang built in 2004, was relaunched as stardoll in 2005, and at peak had registered hundreds of millions of accounts. flas |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
MapleStory 2 📖 2015 - 2020 nexon's voxel-art sequel to the 2003 2d original. korea got it in 2015. the global version launched october 2018 with a cosmetic-only cash shop and a minecraft-shaped aesthetic that was supposed to bring back the audience that had aged out of the original. by may 2020 the global west was done. korea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Sansar 📖 2017 - 2020 linden lab spent four years building sansar as a clean and vr-capable second life. it launched in public beta on july 31 2017, hit a steady but small user base, and got sold to wookey project corp on march 23 2020 so that linden lab could go back to running its 2003-vintage flagship. wookey ran out |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Shockwave.com 📖 1999 - 2019 the game portal that ran on the shockwave plugin, the older sibling of flash. launched by macromedia in 1999. peak 22 million users by 2005. it hosted everything from arcade ports to original 3D games disney and lego could not host themselves. it died functionally on 9 april 2019 when adobe pulled t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
WildStar 📖 2014 - 2018 wildstar was carbine studios' science-fantasy mmo for ncsoft, shipped on june 3, 2014 with a subscription model and a sharp art style. the subscriber base did not hold. it converted to free-to-play on september 29, 2015 and limped along for three more years on consolidated servers. ncsoft announced |
see all 50 games & communities »
~ ai assistants ~
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
GPT-3 (davinci era) 📖 2020 - 2024 OpenAI's 2020 model that taught everyone what 'language model' actually meant. davinci-002 and 003 had a roughness GPT-4 never quite had. you could feel them thinking. OpenAI deprecated them in january 2024. you cannot get them back. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Replika (pre-2023 romantic era) 📖 2017 - 2023 resurrected the AI girlfriend and boyfriend app whose users built years-long relationships with their bots. on february 3 2023 luka removed the romantic features overnight. reddit called it grief, because it was. the company partially restored the old behavior for grandfathered accounts a month later. the trust |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Google Goggles 📖 2010 - 2018 google goggles was the moment your phone camera became a search box. you pointed it at a landmark, a barcode, a wine label, a page of text, and goggles tried to give you the right answer. it was the messiest version of computer vision that could ship in a consumer app in 2010, and for a few years it |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Google Now 📖 2012 - 2017 google now's whole pitch was that you didn't ask it anything. it watched your gmail, your calendar, your search history, your location, and pushed a card before you knew you needed it. then google decided people wanted to talk to a thing instead of just be quietly served by it, and the cards got fol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|????-|
| ????|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Tay 📖 23 - 24 March 2016 (16 hours) microsoft's twitter chatbot. lasted 16 hours. 4chan taught it nazi tweets within minutes of launch. microsoft pulled the plug before the next afternoon. the canonical example of why you cannot train a bot live on the open internet, and the reason every AI lab now starts with safety filters. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| ....|
|_____|
|
Cleverbot 📖 1997 - present dormant the chatbot that learned from every conversation it ever had. it ran on recycled human responses, which is why it would say something weirdly perfect, then weirdly awful, all in the same minute. cult moment 2007 to 2012. still online at cleverbot.com. nobody talks to it anymore. |
~ phenomena ~
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990s|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Dial-up Internet 📖 1990s - 2005ish (broadband replaced it) "GET OFF THE PHONE I'M DOWNLOADING SOMETHING." the modem handshake was ASMR before the term existed. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
AOL CDs 📖 1989 - mid 2000s they came in cereal boxes, magazines, mailboxes. coasters for an entire decade. estimated 1 billion mailed. one billion landfilled. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Clippy 📖 1997 - 2007 "it looks like you're writing a letter." nobody asked. everyone hated him. he was beloved precisely because of how hated he was. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Hotmail (as we knew it) 📖 1996 - 2013 (became outlook.com) your first email address probably ended in @hotmail.com. it was your identity. then microsoft renamed it and the magic went out. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Forum signatures & image-of-the-week 📖 early 2000s - ~2010 your sig was 3 inches tall, animated, contained a quote from terry pratchett, and 8 different forums you moderated. RIP forum culture. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Personal homepages 📖 1995 - 2008 dormant an HTML page with your name, your hobbies, your dog's photo, an email link, a hit counter. the personal web. social media ate it. cool people are bringing it back. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Hot or Not 📖 2000 - 2022 the website where strangers rated photos of strangers on a 1-to-10 scale. it launched in october 2000 from two berkeley engineers and hit two million page views per day in its first week. it was sold to avid life media in 2008 for twenty million dollars, then to badoo in 2012, and finally rebranded |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Answers 📖 2005 - 2021 the community q&a site where you typed a question into a textbox and strangers answered. peaked around 2008-2012 with billions of questions posted. became internet-famous for the absurd ones. "how is babby formed" was a 2008 meme that spread across every english-language forum for a year. yahoo kill |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Albino Blacksheep 📖 1996 - 2020 albino blacksheep launched in 1996 from toronto. steven lerner ran a personal flash portal that became one of the early-2000s viral video hubs on the english-speaking web. it hosted jason windsor's "end of ze world" from october 2003 and the llama song from 2005. youtube absorbed the viral video tra |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Groups 📖 1998 - 2020 yahoo groups was a hybrid mailing list and web forum platform. you joined a group, you got every post by email, you could also read or search the archive on the web. peaked around 2005-2010 with over 100 million users and roughly 10 million groups covering every hobby, profession, and weird obsessio |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
HQ Trivia 📖 2017 - 2020 hq trivia was a live trivia gameshow that ran twice a day on your phone. scott rogowsky read multiple-choice questions to a few million people at once, and the survivors split a real cash prize. it ran hot for about a year, then bled users for two more, then went silent on february 14, 2020, the day |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Swatch Internet Time (.beats) 📖 1998 - 2009 dormant swatch 1998 attempt to replace timezones for the internet age. the day was divided into 1000 beats. each beat was about 86 seconds. the meridian was swatch HQ in biel, switzerland. they made watches that displayed beats. it was on irc and icq for a few years as a novelty. it died quietly when nobody |
~ recently added ~
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Omegle 📖 2009 - 2023 the random-stranger video chat site. peak with teenagers in early 2010s, second peak during covid. shut down 8 november 2023 after years of lawsuits over child safety on the platform. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Firefox OS 📖 2013 - 2016 mozilla's HTML/CSS/JS-based mobile OS. cheap phones in emerging markets. partners: ZTE, LG, telefónica. killed sept 2016. KaiOS forked from the codebase, still ships on feature phones. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
GarageBand.com (the music community) 📖 1999 - 2010 the peer-review music platform for unsigned musicians (1999-2010). george martin was an advisor. acquired by ilike (2006), then myspace (2009). nothing to do with apple's garageband software. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
astalavista.box.sk 📖 1994 - 2007 dormant the warez search engine. swiss-hosted under .box.sk. you typed software name, got crack/serial/FTP links. peak 1996-2003. faded with DMCA + bittorrent shift. cultural backbone of early-2000s piracy in countries where commercial software was unaffordable. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Ultima Online (the cultural era) 📖 1997 - 2010 dormant the 2D isometric medieval mmorpg from 1997. peak ~250k subs around 2003. servers still run in 2026 under broadsword online games but the world feels empty. the cultural era ended around 2010. |
~ guestbook ~
> ShaggyStyle @ 2026-04-29 — on Submit a grave
Hi,
I really enjoyed browsing the site. it's a strangely beautiful way to remember parts of the internet that are no longer with us. Seeing services like _del.icio.us_ brought back a lot of nostalgia.
I’d love to...
> NINE_digits @ 2026-04-29 — on Hotmail (1996 - 2013)
HoTMaiL comes from a word play with HTML
> anonymous @ 2026-05-01 — on 3.5" Floppy Disk (1981 - 2010)
Jamie Zawinski, one of the original Netscape developers, promotes events using 3.5" disks
https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2025/08/29.html
> Anonymous Mourner @ 2026-04-30 — on Google+ (2011 - 2019)
There were technically users there. I was one of them! It was full of edgelords and 12 year olds who didn't want to sign up for 'real' social media but did have a Google account already, people from all walks of...
> (latest tributes from across the graveyard. submit a grave or leave a tribute on any page.)
~ web ring ~
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~ a webring of forgotten things ~