Slashdot Mirror
Net Cemetery
Ant wrote to us regarding coverage of the .com dead - the Net Cemetery. It's a fun piece, which gets into the problems of covering and reviewing a medium that's changing everyday. If you're into wandering through the .com wasteland, you should also check out Ghost Sites, which does a great job of "museumifing" (sounds like transmorgify) the same type of sites.
As much as I hate the whole dot-com market overreaction and all, what were some of these people thinking?
zoza.com? What do you think of when you heard 'zoza.com'. That's right, absofuckinglutely nothing.
bigwords.com. what's their motto, 'tired of only being able to buy a vowel?' your guide to antidisestablishmentarianism? helping you recover from Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanicconiosis? Who cares now, they've been
Floccipoccinihilipilificated.
carorder.com, because not only do you want to buy your car online, you want to buy it from someplace you've never heard of before.
elingo.com, for all your jargon needs!
icecreamvan.com. no, i'm not kidding.
popawheelie.com, because popping wheelies in real life is dangerous, and in potential violation of traffic laws.
while nobody here likes high unemployment in the tech sector, the fact of the matter is, it's not exactly shocking that most of these places died, nor is it particularly sad to see most of them go.
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Reel was one of the first Internet retailers for movies, and they were very well known, especially among DVD early adopters.
.coms were blowing millions in 1999 trying to overcome the "first mover advantage" of places like Reel and Amazon, Reel closed their doors, becoming one of the first big dot-com casualties. People (Investors) should have stood up and taken notice that if Reel couldn't make it, most of these other guys without name recognition or a customer base wouldn't either.
The funny thing is while other
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Slashdot's parent is about to go under.
We'll be mourning or ridiculing that one too
in no time.
These bankrupt dotcoms
would fade like the morning mist
but for this website
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E_NOSIG
Reel.com used to be an online movie store but now they only have movie reviews and related information and for purchases they point you to buy.com
From their FAQ:
Hollywood Entertainment Corporation has decided to get out of the e-commerce business, but not the movie content business. In other words, we will continue to publish the best movie content site on the Web, but movie orders through Reel.com will be fulfilled by an e-commerce partner, Buy.com. Reel.com will continue as a premier destination for film-related content, commerce, and community. Through the Reel.com Web site, consumers can access an entertaining environment filled with a wide variety of film-related information designed to help consumers select movies to purchase, rent, or watch in theaters.
Reel.com is on the list. Pay 'em a visit at www.reel.com/reel. asp and see if they're dead yet.
*shrug*
Aside from that, it's impressive how many of these companies went belly up... and it's FAR from a complete listing. Of course, now the industry as a whole is getting swamped by newly-unemployed job candidates, venture capital has dried up, and all the suriving companies are either taking cost-saving measures or are clinging onto life. I know it's fun to laugh at this stuff, but even for the seemingly secure working professionals out there, this changes the face of the industry for a while, and not for the better.
Makes me wish I skipped college to get in on the speculative bubble. (Don't flame saying I shouldn't have wished that - cause I got flamed last week for saying that my college education was very solid, because I don't have all the practical skills that someone from a "Learn Java Quick" course has)...
Sure, there might have been a few .coms that literally burnt money, but...
Also, on F*ckedCompany during the last month, the hardest hit companies are online metal companies. Yes, people selling iron, aluminium, nickel and whatnot. Maybe this is because people who buy metal (do you?) just kept on using their local scrapyard?
http://ebituaries.whirlycott.com/ ostiguy
I can see atleast two that I had atleast some affiliation with over the years. Iguide.com was concieved out of the failed News Corp/MCI joint venture I worked for, and ZipLink.com purchased me and the rest of the call center from News Corp. Sigh those were the days..
Runestar
I browsed to the site.
I randomly scrolled down.
There the name was. How uncanny.
The company was there and it brought it all back like it was yesterday (it was yesterday actually): The helicopters (games), the fighting, the blood and guts, our asshole commander in chief.
Someone you trust is one of us.
There's a lot of rubbish on the net. We all know it. We know there's lots of absolute rubbish. But in the same way that that archaeologists get really excited about unearthing ancient rubbish pits and have wonderful skills at pulling together information from them to find out about real lives from history, who knows what the dead websites of today will provide for information gatherers of tomorrow?
We can't tell what the future will want to look at from our present. Right now we're not even saving the good stuff. We need to seriously think about archiving up the web for future generations. I was one of a team of four people who built Virgin Music Group's first website back in 94- 95. Did we keep any of it? did we ***! Bit of a shame really.
Ask your local archivist or archaeologist or local historian if they think anything is too small to be of use when researching the past.
... although maybe harder to track, would be a museum of what might be called zombie-baby sites. These are pages that reach some very early stage of development -- lots of "coming soon" and occasionally even still those cheesy "under construction" icons -- and then just stop. And yet they don't actually go away, which is the weird thing: someone's paying for the hosting, but not doing anything with it.
I'm not into the idea that a page has to change all the time to be worthwhile -- for a lot of businesses, I think updates once a year or so are fine. But unfinished pages (either commercial or personal) with Last Modified dates of, say, 1997 really puzzle me.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
a .Net cemetery for Microsoft.
But maybe that's just me.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
How is this different than any of the other sites out there, like FuckedCompany.com?
Seems like trying to make a museum of all the grains of sand that used to be on a beach, but sadly washed-away to sea, over the years. Allan
This ties is well with Story of the Pnuematic tubes, a highly developed system that disappeared and became utterly forgotten because of other systems that were utterly superior to it. (Telephones. fax, etc.)
I also am fascinated by the Athenian "computer" that ran the old Athenian democracy. (see info here in 5 parts: 1,2,3,4,5) It was far more IT intensive than most folks realize.
So with these dead sites, etc the question comes to mind: What replaces the internet when it is over?
My vote is that the most likely course is the borgification of the world. Wireless, of course.
But of course, it could be something else as well.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
www.24-7.com
In twenty years, I'll tell my daughter all about people pouring all of their cash into pets.com and she won't believe me. How long until the world forgets about boo.com? We need a place to wander the halls and say "remember them? I was so glad when they went under."
Of course, it's the semi-pro non-profit sites that will survive this collapse with cockroach-like aplomb.
That's spelled Transmogrify, thank you very much,
and I'll thank you not to denigrate this succesful science that I've so carefully tested.
(Then again, maybe a simple letter transposition is within the spirit of this great science!)
--Calvin
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Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
What did Yahoo!, Microsoft, Slashdot, et al look like when they first opened up shop? What did they look like on, say, November 21, 1999? Isn't there some sort of project to archive all this? I think it would be a valuable historical tool- a setting in one's browser that let's you enter any date, sending you back in time.
I'd like to see trenchcoat.org (a gag perpetrated by the freaks at rotten.com ) before they switched to their "All Hate Mail" format.
is that Microsoft, in their desire to be number 1 in all things, will try to make it on this list.
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
Well, this is fine and good for the companies whose relatives decided to give them a decent burial...but what about companies that were so in debt they were cremated by their creditors?
Check out First Aid for the Dying Dot-Com for more information on how to revive this technological casualties.
Here's my favorite warning sign of a dying dot-com:
3. Replaces 180 fulltime employees with two interns and a chatterbot.
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If there were gods, how could I bear to be no god?
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If there were gods, how could I bear to be no god?
Consequently there are no gods.
An April 2000 study by the Canadian Council for the Use of the Internet found that web business site that were updated less frequently than once per week were 72% more likely to disappear within three months, as compared to sites that were updated more frequently than once per week.
And that was over a year ago, when the world of the internet was still sailing high!
The cemetery will continue to grow, and people won't care. After all, who cares about the fact that Altos went out of business? Or that Synergistic Software is gone???
Why would we sites be any different? Let them rot, and let those who are tactiful and savvy win the moment.