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Webring - Another One Bites The Dust
imrdkl writes: "Salon is running an feature about the history of the WebRing since Yahoo! bought it last September. The article goes on to give an outlook on Yahoo! itself, including how WebRing has recently been sold to one of the original developers. Webring seemed to me to be a really nice neighborly concept, but it seems at least some of the ringmasters reckon it should die now."
There's a large list of webring systems at Google under Computers > Internet > Web Design and Development > Web Ring Systems. Hopefully not all webring systems will go the way of WebRing.
What do you think of MusicCity now?
Did the concept of webrings ever really generate anything though?
Remember the last time you noticed a link to a webring'd site - you were probably on that site due to Google, and you were there because you wanted a specific piece of information.
Information found - close the window.
Information not found - hit back and try the next search result down.
Any online "communities" are usually formed by a group of people who know each other (at least to a minor degree), and not by the "next link on this webring."
Webrings are the internets version of strip-malls. They are trash.
I like Google's "Similar Pages" utility that allows users to find pages with relatively similar content to ones that they already find informative, useful, etc.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
But I was positioned just before goatse.cx, and my "next site" button would lead to it. After too many complaints from visitors I left the webring. The site before me was now linking to goatse.cx, so he left too, etc.. until the hole ring collasped to a webring of sick porn I guess.
What do you think of MusicCity now?
Is it my imagination, or has /. become the office link to all things Salon? Pretty redundant for those of us who read Salon on a regular basis to see all of their stories posted here too.
Sapere Aude - Homer
IRC is still alive and well.
Sapere Aude - Homer
But almost as quickly as webrings became popular, they (for the most part) vanished once again. I think there are three major reasons for this:
Those reasons and a myriad of lesser ones are what contributed to the death of webrings, if you ask me. Kind of a shame, but honestly I (as a web surfer and as a webmaster) never found much use for webrings beyond the fact that it was kinda cool to be part of a "group."
Mozilla's a nice operating system, but it needs a better browser.
How many times did you fall on a web page that had that webring thing? Ok.
How many broken links? how how many times did you have to cache the original page in a different page, "lookup 5 sites" on another page, and go thru them one by one? (or always pressing back after a 404 error).
I guess the ringowners had better things to do than to maintain their lists, the concept was cool while it was working, but right now it's just a pain and time wasting. I agree, put this dog to sleep.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Some of the disadvatages of webrings have already been pointed out:
.MODs, or tables that brought netscape to it's knees (or a GPF).
Search engines do a better job of delivering information looking for.
Half the time, links in webrings were broken.
Duplication of effort; everyone and their brother wanted to be the "founder" of THE Linux webring - and the same was true for EVERY topic imaginable. More like webchainmail.
The worst part was the webrings where some goofball thought they'd use the 1337-est tricks they knew in designing their web page, so 90% of the bandwidth to download the info went to bad flash, stupid fucking
Good riddance.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I seem to remember a Webring of Webrings?
"One ring to connect to then all, and in the Ethernet bind them..."
*wince* [Ducks myriad of popcorn and Glossettes from the back of the back of the theatre...
Yeesh. Sorry 'bout that...
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
There are such idiots out there, who complain for the sake of complaining... but to hear such whining as this in an article is just sad - somebody slap that journalist around a bit, please.
If Richard Lowe doesn't like the webring service anymore, then he shouldn't use it! If someone wishes to put money and time into it and try to resurrect it, more power to them. People like Lowe must be taught to keep their mouth shut, as they seem to not be learning how on their own. If they don't like the service, and aren't paying for it, then they should stop using it... but asking for it to be shut down because they don't like using it anymore is completely and utterly selfish.
- Chris Jacobson
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
Webrings are one of the things that has really drawn the Linux community together. I can't tell you how many hours I spent just hopping form site to site on linux webrings increasing my knowledge about Linus and Alan Cox and linux in general. It's one of the things that we will always have over the "Commercial" windows world, and it makes me happy to be a part of it.
So that's what a "Hrung" is!
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Well, I'm offended.
Username taken, please choose another one.
My roommate interviewed for a position at WebRing.org while they were in the middle of the Yahoo acquisition, and he revealed a dirty little secret that the interviewer let slip: Yahoo wanted to lay low for a little while to keep building critical mass, then implement interruption based advertising so that in order to get to the next site in the ring, users would be forced to sit through a 10-second Flash animation (probably coupled with a few pop-under X-10 ads).
Naturally, the waning popularity of webrings in general made it an economic reality that the ad revenues generated wouldn't even cover the cost of running the service. So, Yahoo dropped it, predictably enough.
What Yahoo! does makes a lot of business sense. However they are forsaking a large amount of goodwill as they acquire and corrupt various sites that used to be very nice resources. Alas, that is the way of the capitalist. I can't say I'll feel sorry when it comes back and bites them later.
df
P.S. My roommate got the job offer but, fearing imminent layoffs, did not accept.
Method of organizing large amounts of information without a coherent index.
Hey Bob,
/bots love to think they're "in the know," even though what you post can easily be utter bullshit. Trust me, they don't know the difference.
You need to work a bit harder at getting modded up before you can troll effectively. May I add a few suggestions?
1) Stay on-topic, at least for the first two paragraphs.
2) Pretend to have "insider information".
3) Try to bash Microsoft and compliment Linux whenever possible. e.g. "my office used to be a M$ shop but I persuaded my boss to try Mandrake on the desktops and we haven't looked back."
4) Tell an interesting story, regardless of whether or not it is true. Make sure it portrays Open Source in a good light.
5) If all else fails, get a new account and start with non-negative karma. If you want to trade your account for one that has about 20 karma, email me at wcbell@gmx.net.
Hope that helps!
-AC
an unemployment webring for the displaced admins and programmers. Oh, wait! Doh!
Anybody else notice the terms of the deal? Existing webrings won't be transferred! Sure looks to me like they decided that the whole thing wasn't worth one cent, and when the original author asked for the name webring.org back, they gave it to him for free.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Even with some of their more unfortunate antics, they have still been a more user-oriented network than either AOL or MSN.
I think people have gotten confused somewhere along the line here. I had a Webring back in the days of webring.org and it worked fine. Then Yahoo bought it, I had to make a couple of login changes, but it kept working fine. Now they've sold it to Webring.com ( http://dir.webring.com ) and I was notified by email that I could migrate my ring by clicking a link. I did so, it migrated, and now it lives on the new Webring.com and works fine.
Webrings are not inherently rocket science, it is just nice to have a common clearinghouse. I wish the new maintainers the best of luck.
As Webring isn't dead, its just going back to its originators
propz to all dead sage weils and newdream.netters.
and starseed.
we'll miss ya webring, word em up
goatse.cx is now putting on their www page. Don't
visit it! Don't visit goatse.cx until they get rid
of the bugs!
The Salon article doesn't give Sage enough credit. I remember sitting in a side room in InfoStructure, the first ISP in Ashland Oregon, when Sage showed me WebRing for the first time.
We had been spending lots of time with the SOU college geeks who started up the ISP, and since it was a mere 5 blocks from the high school, it was the natural choice over boring classes like chemistry (for me).
I spent most of my spare time playing Doom online, and Sage was busy loading FreeBSD on some box he had pieced togethor. He was way ahead of me. I think the initial version of WebRing he showed me was all in Perl? I can't recall but i'm pretty sure that was the case. I haven't looked recently, it may still be the case.
I know he forked it off to StarSeed, but he was involved somewhat through the whole deal. He ended up pocketing a handsome chunk of cash from the repeated sales and stock swaps that become the norm for WebRing.
This is actually one of those things that was spawned at the beginning of the web, where the creator did well by it, and the idea was original. A true internet first, and Sage has claim to that forever. WebRing would be much more than it is today if it really had a concerted group of people working on it. Maybe it will.
There were a couple geeks to watch that came out of the class of '96 at AHS. It will be fascinating to see what comes out next.
I'm working hard on my contribution right now.
Alexander Mace
I created my first webring, The Absinthe, in July '97 with my then girlfriend in hopes of making an area to link our friends gothy sites together. It grew from two simple personal sites into a ring of more than 150 sites. By this time I was dealing with the ring all on my own (A difficult task with the amount of submissions I was getting), so I enlisted two friends to help. Starseed had purchased webring by this time and I was becoming more discriminating with what type of site I would let into my ring. Goth rings were a dime a dozen, I wanted mine to standout and shine with the best that the gothy portion of the net had to offer. With Starseed came changes to the webring management functions to increase ease of use. These changes made administering a webring more difficult, timeouts were frequent and after a timeout you had to wait 20-30 minutes to log back in making ring management tedious. With the arrival of the Yahoo/Geocities deal, I really feared for my ring and those others I was a part of. I wasn't worried about ads or popups, I was concerned about the perversion of the communities that we ringmasters had created. Without the ring masters holding the system together, creating rings with Next5 and List/Index pages to display ads on(And who here is an old ringmaster that remembers the option to turn off ads on your pages? Ahh the good old days.), webring wouldn't have flourished. So with the advent of a new "improved" UI, to enhance ease of use, the Webring died as far as I'm concerned. It didn't die because it was simply difficult to admin a ring, it died because it was no longer fun. Fun was the reason I'd created a ring and the only reason I worked to create a better ring for myself and all those who were members. Also the trend was dying faster than the Swing dance/music craze. Everyone had a webring, so they made X of the Y sites, then they made cliches, now they all have E/N sites.
Maybe one day I'll use Ringlink to revive The Absinthe, but only when I feel that it may be fun once again, it's certainly past the 'so last year' phase and hardly anyone has a decent ring anymore.
Back in ... like '91, '92... something like that
anyway.
Eh, you prolly know better 'n me...
MindNet was good, Cool group of people.
One site that works as good a googles "similar" button, www.l2g.com/more/[webpage you search for]
The same could/should be said of 'blogs?? Ted Nelson had a good thing going when he provided for link fixup in his early hypertext fantasies!
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