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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."
Correct link --> http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet /Web_Design_and_Development/Webring_Systems/
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Sorry, but that is incorrect. The original link provided by Harumuka,t /Web_Design_and_Development/Web_Ring_Systems/ was actually correct. Your link yields the following message:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Interne
"The requested category Computers > Internet > Web Design and Development > Webring Systems could not be found. It is likely that this category has been moved to another location within the directory. "
Check your links first next time. Moderators, please mod the parent down.
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
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.
Ummm, yeah, right.
First off, I am a Yahoo employee by way of GeoCities. I worked for GeoCities during the Webring acquisition. GeoCities bought Webring, not Yahoo. Yahoo bought GeoCities some months later, and ended up getting Webring basically by accident.
Further, I was a member of the team talking to Webring about integrating their technology. At *no point* did anyone mention interstitial ads, nor did it come up during the transition to Yahoo. Given that I was one of the key contacts on our side, you'd think someone would have mentioned something like that to me.
Basically, Webring was bought by management -- all of our engineers thought the technology was crap. Their employees were incompetent. The integration was killed quickly and quietly when it became apparent that they had nothing going for them but some half-assed Perl scripts. I still have no idea why the company was actually purchased, but then I'm just a lowly programmer.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
As Webring isn't dead, its just going back to its originators
I, too, am a Yahoo-acquired GeoCities engineer; though I wasn't part of the original Webring acquisition, once I got to Yahoo it was easy to see that they had absolutely no use for Webring. The role that GeoCities bought Webring for--tying together user's sites by topic rather than loosely-defined "neighborhoods"-- was accomplished much better through the Yahoo directory, it was felt.
In the Bubble days Yahoo could afford to support projects that had only loose connections to the central site, and so Webring wasn't axed after the Geo acquisition (as it no doubt would be in today's climate). It, too, was to get tied into the directory somehow (yes, the descendant of David & Jerry's original "List" was still central to Yahoo, and is to this day in various guises). I've no idea how anyone would have got the idea that adding links back to Yahoo's directory constituted interstitial ads--that's either a gross misunderstanding or a false rumor spread by PO'd ringmasters. Back then, Yahoo had no need to create more ad slots--just getting folks to visit the central site was considered to be of value. (The old "eyeball"game.)
There is a tragedy here, but no crime. Webring was a speck on GeoCities' balance sheet, much less on Yahoo's. Geo might have done something better with Webring if it (Geo) had remained independent. But Yahoo's acquisition of GeoCities left it with no real place. I'm glad they finally let it go.