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."

Comments

Re:Good concept, unpractical in real life...

[Servo5678]

The problem I had with webrings was that website owners were less likely to join and existing ring and would instead make their own ring to compete with an existing one.

For example, say I make a webring for Handspring Visors. It's dedicated to websites about Visors, Visor software, Visor mainteance - everything Visor. Now other Visor sites wouldn't join up - the owners of the other sites would create competing webrings, and before you know it there'd be a webring for Visor Hardware, one for Visor games, one for Visor hotsync tips, one for Visor hacking, etc.

How many webrings do we need for the same topic?

Re:Webrings have been good for linux

[swimfastom]

I disagree. I haven't used webrings for a couple years, but when I did, I found them to be almost useless. Half of the time I would get a 404 Page not found error. It only made me frustrated and I just started using search engines to find related linux pages. Some websites would even become a part of a webring for the sole purpose of increasing traffic to their site! I remember hitting "next site" on the linux webring, and finding something completely unrelated.

Off the topic of linux webrings, there exists quite a few sites that are designed to let anyone create and manage webrings. An example is Ring Surf. The site claims they have over 20,000 rings. Other sites that offer many tools for webmasters, such as Bravenet offer ring setup as well.

As for me, I never joined the cult of webrings because I found them to be useless and didn't want to waste the space on my pages. I'm surprised webrings lasted as long as they did.

Re:My Webring migrated and it works fine.

[hearingaid]

I've actually gotten two requests for signups to my (low-traffic) ring since the switch back from Yahoo!

I'm glad it's out of Yahoo! actually. the ring code fascists were irritating. why can't we have custom fragments?