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

Officially fscked

[Harumuka]

An October 14th article reported the rumor of webring.com closing. For more information, see the two dozen replies in the Supper Happy Fun Slander Corner. One poster made a good point:

I had a webring with webring.org. Yahoo purchased them and fucked it up

I had a chat room with egroups. yahoo purchased thenm and fucked it up

Now the webring is going and all the clubs have disapeared.

Yahoo!'s intent was malicious anyway

[dfeldman]

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.