Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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.
My biggest problem with webrings was that the other sites were completely useless. Either the site I was at didn't have what I want and the others didn't either, or the site I was at had what I wanted and the others didn't.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
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
>>IRC is still alive and well.
>But the average web surfer doesn't know what IRC is.
Hmmm, could there be a connection here ?
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?
I still have a rocketmail account. I really miss rocketmail, which is one of the many things that yahoo swallowed. I think that they were interested more in acquiring the 411 database that came with rocketmail, than actually keeping most of the other services that came with it. I don't blame people for wanting to make money, but I wish that it was a little easier to leave a few little corners of ingenuity alone. Rocketmail, Geocities, 411, Webring...
I almost never read that account, but it's nice that it's still there. Guess I should be grateful that it didn't get thrown out along with everything else. Yahoo used to be a couple of fun guys in a trailer on campus. Times sure have changed.
The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal. (Mark Twain)
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.
http://tomgould.com/
an unemployment webring for the displaced admins and programmers. Oh, wait! Doh!
, but I wish that it was a little easier to leave a few little corners of ingenuity alone
I think in years to come we're going to look back on many different ideas which were very good but never made it. Why? Because they got swallowed up, the big company didn't know what to do with it, and eventually it became a casualty of a budget cut/lack of interest by the big corperation. It's sort of sad to think of how my internet experience a few years ago was defined by fairly innovative ideas that were doing pretty good, and now most of them have been taken over and either killed or corrupted beyond redemption. WBS really comes to mind as the only chat room I've ever been able to tolerate, and that was killed not so long ago (taken over by Infoseek alliance or whatever). Even slashdot itself might end up in this category eventually...
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.
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
This is entirely correct. I remember feeling nervous when Webring got swallowed up by the vastly more commercial GC.
WebRing didn't need very much, really. It worked, and worked pretty well. It let ringmasters set up the rings pretty much the way they wanted to: good rings were useful, bad rings were not. Post Yahoo! the rings became much, much less useful, as the Yahoo-borg attempted to corrupt all webrings with its user interface.
Now, I like the Yahoo! UI for a general search directory, but man, it sucks as a page design element. Straightjacketing.
And then I can go on about how All Ring Members Must Now Have a Yahoo! ID Instead of Just an Email Address... bah.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
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.
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.