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

Alternative webring systems

[Harumuka]

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.

Webring "communities"?

[hingleton]

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."

Salon anyone?

[gkbarr]

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.

I remember...

[PlaysWithMatches]

... when webrings were pretty big, a few years back. Every page you went to on any subject seemed to have a "This site is a member of such-and-such ring" box on it somewhere. I even joined a webring myself, back when I had a web site about the Euphoria programming language.

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:

1. Most webrings were poorly maintained, at best, and filled with broken links.
2. Sites like Google, the Netscape "What's Related" menu, etc. made webrings obsolete. Why bother with a webring when your favorite search engine had a feature to show you related pages, and most browsers had this built in?
3. Why the hell do we need 50 Linux webrings?! "Linux Users," "Linux Lovers," "The *Official* Linux Webring," "The Unofficial Linux Webring" ... sheesh!

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."

Re:I remember...

[evand]

I think the major problem with webrings is that they weren't useful. I very rarely used them for navigation; even if I was interested in Topic X, who says that the Next Site on Topic X's webring would be any good?

In general, if I was interested enough in the genre of site to be on a site regarding it long enough to see the "Member of Topic X Webring" navigation item, I probably knew most of the good sites anyway.

Re:I remember...

[Tony.Tang]

I agree with this post. The utility of the webring was quite low, and has been made even less useful of late.

One of the reasons may be that "back in the day", the ratio of "good sites on a topic" to "how easy it is to find them" was quite low. Today, the ratio is a lot higher -- it's easier to find more sites on a given topic both because there's more of them (chaos breeds goodness), and because there's a lot more investment into things on the web (consider news sites, for example).

I was involved in a few webrings back in the day, but like the original poster said, it was more of a "belonging" thing than anything else. Being in a webring meant being in a community. One of the big ones of the day was diary-l (I don't know what happened to it). The webring also had a mailing-list -- and it was folks in the mailing-list that probably had the best time -- after all, that encouraged more interaction than anything else, and made people feel part of a group.

It was an interesting social phenomenon, I think. In a place where there was considerably less social interaction, webrings came to be to try to bring some order to the chaos, and make people feel like they were part of a community. It was, of course, essentially an illusion (or a clickable link, at best), and I think webrings were one illusion that became evident by virtue of their being useless.

Can't wait for LoTR...

[Soko]

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

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:Yahoo!'s intent was malicious anyway

[shrdlu]

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.

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.

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.

Terms of the deal

[Russ Nelson]

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

Just remember the "alternatives":

[Ars-Fartsica]

...Microsoft and AOL. Gee sorry Yahoo had to let all of you down and try to run a business.

Even with some of their more unfortunate antics, they have still been a more user-oriented network than either AOL or MSN.

Re:Yahoo!'s intent was malicious anyway

[egomaniac]

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.

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?

Re:Yahoo!'s intent was malicious anyway

[hearingaid]

GeoCities bought Webring, not Yahoo. Yahoo bought GeoCities some months later, and ended up getting Webring basically by accident.

This is entirely correct. I remember feeling nervous when Webring got swallowed up by the vastly more commercial GC.

The integration was killed quickly and quietly when it became apparent that they had nothing going for them but some half-assed Perl scripts.

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.

Re:Yahoo!'s intent was malicious anyway

[edhall]

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.

-Ed