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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."
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."
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.
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
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
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.