JenniCam Closing After 7+ Years

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JenniCam Closing After 7+ Years

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday December 4, 2003 @09:32PM from the no-longer-refreshing dept.

An anonymous Jenni fan writes "Details are sketchy, but apparently within the past few days, JenniCam has announced that it is closing permanently on New Year's Eve. Jenni Ringley has run the site for over 7 and a half years and was even voted more popular than Linus in a ZDNet poll. Of course, such constant exposure has had its downsides; she has received death threats in the past. Last chance to check out that Slashbox while her life is still online."

32 of 605 comments (clear)

And... by dr_labrat · 2003-12-04 21:33 · Score: 5, Funny

...what better way to say goodby than giving her server a good ole fashioned slashdotting.

--
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
The end of an era... by musingmelpomene · 2003-12-04 21:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

I think this calls for a moment of silence, or something. No, I really mean it. This was one of our first chances to see the true potential of the internet - for good and for bad. It spawned camwhores of all varieties and gave rise to a new kind of voyeurism. Goodbye to a pioneer.
1. Re:The end of an era... by Westacular · 2003-12-04 21:38 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  One can only hope that camwhores everywhere might follow Jenni in this new trend.
2. Re:The end of an era... by Vee+Ecks · 2003-12-04 21:40 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Eh, whatever. Until two minutes ago when I saw this, if I'd thought about who the first girl to get nekkid in front of a webcam was, I'd have thought of her just that way: "Who was that first chick who shat and screwed on camera for all of us?"
  ...and that's exactly how I'll think of her as soon as this thread is over and "jennicam" has once again faded mercifully from my mind.
  A moment of one-handed typing, though, sure, I'll go for that.
3. Re:The end of an era... by SystematicPsycho · 2003-12-04 22:38 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I'll be glad to give it a moment of silence when shows like Big Brother and Survivor are finally gone. That's the kind of voyeurism is spawned.
  --
  
  --
  Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
4. Re: The end of an era... by Black+Parrot · 2003-12-05 02:49 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  > It was amazing to me that people could get so worked up about seeing a fat chick's floppy boobies.
  
  Adjust the aspect ratio, silly.
  
  --
  Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Am I the only one? by sageo · 2003-12-04 21:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

Who didn't know about this site OR care when they heard about it?
1. Re:Am I the only one? by tres · 2003-12-04 22:53 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Ah isn't it great ushering in the next generation? Doesn't it just make you feel old as dirt to hear someone who is not only ignorant of Jennicam, but also indignant of the idea that he should know about it.
  
  I begin to understand the sad forlorn look in their eyes when my parents would wax poetic about something so banal as the A&P grocery stores and I'd indignantly grumble, "who cares?"
  
  I expect now we'll be saying names like Robert Smith or Steven Morrissey and get quizzical looks, "um.. yeah... huh huh... aren't they like, the ice-cream guys or something... huh huh... huh"
  
  Jeez
  
  You whippersnappers, listen up:
  
  Back when I was your age, we didn't have color screens. Back then, a gui was something you pulled out of your nose.
  
  When I was your age, we loaded programs onto our computers using cassette tapes. We waited 20 minutes for the program to load up, and if we were lucky, it ran.
  
  When I was your age, we didn't have C compilers that were free. We had BASIC, and if you were lucky, you had Pascal.
  
  Back when I was your age, a 9800 baud was one thrilling piece of hardware.
  
  We had computers that weighed over 100 pounds.
  
  AND WE WERE GLAD.
  
  --
  Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
2. Re:Am I the only one? by Davak · 2003-12-05 01:07 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  I wondered how old one had to be to get a 3-digit slashdot ID.
  
  Now we know. :)
  
  /Running and ducking
  
  Davak
3. Re:Am I the only one? by AKnightCowboy · 2003-12-05 01:24 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I guess she's faded into insignificance, because all the teenagers who watched her with the hope of seeing her naked have grown up.
  No, they've just watched the Internet evolve into the greatest pornography distribution system the world has ever known. In 1994 it was hard to find any good free porn sites.. 1995 brought the businesses who locked down their porn and blurred it out for guests. Eventually the race to compete for customers brought us to the point where you can now just type in random URLs and get to a hardcore pornography site. Who needs to sit around on Jennicam.com hoping some 30+ year old chick takes her shirt off? God bless the Interweb and smut peddlers.
4. Re:Am I the only one? by Divide+By+Zero · 2003-12-05 01:29 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Baffles me that she's more popular than Linus.
  
  Look at it this way: A(n occasionally naked) girl gets more votes from Internet users than Linus in a popularity contest. I would have been genuinely surprised if Linus had won. [Put your favorite Diebold/election fraud joke here!]
  
  She -was- one of the first people I would consider a "net.celebrity" in that she'd gotten mainstream press coverage for what she was doing on her website. It wasn't a pr0n website by-and-large, although I have seen a few images from what must be early Jennicam that made it look like she was taking requests for nudity. The vast majority of the time I caught it, it was either her at her computer or out of the house or her cat on her computer chair or some crap.
  
  I always saw it as more of a cam-blog, before there was "blogging" as we understand it today. You could peek in and see the new boyfriend or maybe a change she'd made to her furniture or whatever. Mundane, but still something that you checked out anyhow.
  
  I can't say that I'll actively miss it (I haven't seen the site in probably over a year), but it does strike me as an end-of-an-era sort of thing. Jennicam came out in the "frontier" days of the Internet - a time where the general public didn't know what a URL was, before "camwhore" was a word, before the corporate world started to use it as a marketing tool. It was just some chick who put her life on the internet as sort of a diary or exhibitionistic social experiment. In that sense, I am sad to see her site go, because to me it represents that time now gone, and I'm a sap when it comes to that sort of thing.
  
  --
  Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
5. Re:Am I the only one? by mfender9 · 2003-12-05 03:26 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Well, ol' man, back when I was your age, we didn't have monochrome monitors. We had punch cards, card readers and a line printer. Yessir.
  We had to send smoke signals in through a plastic funnel. Our printer was an old man carving output into a tree with a rock.
  We had Fortran, PL1, Assembler and JCL.
  We had Onetran, PL0, and French.
  Try 300 baud thru an acoustical coupler.
  Try making bleep noises down a piece of string through a tin can. 0.5 baud if the winds were favorable.
  The IBM 29 card punch weighed more than [100lbs]
  The Sears WonderBox 1900 was so heavy, it needed a special floor.
end of life, universe and the internet by martin · 2003-12-04 21:38 · Score: 5, Interesting

OK
webcrawler starts to suck
altavista goes static
google has problems with retricting searches (until recently try getting info on baseball in the UK!), bloggers etc
napster goes legit (but available only in the USofA)
MP3.com get bought by C-NEt and all the content 'gets lost'
now Jenni-cam is to be no more

well that's it, I'm off to desert to eat sand, the internet is dead :-)
1. Re:end of life, universe and the internet by tankdilla · 2003-12-04 22:02 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Whoa man, i'd totally forgotten about Webcrawler. Takes me back to high school (about 6 years) and trying to actually search for pr0n. Nowadays pr0n searches for you, here in Sovie....err rather everywhere actually.
  
  --
  -Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
Closing when? by phalse+phace · 2003-12-04 21:40 · Score: 5, Funny

JenniCam has announced that it is closing permanently on New Year's Eve.
Um... I think she'll be closing sooner than that once we get through /.ing her.
I didn't know :-( by dtfinch · 2003-12-04 21:41 · Score: 5, Funny

All this time, I could have had her webcam appear whenever I visited Slashdot. Even the guest gallery (there's also a paid members only gallery) is loaded with full nudity and "playing". Even during the past week. Live news and live porn all in the same place. Too bad it'll be over after this month.
Closing Jennicam? by xeno_gearz · 2003-12-04 21:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

On one hand, I could lament the "loss" of an internet mainstay of whom many of us were aware of. On the other hand, webcams have become so overdone. Every teenage girl and her best friend have one. Consequently, this is played out. So who cares? I'm sure "Jenny" has realized she has better things to do than pose on a webcam.
On the other hand, perhaps Jenny's subscriptions were dropping as creepy men were finding other girls' webcams to ogle. Maybe Jenny realized that her extended 15 minutes of fame are finally up. No disrespect though. She certainly seems to have garnered all the attention she could from a webcam.
Remember the coffee cam? Now that was cool. Wasn't it at MIT?

--
*
troll blacklist. Please mo
1. Re:Closing Jennicam? by Meowing · 2003-12-04 21:48 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Remember the coffee cam? Now that was cool. Wasn't it at MIT?
  Close, sort of. it was at the other Cambridge.
2. Re:Closing Jennicam? by toastyman · 2003-12-05 00:53 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Just a note...
  
  I (believe) that I'm the one who originally coined the term "camwhore". (My original registration of camwhores.com/camwhore.com predates any mention of it in google/usenet/archive.org, and the oldest web archive I can find is an IRC log of me).
  
  The word "camwhores" itself was sort of a pun... Sure it had the sexual connotations, but we all were talking about how people who like the attention their webcams gave them struggled with the moral impact of showing random strangers on the internet more of their intimate life than most of their friends have seen. whore n. A person considered as having compromised principles for personal gain.
  
  A whole industry of webcam portals, from Jennicam to Stile Project's old cam portals back in the 90's(which evolved into camwhores.com) to the huge sites that are out there now have really changed a lot of how porn works. You didn't have to sell your soul and have sex with strangers in a studio to play with your exhibitionist side. You don't have to make a cheesy home video and try to get your friends to watch it. The live nature of webcam porn lets the viewer interact with the person in front of the cam directly. And this isn't just a fringe minority either, do you really think the hundreds of thousands of webcams sold are just used to videoconference with grandma? When Gateway bundled a webcam with most of their college-geared desktops a year or so ago, the number of applicants on our site alone doubled.
  
  However, the reason for this whole post(not just because of my personal involvement with the word)... The whole "Camwhores" scene is NOT about underage girls. All the major webcam portals, adult hosting sites, one-on-one show sites, and everyone else are really really strict about age verification and policing their content.
  
  The last thing we need is Ashcroft running TV ads saying that webcams fund terrorists. :)
  
  Anyway, Jenni was surely one of the big pioneers of this whole thing, and I wish her the best.
Well that sucks... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-04 21:45 · Score: 5, Funny

...but there's always DarlCam.
Jenni is just maturing, is all by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · 2003-12-04 21:48 · Score: 5, Funny

JenniCam isn't closing, it's just changing name to reflect the fact that Jenni is getting ripe. Here are the official domain names she'll use in the future:
- PreggyCam.org - MommyCam.org - MenopausyCam.org - NannyCam.org - CoffinCam.org

--
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Am I the only one ... by Unleashd · 2003-12-04 21:48 · Score: 5, Funny

that saw this article and started to hear Forest yell "Don't go Jennay"

--
We don't need no stinking sig!
Re:too old? by xeniten · 2003-12-04 21:54 · Score: 5, Funny

Jennie is NOT a cam girl!!!

Jennie used the camera as a medium of self expression and speech, a means and method of recording her life for all to see on the internet. Jenniecam really was purely a social experiment.

She will be greatly missed.

--
Romana: "How did you know?" Doctor Who: "Ah, well, knowing is easy. Everyone does THAT ad nauseum. I just sort of hope"
Re:Jumped the Shark... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-04 22:08 · Score: 5, Funny

From the sound of it, I'd say more like four times in the last half-hour. Man, you are seriously creeping me out here...
Much more interesting camgirl by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-04 22:08 · Score: 5, Informative

While Jenni is mildly attractive, there are far more sexier and interesting camgirls out there. My favourite at the moment is Mercatur, a mid-twenties web designer.

Unlike Jenni, she is actually an interesting writer. She tackles wide-ranging and amusing subjects like why girls should only sleep with computer geeks (link) to advice on how to give good head to a guy (link).

She is also extremely cute. And single, I believe ;-)
1. Re:Much more interesting camgirl by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-04 22:21 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Uhhh..Are you on drugs? That woman has a face like a Playstation controller.
2. Re:Much more interesting camgirl by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-04 22:26 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  A true geek, relating a girl's features to a computer component.
  Although I did see a girl today whose chest was as flat as the underside of a motherboard.
3. Re:Much more interesting camgirl by DeltaSigma · 2003-12-04 23:24 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Anwering my own question: She is "...currently a circulation manager at a publishing house."
  After seeing her "got root?" T-Shirt I just HAD to know what system she's running. According to her faq she uses "...Photoshop 5.5, ImageReady for compression, notepad for html..."
  Photoshop and Imageready, fine, you need Windows for that. Fair enough. Most professional web designers I know are stuck with windows (though the clever ones use crossover office), whether they want to or not.
  However, no self respecting linux geek would resist the chance to make it known to the public that they like either emacs or vim. I mean, notepad? Yeah, sure, I'm happy she can throw some markup together, nevermind the fact that she's not adhering to standards, it's still better than the stuff WYSIWYG editors spew out their little iso-8859-1 orifaces.
  ...and you know what, I wouldn't even be so upset about all this if it wasn't for your misrepresentation of her.
  I mean, sure she has an appreciable interest in technology, built her desktops herself, does manage her own page, likes geeks. But fair warning to other web designers: if you want something pretty to look at whilst discussing the lack of standards in web content, or the lack of design within sites, I have the suspicion that you might be disappointed.
  ...though I'd very truly love to be proven wrong about her.
4. Re:Much more interesting camgirl by ScottSpeaks! · 2003-12-05 00:39 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  ...advice on how to give good head to a guy...
  "Don't vary your speed"?!? {shakes head sadly}
  Going to another woman for advice on how to give good head is like the blind leading the blind. Ask a gay man for tips, ladies. We actually know of what we speak. :)
Continental Drift by Pete · 2003-12-05 00:48 · Score: 5, Funny

Thank god we've still got the thrill-a-minute continental drift cam.

Much more intelligent. And more exciting.

:-)
Pete.
Interview by lxs · 2003-12-05 00:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

Any chance of a slashdot interview by way of a farewell?
I've Got It! I've Got It! by tds67 · 2003-12-05 01:30 · Score: 5, Funny

Jenni, I've got your number,
I need to make you mine,
Jenni, don't change your number:
64.141.14.2 (Chorus) 64.141.14.2!