Slashdot Mirror
Cyber-Soap Returns From The Dead
An anonymous reader submits "Back in 1995, an experimental "cyber-soap" had a wildly successful launch. With over a million page hits a day (an almost unheard-of amount of traffic at the time), The Spot was named "Cool Site of the Year" in 1995, and by all appearances was a huge success.
As was the case for many projects of the time, though, by 1997 The Spot was gone, another victim of the dot-com bust. However, unlike other dot-com projects, The Spot has been given new life, un der new ownership, and was relaunched in March. Can the Spot, a unique blend of soap opera, blog, and reality show, survive this time around, or is it doomed to end up back in the graveyard of failed websites in which it was first buried seven years ago?"
The way Americans love their reality entertainment, it'll soar in theory. However, I doubt it goes far for one simple reason: nobody will have heard of it. Can't beat American Idol if nobody knows about it.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
I think it's pretty obvious why this site died a few years back. Just remember that history is destined to repeat itself.
-- 42 --
by 1997 The Spot was gone, another victim of the dot-com bust.
The dot-com bust in 1997? Huh?
Love them hype-journalism phrases. "Dot-com bubble" and "dot-com bust" are used to explain every negative event in technology.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
"..By reading these words, you are already part of the story. How involved you want to become is completely up to you...
Yep. *Closes browser*
- Mad, ingenous - they've both left you puzzled -
Let's face it, with the explosion of blogs on the web these days... people seem to love reading about people they barely know.
So, take beautiful actors and inject scripted situations... and away they go. I'm sure this'll spin into something this go around. 1995 was just a little too early.
Dear 1995,
We do not want this. Please take it back. We have enough reality TV shows as it is, who in the HELL would want them on the internet???
Signed,
Conserned Slashdotter.
PS, please tell Al Gore "Thanks for your brilliant contributions".
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Particularly poor idea. My good friend is a program exec at NBC, and they're considering dropping soaps all together (not in the least due to they're only averaging 2.5 Nielsen points a week for all their soaps).
In addition, soap opera viewership is 89% female. American females average 24 minutes a day online, men average 42. Essentially, they're transferring a female product to a male medium.
I knew with Google, they'd try to resussicate the entire kit and kaboodle again -- people are dumb enough to buy anything twice.
Excuse me while I get my Marimba Castinet push technology and I'll pay for it with my Flooz.
Dotcom Bust in 1997? Even the Boom was just getting started. Find another copout for failure, instead of inventing fantasy macroeconomics.
--
make install -not war
Just because the kind of people who like that sort of thing would rather watch a reality soap on TV than read a webpage.
Soap operas and "reality" tv are the most worthless forms of entertainment. People should spend their time one anything else at all IMHO. Atleast with IRC and D&D you are interacting with other people.
"Can the Spot, a unique blend of soap opera, blog, and reality show, survive this time around, or is it doomed to end up back in the graveyard of failed websites in which it was first buried seven years ago?"
YES! NO! [flips coin] Ummm...what is it when the coin lands on edge?
I must not be much into TV. I immediately thought about bars of soap (you know, the stuff you wash with?) with embedded microchips.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Contents of a normal soap-opera:
1. relationships are formed
2. couples break up
3. people start to hate eachother
4. people start to love eachother
5. someone dies
6. someone are born
contents of the soap-opera i want to see:
1. Operating systems are installed
2. Operating systems are removed
3. Some company sues another company
4. Some company donates money to another company
5. Software is abandoned
6. New software projects are started.
Why cant anyone make something like this?
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
No, because it's a soap. People who watch soaps are spods that shouldn't be using the internet. They really need to get a life and stop immersing themselves in alternative realities.
Sorry it's a short post, I have to get back to Everquest.
When they go write stuff such as "OMG! I was actually recognized by a Spot fan at work yesterday! It was so surreal and uber awesome" or "Anyway, gotta hit the bucks right now for a Tazo Chai latte! Make it a super day!". Puhleaze, real people (it's supposed to be a reality soap, right?) to whom we are supposed to relate do not talk like a textwriter trying to emulate the way people who are like 20 years younger are talking. And the acting shown in the "Spot Moments" is just awful. I want no part of this crap.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
...I come to Slashdot. It's like a soap opera without the soap.
Didn't that sound like a freaking plug to you? An anonymous reader submitted it to a website that gets thousands of hits a day. Nice promotional spot there, buddy.
Looks like this one's gonna be a non-RTFA'er for me!
In 1997 we were still flying high (I was anyway). Easy to find jobs that paid scads of money.
I thought the bust was more like 2000-2002. I was laid off in from my comfy biotech position in mid 2001, when the only aspect of the company that had any remote potential was eaten by a bigger fish. Something like 85% of the employees laid off.
Does this anonymous poster have a short-term memory?
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
As for the actual content...
Well it's nothing unusual compared to what I have seen in my own blogging experience. I don't know why I'd bother with this site, there are other sites with more people and more interesting people out there.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Let's Slashdot this thing before it has a chance to take off!
All together now...
*click* *click* *click* *click* *click*
The coolest voice ever.
I'd watch a soap opera with a good troll....
The Squat...
Tell the truth, this could probably be successful. It's an extension of a traditional idea that has been moved to a medium which is actually superior for delivering that kind of content.
People already lap up blogs and celebrity websites, and watch webcams with frightening regularity, and soap fans already have a large stream of spolier mags and dedicated websites. Now that the dotcom boom has passed, it's more likely that someone will actually generate a decent way to generate money from the system rather than think "it's on the intarweb! It must be profitable".
The only real issue I see with this is there is real competition with actual weblogs and "legitimate" celebrity webpages, where the content is free and more "true to life".
That's cyber-soap? Here's cyber-soap !!!
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
As if inane, trite blogs/boards/et al., weren't enough - now we're going to get hordes of semi-produced/casted business versions...
I spent all of 5 minutes browsing the spot, and it was blatantly obvoius that most "post" we're little more than product placements. "Amanda" "hears" about how [swedish retailer of semi-disposable furniture]'s got some great(!) stuff - going there now!! The "Kai" character takes up surfing - i.e. goes to a named and praised surf shop (link+logo included of course), the guys at shop X we're awesome!!
So, this is apparantly business' take du jour, on the latest mainstream trends online - we get the likes of the spot and the subservient-chicken. Viral marketing ey? Well, let's start spraying some virus-killing poison then.
I'm so reminded of the ad agency in Gibson's Pattern Recognition it's not even funny.
Wherever and whenever real people try (and do) find each other in - to them - meaningful ways, you can be goddammed sure that advertising leeches will find a way to nestle their way in between them. Gotta get yer earnin' on.
668.5
NO No No No No No No. This type of juvenile pap is the reason so many sites failed in the first place.
"Hey, let's put up a website and make a million dollars."
There is NO draw here... now if they take off all their clothes, and charge by the month.....
Excerpt:
[The Opportunity Services Group]'s internships for 1.0ers will be set at our online social networking service, code-named Go_Ogle.
The earliest internships will focus on Go_Ogle's leading-edge technology for searching social networks, which is also a 'must-use' in corporate turnarounds.
We will market our interns, suppliers, intern employers, Go_Ogle and OSG through profitable comedy programming, online and on television. The initial television program -- The Secret Life of Windows of Opportunity -- will center on the comic plight of OSG's CEO: like many men, he wants to succeed in my professional life and also be the best boyfriend, and later husband and father, he can. In his case, achieving this balance:
- is complicated by the magnitude of the stakes in the early CLLCS [i.e. Customized Lifelong Learning and Career Services] market.
- will be further complicated by OSG-affiliated actresses and models, who will routinely employ their beauty, their charms more generally, and the latest innovations from the burgeoning sciences of enhancing desirability, to make a favorable impression on him.
The online complement to the sitcom -- Windows of Opportunity -- will chronicle, among other storylines, the variations on the CEO's experience that will characterize interactions between OSG-affiliated actors/actresses/models and OSG employees at all levels of the company.Is Value America (www.va.com) a proud sponsor of The Spot? Or just the closed captioning?
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
hopefully this will give some of the trolls something else to do.
but, to remain on topic, it doesnt even seem much of a question of whether or not the show will succeed, its more of the same question every other "Reality Show" faces:
who REALLY gives a shit?
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
The reason the Spot was interesting at all when it began was that it was not labelled for what it was (a corporate sham), and at the time, it seemed amazing that anyone would post anything of a intimate nature on the web.
I remember a friend mocking me at the time for thinking anyone would post such stuff for real. But now, with a million blogs/webcams where people post insanely personal information/images for no financial gain, I feel somewhat vindicated...
it died in '99 .com bust
I think that's why they said
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.thespot.com
Back in 1995, the Internet was young, and many of us weren't sure whether The Spot was for real or not. Lots of people I knew thought it might be real people living in a real house. Today we all know instantly that it's a fake, and the spell is broken.
It won't work this time round. I'll watch The O.C.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
it was going to fail miserably but now that it is on slashdot it will either be slashdotted to death or suceed through this free advertising
The Spot was one of the first in and first out of the Dot-com era...
Must've been exactly that, since I've never heard of it before.
Then again, I was only a baby then.
Just curious, exactly which Slashdot readers is this catering too? Even our female /dotters have shown themselves to be relatively immune from tripe like this.
/plurvert
It's not even Sunday yet.
God, I can't wait to see what's left over for tommorow.
So, most slashdotters believe this cyber-soap will fail.
Where can i buy stock in this company?!
Anybody remember 'Romp'?
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
I misread thespot for thespark and thought, "YES, Stinky Meat Project is back! Wooo!"
:)
Oops.
"Calculon? I thought you were in a coma!"
"That's what I wanted you to think with your soft, human brain."
"Hey dawgs! A major shout out to ZJ Boarding House where owner Mikke (with two k's!) and manager Matt hooked us Spotmates up with some 411 on buying the "right" surf boards. (See my video!) Yep, I've decided to take up surfing, and heard word on the street that ZJ Boarding House was the place to go!! They were awesome. I love it here on Main Street!
/. really want to read crap like this ? Concept aside does this story and the way that it is done appeal to anyone here at all. The shit that these people come out with is so contrived and cliched that it bends my mind. The only people (I hope) who could possibly appreciate such stylized phony crap like this are people who do not have the attention span to devote time and energy into reading this site.
Yo, Matt - man, thank you so much for the help. Reed and I are gonna seriously take you up on lessons, dude. And PS: we wanna hear some of your tunes!
Lates,
Kai"
Do people on
I mean who the fuck are their target market ? Insecure wannabe socialite teenage girls who are not allowed go out and have a real social life ? Scientologists who watch will and grace ? I mean where do they expect this to go ? I think this sort of thing could work if it were based around some sort of subculture and not a bunch of paper mache stereotypes.
_________________________________________________
I used to read the Spot religiously at work back when it first popped up. Dare I say I actually had the hots for one of the characters, and that I was seriously upset when she "died?" It wasn't that well done, as I recall, but then it was breaking new ground, so it didn't really have to be that well done to be effective. I'll probably give this a few looks, but I suspect it'll take too much effort to get involved a 2nd time.
.nosig
The police still can act to frame a guilty man. Especially, in L.A.
This article brought back fond memories. The Spot was one of the first websites I ever visited on a daily or more basis. I had escaped the Compuserve prison and was out on the wild, wild web for the first time. I enjoyed it then. I don't think I want to go see it again, somethings are better kept in the past.
Debian unstable Registered Linux user #226117
My blog:Real Health
We can only hope.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I used to love reading about real caffeine fiends in my neighborhood (Noe Valley, San Francisco), writing and acting out a soap online. sfblend.com went offline back in '97, but the old episodes appear to be archived at http://kenlaws.tv/sfblend/. (Thanks, google.)
That it only got double digits by the time i saw it!
Sincerely, Czephyr
I was a huge fan of the Spot back in '95 and '96. Got really tired of it by the time it was killed off. Loved the dog, but not the too sexy for the dot com bubble silly Cyberian adjective.
If memory serves, when it was thankfully put to sleep, it was because the production company was bought out by AOL which consolidated staff. AOL was heading in an entirely different direction.
The Spot is probably why I can't abide shows like Survivor, The Bachelor, etc. I burned out hard on this stuff.
I checked out the new site/same as the old site, with all new faces but one. They still take themselves far too seriously. It was a great concept 10 years ago. Now it's just lame. Please, God, make it go away.
Maybe I'm just old, in relative terms. I'm 40 now.
NOPE. The writing isn't there (again), and there is some revisionist history going on. The ORIGINAL Spot was one of the first things i got to point a browser at...and it was great till the REAL dot commers (american cybercast) bought them out, then it went downhill. This is just a rehash of the AMCY days. Some of the ORIGINAL people can be found at www.crlight.com . "Can the Spot, a unique blend of soap opera, blog, and reality show, survive this time around, or is it doomed to end up back in the graveyard of failed websites in which it was first buried seven years ago?"
typing with one hand is a lot slower than i thought...
=^)
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
The UK has its very own online soap. Chalk Hill Lives is filmed in my dear own Portsmouth (Yes, home of the paedophile riots).
It's truly awful with some shockingly bad acting but, if that's your thing.
Chalk Hill Lives
As was the case for many projects of the time, though, by 1997 The Spot was gone, another victim of the dot-com bust.
The 'dot.com' bust occured several years after 1997. It sounds like the site was devoured in the dot.com boom, instead. Was it taken over by a conglomerate, similar to the way a number of good independent sites and companies were 'taken over', i.e. the handover.net thing?
resigned
I remember The Spot! And back in those days, we had dial up internet access at my work.. with a caching proxy server.. and I used to use the front page of The Spot to see if the caching was working right..
Clear out your browser cache, request thespot.com, and see how fast it came up.. fast as you like? The proxy server's doing its thing! Slower than a dog? Something's broke in the computer room..
Ah, those were the days *sighs*
Whether it'll be successful this time round? Meh, anyone's guess.. I can't even remember why it shut down the first time.. how are they gonna make any money?
As if there aren't enough trendy caucasian people on broadcast TV, now I can watch them on my computer too. Oh Boy! I can't wait!
I remember reading The Spot when it first came out. We were all fascinated by it, even though we could tell it was a little bit unreal.
The reason it failed was that it was a complete set-up. None of the characters existed, not even in the sense of an actor/author playing the part. One person wrote all the various blogs; he and a couple other people plotted out the storylines in advance.
Once that broke, interest in the site dropped like a rock.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Still, the one thing that sticks in my memory about The Spot was their site design. It was somewhat similar to what they have now but a bit more primitive. Same idea, though. Back then, though, sites were full of BLINK tags, purple links on pages with grey backgrounds, and full of frames. The Spot's site actually looked nice! It was a breath of fresh air. I remember trying to make my own personal home page look like it.
The fact that the site looked so professionally done back in the day when nearly all sites were clearly slapped together by design-challenged geeks probably should have clued me in that it wasn't as real as they claimed it was.
Hrm. Just another random trip down memory lane!
Wow... Though this whole thing probably sounds very unlike Slashdot to report on in the first place, I do remember "The Spot" and how it was a pretty fresh, original idea at the time.
If I recall correctly though, one of the things that detracted from it was when it became pretty much public knowledge that the whole thing was fictional. Part of the early fascination of "The Spot" was the belief that you were actually reading about the daily lives and adventures of real individuals (hence, the "reality TV" type concept, long before it existed on TV!).
I seem to remember the advertising agency running it really wanting to remain hidden as long as possible, to keep readers believing they really were reading a site hosted by the 20-somethings writing their life stories online. When the truth came out (partly due to magazines like Wired spilling the beans), it just failed to interest me any more.
At least I'm pretty sure it is. "Net Slaves" by Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin chronicles some of the many people who were burned by the Internet and technological boom days - you remember, back when it was the best thing since sliced bread, everyone wanted a part of it and HTML "programmers" could earn $US85/hour?
Basically it's divided into chapters based on sterotype - Garbagemen (support techs, low-level coders etc), Cops & Streetwalks, Social Workers (think AOL chatroom moderaters, online chat hosts etc), Fry Cooks (overworked project managers), Priests & Madmen ("cyber-pundits" - basically anyone with half a grip on The Internet and the ability to overmarket their ideas) and lots more.
One of the stories told is about SoHo Nights - the Web's first online soap. It's mainly centered around a guy called Kellner, who together with Mira (fake names, naturally) first came up with and marketted the concept to Mira's company.
Essentially Kellner had the idea, didn't think it was a good one, but was talked into it by Mira, who recked she could sell it as an idea to her company.
At the end of it all Kellner is basically broke and berefit of any credit for the idea or the work he put into it. Mira, whose only contribution was marketing hype needed to sell the idea to her company, sold it as her OWN idea (along with another person at the same company by the name of Jullian). Kellner was left several thousand dollars out of pocket, the promised contract had not materialised (and why would it - the financing company thought it was all Mira's idea) and worst of all his BEST idea, much more successful than SoHo Nights (though it did eventually fail), was stolen from his laptop by yet another woman, put up to the deed by Mira and Jullian.
From the epilogue:
"Kellner never received another check from DBLY and was thrown out of his loft at the end of September. His American Express account terminated, Kellner's debt was referred to a collection agent. SoHo Nights survived as a ghost of a site until December of 1996, when Kellner's ISP took it down for nonpayment. Kellner now lives in Flushing, Queens, with his parents, who contantly nag him to "get a decent job and get married". Kellner has given up on beocming a Web entrepreneur, although he still gets the itch occasionally when he's not trying to get back into the video production business. As for Kellner's former partners, they all lost their jobs in late 1997 whne DBLY Interactive cancelled The Webmaster [the Great Idea stolen from Kellner's laptop]. Despite the fanfare and more than $300k in development money from Fox, the site failed to attract more than 30000 page veiews a day. This was a turn of events which thrilled Kellner to no end, although the whole experience of having his ideas stolen till left him with a queasy feeling, like he had been ambushed by a gang of mental succubae."
I picked up Net Slaves for about $AU2 in a second hand book store. It's not the greatest book in the world but it certainly does have some interesting accounts of various people who were fucked over by the technology craze of the late 90's. It even has the sad luck story of Ken Hamidi (Ken Hussein in the book) and how he came to found FACEIntel.
Janie took my gun...
Misread the headline again. I was hoping that with the return of cyber-soap, some of the people around here might start taking baths.
Cyber-Soap? ;-)
Did anyone else expect a story about hygiene products for geeks?
Yeah, the Soap calls itself "reality"...with gorgeous chick and dudes with 8-day beards.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If this was actually THE SPOT given creds in this thread, I'd be joyous and happy (I used to love that site back in 95/96) but as it stands, the VERY same people that caused the downfall and destruction of the Spot back in in 1997, are now back and trying to purely make $$$ out of this property -- the original creators are not only not involved, but can't be too happy with the current travesty that barely has the URL in common with the original.
:-)
:-)
Submitted, of course, by an 'anonymous reader', which is the normal M.O. for the people behind Spot2004 -- namely ignoring continuity, alienating the fans, and hiding behind lies of claiming they are not involved. Now, judging by the overly negative comments here, I'd say that they aren't doing too good a job finding new fans - I guess they shouldn't have pissed away their old fansbase, now should they
The 'anonymous' contributor claims that the Spot originally sunk as "another victim of the dot-com bust. ", when nothing could be further from the truth. The dot-com bust had nothing to do with it, but rather greedy and incompetent corporate leadership, executives recruited from film & TV with absolutely no clue about the nascent internet culture, and (after booting the original writers and creators of TheSpot) a creative crew that couldn't write their way out of a barrel. Come to think of it, those were the problems of every other dot-com, and the reason why they busted, I guess
So, overall, the site does not deserve a visit, or even a casual glance, in the state that it has been 'revived', which, judging by te coments on here, won't really happen (except for the Slashdot spike they might get).
Kinda funny that they submitted to slashdot, in hopes of getting hits (and taking those to the bank) pretty much on the eve of their investor's stopping the flow of $$$ (their 90 days are coming to an end)
Could you possibly be any more mis-informed? I would suggest at least having hald a clue before you spout off nonsense. The Spot had at least 5 writers, some of which did write multiple characters (you know, I don't think the dog needed its own writer), and the characters/actors/authors behind the characters were quite real. I know, since I met most of them (either actors, or the authors).
Interest in the site did not drop because it was 'discovered' it was fake (I guess you never visited the 'Behind the Scenes' part of the site, which made no secret of that), but rather because in its last year it was taken over (sorry, re-imagined) under a corporate restructing, by actual soap-opera writers that wanted to give the site more dimension'. Combine that with the new leadership having kicked out the original authors and creators, and having 'mainstreamed' the site (i.e. dumbed it down), and it became a slow-motion trainwreck, until a fan boycott shuttered the site down in late 1997.
What dropped it was corporate cluelessness and greedy stupidity.
Where the heck do you get such stupid ideas as 'it was scripted by ONE person?? How utterly stupid!
If you want to see what the people that were actually behind it are up to now, go to http://www.crlight.com. If you want to see what the people that contributed to its original downfall are up to, you can alternate between the unemployment line, or the new Spot site (soon to *be* the unemployment line)
It's spelled 'definitely', ass-loader.
Blatant karma whoring ahead. See what The Spot was like Wayback When.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
What a monumental waste of time, effort and bandwidth!
Interesting. Any links to the interwiew (now that we've put my 'tragedy-of-the-common-plugs' rant/spectacle behind us ;) )?
Along those lines, whatcha think of No Maps For These Territories - pretty good docu/interview with Mr. Gibson, huh? Fascinating author, great zeitgeist, even greater/unique style of writing.
And way OT: as you obviously know more about Gibson than me, any ideas on what he's writing now?
668.5
Because it was posted on the site.
Which leads to some interesting "all Cretans are liars"-class of questions. I choose to believe that the site is a complete piece of shit and to get my entertainment elsewhere.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Unfortunately for you, devphil, it was never posted on the site. I would know, you know.
Unless you can provide a nice cozy URL indicating what you claim.
As to getting your information elsewhere, and what you feel about the site - that's fine, it's your right to have a personal taste and preferences. Besides the fact that you currently have not other option than to get your entertainment elsewhere, since The Spot has been unavailable since 1997 (I don't count the current incarnation as a valid replacement).
All I'm saying is "get your facts right", seeing as how you haven't, so far.
You have not offered proof either, only unsubstantiated claims. I haven't looked at the site since 1997, so I neither know nor care what's happened to it since. Maybe the Wayback Machine has copies of the original, but I have better things to do.
Give up, dude; I still don't believe a word you've said, despite the supercilious tone. And I don't feel the need to make you believe me, so if you don't, you don't. Plonk you go into the killfile.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
ietst
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe