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The Greatest Defunct Websites and Dotcom Disasters
NotableCathy writes "CNet has an interesting retrospective write-up documenting the most notable dotcom disasters and now-defunct Websites that were massive in their day, detailing what happened to them and what they led to. Nupedia didn't escape a slating (remember Larry Sanger's memoir?), or indeed Beenz, whose founder and CEO once said 'would become the universal currency, supplanting all others,' according to The Register seven years ago."
I remember the Pets.com sock-puppet.
Then I remember a commercial for "Bar None" credit, where an astoundingly similar sock-puppet declares "because everyone deserves a second chance".
I have no idea if that was intentional or not, but it still makes me laugh to this day.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
I know that Google took it over and still makes Usenet content searchable, but a part of me pines for the simple days when it was Usenet that contained the useful technical information we needed, and when Dejanews was the best way to get to it.
Anyway, the founder wrote a book.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I miss clubcastlive.com - it had live webcasts of bands at various clubs in Austin, TX. Shortly after they appeared on one of the morning TV news programs, they vanished from the web - and the domain eventually got snagged by a squatter.
I think bandwidth costs ate them alive - they streamed in 112 kbps MP3. I managed to snag a few shows before they went Tango Uniform.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I'm surprised CNet't not defunct. So many parts of their sites are very hard to look at, including this one. It's a shame because I always felt they had such potential, but I really can't browse their sites. It's still hard to understand why CBS valued them so high with their purchase.
Developers: We can use your help.
wbs.net. It was a pretty lively community.
I have yet to find another web based chatting site which was as well laid out and provided the right balance of services.
ABC/Go network can DIAF.
What sites do you miss?
Where the heck is mp3.com, the bright, shining, and defunct future of music distribution? I still have probably a thousand of free MP3s of cool bands I found through that site.
AdCritic.com it was one of the best internet sites for getting all the lastest (and funniest) commericals from around the world. I remember when they closed down their site, they just got to big too fast and couldn't support themselves anymore... too bad, it was definatly one of the best.
http://www.theindustrystandard.com/article/0,1902,14183,00.html $35 million from investors, and a $10 million launch party featuring acts like The Who, The Dixie Chicks, Kiss, and Brian Setzer. All this for a streaming video service that never worked so at demos they used a custom front end for Windows Media Services.
Well, one of the guys who made millions in the dot com boom is now making sure there are no more 9/11 disasters by writing books on terrorism: Craig Winn of ValueAmerica.
Read dot.bomb by David Kuo - a very interesting insider look into what all went wrong in a typical dot.com company.
How was that a disaster? The woman made a shit-load of money and got a shit-load of attention for no work.
The cake is a pie
A daily fix of news about crime and criminal justice delivered with a sense of humor. You can look through the old ones using the wayback machine. It's a little like what thesmokinggun would have been with real editors and reporters. They went under around 2002 but it used to be one of my daily browsing spots.
That and our own nofuncharlie, which went under not because of lack of funding (there never was any in the first place), but because we let some domain-snatchers grab the domain out from under us....
No-one ever mentions Wireplay.
When that first started it was, in my opinion, the best online gaming service available. For those who don't know you paid for a connection direct to their servers, not the internet, which made it the fastest gaming experience available in the pre broadband era.
There were gaming leagues, prizes, admins/judges for all games,and the chatroom system was excellent. I don't think their chatroom system has ever been bettered in fact.
All my best gaming memories come from my time as a Wireplay member. I even made skins for lots of clans who played in the leagues.
There was sort of informal feel to the place too, The staff had a webcam in their office that let you watch them work, and they had a log that they wrote whatever came to mind in, who was off sick, what they'd got up to at the weekend, anything.
I don't recall who bought them out, but sometime during the boom they got taken over, and everything turned to shit, somost of the people I knew quit and moved over to barrysworld leagues. I left shortly after the new owner assraped the chatroom system and wrecked its charm.
Now I find that it exists as some sort of free affair, but it's not the same.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
But before wikipedia, there was everything2. Everything2 could have been what wikipedia is now, but CmdrTaco's poor programming and database skills left it unscalable and slow as fuck (much like slashdot, but without Anover.net/VA Linux/SourceForge cash to throw hardware at the problem).
I recall the early lycos search business model -- you'd get 40 or free searches, then a subscription was 'required' (not really, but it was supposed to be required). I can specifically recall goofing off in my IT hardware support role searching and downloading DOOM *.wad files for late night fraggage. There was no /. then, sadly, there was only DOOM and Efnet.
Altavista seemed to get replaced by google, in rather short order. I can't recall a specific reason I stopped using it, unless it was related to the repeated sale/reorg of DEC -> Compaq -> HP. I remember the news spreading about altavista hacked in '97 and '01 (the pr0n).
Maybe I'll use that webcrawler search thingy to look this stuff up. Maybe I should go back to work instead.
Likely a company name you have never heard of, but another sunken testement to the Dot com bubble burst.
Circadence started as a small online games developer (VR-1) with well under a hundred employee and in a very short time grew to just under 500 people, millions of dollars of deployed hardware at 20+ network backbone nodes, a 24 hour NOC, 4 full time customer service people (each making 40k+) all without having a single customer. During this growth, the only money making arm of the company (the games development section) was sold off for additional capital.
Circadence was going to revolutionize e-commerce by speeding up vender to backbone node communication through packet manipulation. (Thus all the deployed hardware). No more static image caching for them, they could deliver dynamic shopping pages to the customer as much as.... 5-10% faster.... Wait. (To give some credit, the speed improvements would have been better if the projected e-commerce boom started to congest the internet, unfortunately that also never happened)
The first layoff went from 400+ employees down to 130 or so and was couched in terms of a company wide meeting in both an upper and lower conference rooms. The lower conference room got the talk and were walked out the door en masse and then escorted back one by one to get personal possessions. The upper conference room was told to go home for the day and to come in tomorrow for business as usual.
A couple months later was the next round of layoffs, which took the company down to 11.
All those millions of dollars of network gear and servers showed up on trucks to be auctioned off at pennies on the dollar. An entire building worth of computers, office furniture, desk detritus, everything either went into dumpsters or boxes (which later went into dumpsters), or was also auctioned off.
Millions and millions of investor capital spent all for nothing. I wanted to cry as I watch everything being thrown out, boxed up and disassembled. The beautiful NOC where I watched the events of 9-11 for half a day in shock was cold, dark, and in pieces... as was the hopes and dreams of the rest of the company.
Maybe it's that the UK is too far away or that the writer doesn't get it personally. "Web site that sold groceries " was never the business model. They did that, but to paraphrase JFK "not because it's easy, but because it's hard". Once you can perfect getting fresh peaches delivered via an Internet order, everything else is easy.
They were a tiered distribution company. They would have become a combination of Wal-Mart without the storefronts and UPS. Their two edges were
1) dis intermediate all the retail outlets that all sell the same things. The profit margin in groceries is razor thin (again, they did the hard thing first). Eliminate the stores and employees, replace them with largely automated warehouses and drivers and you change the entire profit dynamic. Walmart.com and vons.com don't get this benefit since they still have to support physical storefronts. Amazon gets this benefit and does pretty well. People have figured out by now that Amazon isn't just an internet bookstore, Webvan died before it could get there.
2)Use the internet as the front end of the business. That's pretty obvious.
"Webvan -- none of whose senior executives or investors had any experience in the supermarket trade". Umm... yeah, that experience would have been useless since they didn't run supermarkets. They did have one of the main architects of Walmarts inventory and distribution system. They were damn good at what they did. If they had an unhappy customer I never met him.
They died from dried up funding more than overspending (though they did that too). They were just about at the point of doing the "since we have a truck coming by your house anyway, why don't we also drop off your Netflix movie, next semester's textbooks and that creepy Rei Ayanami doll you ordered from Japan?". Without that Netflix has had to spend huge effort to get a (kick ass frankly) distribution system done via USPS. Amazon has their affiliate program where you can get all sorts of odd stuff from Amazon, but they don't have that "last mile" solved. If you order stuff in one order from 7 different affiliates you have to pay 7 different shipping fees and deal with 7 different shipments from different shipping companies. At least one of those shipments will get screwed up and one other will come from some shipper that won't leave it without a signature. Webvan was coming by your house anyway to drop off your groceries.
And, yes, I did indeed ride a small position in WBVN all the way to $0.00. They could have been saved at any point and I still think they would be a huge company today.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Now, being a CEO is (really) different from managerial work, but I have an anecdote.
My dad works for Proctor & Gamble. They hire almost exclusively engineers for every position. They figure it's easier to teach an engineer sales/managing/whatever than it is to teach a business type how to engineer. Heck, they pay for some people to get their MBAs - if you could handle an engineering degree, you sure as heck can handle business.
Maybe not many geeks have business acumen - but it seems to be easier to pick up than geekery.
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