Slashdot Mirror
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."
Thank God we live in the enlightened days of Web 2.0, in a bubble that will never burst!
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Won't someone post a link that doesn't have 11 pages?
Beopen.com .. Hired a full staff of reporters with the dream of competing with slashdot.
When it ran out of money a guy I know came back with T-Shirts. Not the cheap ones you get at trade shows but solid fruit of the loom stuff that lasted me 7 years of constant use (I throw shirts out when they get their first hole) as it turns out that was longer than the company lasted in the first place.
The chairs were sweet!
Invenio via vel creo
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...
bit for bit the best and most relevant search of the time. We went head to head with Google and we *HAD* better results with fewer duplicates.
FAST could have been Google, it was better, but the upper management decided there was no real money to be made in web search.
Alas, no matter how smart the engineers, or how good the technology, stupid management can screw up a free lunch. Unfortunately, win or lose, they *ALWAYS* get the pay off.
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.
Where does one submit resumes for becoming a Dot-com distaster? I find dot-coms to be extremely distasteful and I would like to share my experiences on the matter.
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.
How, for the love of God, how....
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
Everyone but these guys! It might seem a little crass, but when you think about it all the businesses that succeeded did so in part from the lessons learned during the "great crash". Which in many ways helped to bring the good idea makers and engineers together through the rubble to form meaningful companies and worthwhile investments from what could have been a severe slowdown for our overall progress in internet spread.
So where are the Jenni archive videos, especially bow-chicka-bow-wow? I know someone has them... come on, fess up.
I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes screaming "I think I can see his kidneys, my eyes, my eyes!"
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
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
I still miss Kozmo.com. With a few clicks you could have a sandwich, a pint of Ben & Jerry's, a Razor scooter, and some porn delivered to you in 30 minutes. Everything you need for the perfect evening! And no delivery charge.
I kind of knew at the time that they'd never turn a profit, but it was nice while it lasted.
so the company went belly up, but no one lost the shirts off their backs
somewhere, a cliche has just died...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
You know, I don't quite get it. I've seen bigger arseholes in upper management or on the cover of some management magazines, and noone gets a shock at seeing those ;)
Well, now seriously, it was just an arse. Admittedly a rather stretched one, but I gather there must be _some_ demand for seeing that on a woman, judging by the whole category of porn and whole sites dedicated to it. I haven't heard of people reeling in shock after being exposed to almost seeing a <insert female pornstar>'s kidneys up her rear end after an anal scene. Or sometimes in the middle of it.
Seriously, it wasn't the most appealing or aesthetically pleasing picture out there, I'll grant that, but I just can't figure out the _horror_ some people claim to have experienced seeing it. It seems a rather disproportionate response. You'd figure that a simple, "hmm, how's this relevant to the topic at hand?" and hitting the back button would be enough for all practical purposes. Horror or shock? Erm, why?
Or was it just the implicit hint of homosexuality that gives the average male in some parts of the world the idea that he must seem properly outraged and horrified by it, lest someone might get the idea that he's gay too? Not trolling, just genuinely trying to figure it out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
At the turn of the Millenium the Internet burst out of academia and hobbyism in a volcano of money, sex and possibility. It barged its way into our lives, our economy and our global culture. For many people the dotcom boom meant oodles of boodle, and the promise of even more. But most of these Web pioneers were shown how dangerous it can be to run before you can walk -- for as night follows day, bust followed boom.
Collected here are history's most important failed dotcom businesses, and Web sites that were massive in their day, but now lie dormant in the graveyard of binary has-beens. We'll see people broadcasting themselves over a decade before YouTube existed, new global currencies that tried to leverage the booming global-local economy, and the best ways to let overexcited entrepreneurs burn through tens of millions of pounds and dollars in mere months.
Welcome to the dotcom bubble: the black hole of Web history. -Nate Lanxon
JenniCam (1996-2004; precursor to Justin.tv)
JenniCam, beginning in 1996, was the first really successful 'lifecasting' attempt. We're more familiar these days with lifecasters Justin Kan and oh-God-look-at-how-hot-I-think-I-am Justine Ezarik. But these modern exhibitionists are doing a decade later what Jennifer Ringley started back when we were all using dial-up connections.
Jenni started out broadcasting her often mundane life from a single webcam, but eventually quadrupled her cam count and didn't shy away from broadcasting anything, including any bow-chicka-wow-wow with blokes, or even when bored on her own. She was 19 when she began doing this (lifecasting, not bow-chicka-wow-wow), and continued the hobby for seven years (lifecasting, not... you get the idea).
No subscription, no sex for you
Money rolled in from $15-a-year subscriptions and Jenni ended up featured on massive US talk shows and on the cover of popular magazines. It's reported that her site was receiving over 100 million visitors a week -- remember this is 1996 and the Web as we know it now had barely lost its virginity, let alone given birth to the God-child we know as the modern Internet.
In 2008, when reality TV shows such as Big Brother deliberately exploit chumps for the entertainment of idiots, Ringley's unapologetic self-opened window gave the world its first taste of what was to eventually dominate our tubes: user-generated video, interactive Web sites, paid-for Net subscriptions, video on-demand and self-exploitation.
But it seems almost eight years of such revelation was enough for the 20-something Jenni, who apparently now leads a quieter life as a computer programmer.
Boo.com (1998-2000; precursor to: Next.co.uk, et al)
If you were cool and wanted clothes, you were part of Boo.com's target audience. Boo.com was one of the first to demonstrate the calamity that was to be the typical scenario for dotcom businesses at the turn of the Millenium -- overhype, overfund and overexpand. It was an online consumer fashion Web store, founded by Ernst Malmsten and ex-model Kajsa Leander in 1998, and launched the following year -- after eating £80m before selling a single item of clothing.
To guide you around the bandwidth-heavy site was Ms Boo, an animated little shop assistant. The problem was that in 1999, the limited numbers of people on the Net were using the also-limited bandwidth of dial-up modems, and browsing the site was a slow affair.
Overstaffed, overpaid, over here
Perhaps that's why eight weeks before its demise in mid-2000, Boo.com had only managed to generate £200,000 in turnover from 300,000 customers. For a company that employed 400 people when it only estimated it needed 30, such a disappointing revenue was hardly enough to keep it afloat. Worse still, the company needed countless millions in additional funding, and as the tech stocks were plummeting like a pigeon shot mid-flight, the doors of banks were slammed, locked and welded shut.
In retrospect, Boo.com simply tried to do too much, to
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.
The new version is under the Apache License V2 and is called Alpine. It was easier to start the new project with the new license with a name change. If you can get past any prejudices about text-based, menu-driven applications, it kicks butt.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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