Archie, the Internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running:
A journey through busted tapes, the Internet Old Farts Club, and SPARCstations.
It's amazing, and a little sad, to think that something created in 1989 that changed how people used and viewed the then-nascent Internet had nearly vanished by 2024.
💡 La Nostra Rete è un #laboratorio per scoprire e ripensare il #Web nella sua dimensione profondamente sociale.
Attraverso esperimenti e racconti, intraprenderemo un viaggio nella storia di #Internet, immaginando insieme un futuro digitale partecipato e orizzontale, ovviamente partendo dal #Fediverso! 🚀
Sarei felice se mi aiutaste a far girare (siamo un po’ in ritardo, belin)!
It's April 2008 at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I continue negotiations with two potential acquirers of ReadWriteWeb: CMP and Ziff Davis Enterprise. One invites me to dinner, but it turns out three's a crowd. (This post could almost be an episode of Fawlty Towers! Fawlty TWOers?) https://cybercultural.com/p/029-dinner-at-two/#InternetHistory#Serialization
This is a story I've never told before — in 2008, ReadWriteWeb nearly got acquired! The next several posts tell the tale... In early 2008, I find myself with two media company wooers: CMP and Ziff Davis Enterprise. The deals look good, but the earn-out targets concern me. https://cybercultural.com/p/027-acquisition-talks-rww-2008/#InternetHistory
In November 2007, I get a shock diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes #t1d. Meanwhile, the Read/WriteWeb server struggles to cope with our rapid page view growth. (part 025 of my serialized book, "Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 Revolution") #internethistoryhttps://cybercultural.com/p/025-health-problems-server-issues/
Marshall Kirkpatrick joins Read/WriteWeb in September 2007, which helps us crack the top 20 blogs in the world. The following month, I attend the Web 2.0 Summit and experience the start of hustle culture, through chats with GaryVee and a hungry (and muscly) kiwi entrepreneur. https://cybercultural.com/p/024-readwriteweb-key-hire-hustle-culture/#InternetHistory#Web20
In May 2007 Facebook announced its dev platform. As I noted in my latest memoir post, FB at the time was not the most popular social network on the internet—particularly outside of the US. Facebook had 24M global users at its platform launch, but it was far behind MySpace at 67M. Indeed, in some cases Bebo was more popular than FB! But by July, FB was growing so fast that we ran a Facebook Week on Read/WriteWeb and I added a RWW "group" on FB. https://cybercultural.com/p/023-microsoft-mix-2007/#InternetHistory#Facebook
Does anyone remember using RealAudio in early 1996? I'm researching this era of the web currently, but I'm struggling to remember what it was like using RealAudio...other than it was pretty buggy! So if anyone has memories from late 95 or early 96, sing out please. The attached image is from Mary Meeker's 1996 "The Internet Report" (via https://www.businessinsider.com/the-coolest-web-sites-from-1996-2016-4). #internethistory
Do you remember...AJAX homepages! Aka "start pages". My Feb 2006 writeup (warning: buzzwords): "...this new kind of homepage isn't just a place to store all your content and links. It'll house your widgets, gadgets and web services too. And [...] having an open API platform to build widgets and web services is going to be crucial for the growth and survival prospects of AJAX homepages." https://web.archive.org/web/20060317200954/http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=127 (image: Q-BEE, Flickr) #internethistory
Social before social media -> One day before Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, in Jan 2007, Yahoo acquired a cool but niche Web 2.0 service: MyBlogLog. I bet nobody under 35yrs has heard of it! Here's how I described it on RWW: "For bloggers, MyBlogLog lets you literally see your readers - and it's amazing how much of a difference putting a face (or icon or avatar) to a reader is." https://web.archive.org/web/20070114043856/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mybloglog_acquired_by_yahoo.php#internethistory
Hands up who bought this book back in the 90s? (I did, and it still lives on my #InternetHistory bookshelf!) David Siegel’s Creating Killer Web Sites was released in 1996 before CSS or Flash were finalized. So it advocated for “hacks” to HTML, such as table-based layouts, in order to make websites more visually appealing. The second edition in 1997 replaced the chapter "A PDF Primer" with a new chapter: "A CSS Primer" :) (via https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1996-flash-css-web-design/)
🌐 Protoweb – Bringing Back The Information Super Highway
"Protoweb is a free public service that hosts historical Internet websites to demonstrate the Internet in it’s early days. It is also a community driven project consisting of volunteers with the goal of rebuilding and restoring early Internet services to offer a seamless browsing experience."