The Greatest Defunct Websites and Dotcom Disasters 192
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."
Re:Pets.com (Score:5, Informative)
AllTheWeb.com (Score:5, Informative)
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.
LNUX (parent company of Slashdot) (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNUX
Stock currently trades at a buck forty
Re:I miss Dejanews (Score:2, Informative)
Re:AllTheWeb.com (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't, but tell that to the investors. The free market said that Google's original business model wasn't good enough - the tech wasn't good enough apparently.
Unless you have the money and you don't care about any sort of return, when you go into business, you must make a return on investment. And when you have investors, if you squander their money, they fire you and possibly you go to jail for fraud. At the very least, if you do not meet their requirements for a return, they will also fire you. The free market works the same way for technology.
Technology isn't the end all and be all for a successful enterprise. Their management made the right decision as far as I'm concerned and I'm sure Google's stock holders would agree. After the "customers" their opinion matters the most.
Re:CNet (Score:4, Informative)
Kozmo.com (Score:4, Informative)
I kind of knew at the time that they'd never turn a profit, but it was nice while it lasted.
Re:beopen (Score:4, Informative)
you want to start a business and even have some start up money to get going that's great. but you had better carefully plan out the next two years of bills that you know about. as if you start coming up short your screwed.
Re:CNet (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Please .... (Score:5, Informative)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2099 [mozilla.org]
Re:Pets.com (Score:5, Informative)
It was the 2001 eTrade SuperBowl commercial [youtube.com].
...hmm. Maybe I didn't remember it so well, after all.
minus the pictures (Score:3, Informative)
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
Alpine (Score:3, Informative)
The new version is under the Apache License V2 and is called Alpine [washington.edu]. 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.