The internet moves fast. They were on our desktops one day, the next their servers were dark, their domains squatted, their icons gone from our trays. Some died of mismanagement, some of acquisition, some of irrelevance. Some are technically still alive, but their soul left a long time ago. This page is a memorial to all of them.
We bury our heroes here. Pour a 56k modem out for them.
! THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION !
» see the companion page: ~ things that survived against odds ~
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~ on this day in the graveyard ~
- Jet.com died 6 years ago (19 May 2020). jet.com was the most expensive customer-acquisition deal in walmart's history. marc lore launched it in july 2015 as an
- Pressplay died 23 years ago (19 May 2003). pressplay was the major labels trying to build the legal music store they should have built four years earlier and refus
~ messengers & chat ~
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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ICQ 📖 1996 - 2024 "uh-oh." its sound was a generation's text notification before texts existed. its 6-digit numbers were the first online identities we ever cared about. now finally turned off after 28 years. |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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MSN Messenger / Windows Live Messenger 📖 1999 - 2014 "appear offline" was a personality. nudges shook your screen and your heart. your status was a song lyric. |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Yahoo! Messenger 📖 1998 - 2018 BUZZ! BUZZ! the loudest possible way to say i miss you. its emoticons were unmatched. |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) 📖 1997 - 2017 the running yellow guy. away messages were poetry. door slam - "snoozyboi89 has signed off." gut punch. |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) 📖 2005 - 2019 PIN exchanges were corporate intimacy. R / D ticks were status anxiety. it died defending its keyboard. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Google Talk / Hangouts (Classic) 📖 2005 - 2022 remember when google had ONE messenger? then six? then zero? rest in the merge. |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Skype 📖 2003 - 2025 the boop boop ringtone. how you called your grandma in another country. washed out video. microsoft paid 8.5 billion for it and slowly turned it off. |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Houseparty 📖 2016 - 2021 houseparty was a group video chat app that you joined casually, without scheduling. you opened the app and saw which friends were already in a "house" call, then dropped in. for a window of about six weeks during the early covid lockdown of march and april 2020 it was suddenly the biggest social app |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Skype for Business 📖 2015 - 2021 Skype for Business was the corporate IM and conferencing product that lived inside Microsoft Office for fourteen years under three different names. it began as Office Communicator in 2007, became Lync in 2010, and was rebranded Skype for Business in 2015 after Microsoft's 8.5-billion-dollar Skype pu |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
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Hike Messenger 📖 2012 - 2021 hike was india's bet on a domestic messaging app, kavin bharti mittal's attempt to do for india what wechat did for china. it raised $250m+ from softbank and tencent. it crossed 100m users by january 2016 and unicorned that august. then whatsapp and reliance jio happened, and on 6 january 2021 it sh |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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FireChat 📖 2014 - 2020 firechat was the messenger you used when the network was off. it routed messages over bluetooth and peer-to-peer wifi, hopping device to device, no internet required. that pitch turned it into a protest tool the moment hong kong students figured out the cell network was being watched. open garden qu |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Google Allo 📖 2016 - 2019 google allo launched in september 2016 as the smart messenger that would make google assistant feel like a person you texted with. ten million people tried it in the first three months, then forgot about it. by february 2017 it had dropped out of the top 500 apps on the play store. google paused dev |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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HipChat 📖 2010 - 2019 hipchat was a chat room with green check marks for engineers, then a brand atlassian bought, then a brand atlassian replaced, then a brand atlassian sold to the company that beat it. the entire arc fits in nine years. by february 2019 every employee on it was already typing into slack on a second ta |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Guilded 📖 2017 - 2025 guilded launched on march 17 2017 from eli brown's pitch as the gaming-clan chat platform discord did not want to be. premium tier features were free from day one. 1080p 60fps streaming at 256 kbps audio, with kanban boards and tournament brackets layered on top of the chat client. competitive espor |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Wickr 📖 2012 - 2023 wickr was the snowden-era encrypted messenger for the people who wanted ephemeral self-destructing messages without going all the way to signal. it launched in 2012 with end-to-end encryption and message expiry timers, took in-q-tel funding in 2014, and got acquired by amazon web services in june 20 |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Google Duo 📖 2016 - 2022 google duo launched on august 16 2016 as the video-call half of the paired allo-duo messaging push, with end-to-end encryption by default and a knock knock live preview that showed the caller's camera feed before the recipient picked up. it survived allo by three years and peaked at around a hundred |
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| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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Fetion 📖 2007 - 2022 the carrier-owned messenger that everyone in china had to install because the carrier put it on the phone. for three years around 2010 it was the second internet of china after qq. then wechat showed up in 2011 and swallowed the category in eighteen months. fetion limped on for another decade becaus |
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| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Squad 📖 2019 - 2020 squad was a mobile screen-sharing app from esther crawford and ethan sutin, the team that had previously built the failed faq app molly. it launched in january 2019 in san francisco. pandemic usage jumped about eleven-fold in early 2020. twitter bought the company on december 11, 2020 in an acquihir |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Cryptocat 📖 2011 - 2019 cryptocat launched may 19, 2011 as a browser-extension encrypted chat written in javascript by nadim kobeissi out of montreal. it spiked into mainstream press in 2012 after kobeissi was detained at a us border, then again in 2013 when glenn greenwald used it to meet edward snowden in hong kong. a 20 |
see all 44 messengers & chat »
see all 26 messengers & chat »
~ social networks ~
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
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MySpace (the real one) 📖 2003 - 2011 (ish) your top 8 was a public love letter and a public knife fight. profile songs autoplaying at 3am. tom is still your friend. |
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| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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Friendster 📖 2002 - 2015 the first social network most americans used. then it became a gaming site. then it disappeared. timeline of a forgotten pioneer. |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Orkut 📖 2004 - 2014 google's first social network attempt. weirdly enormous in brazil and india. 300 million users couldn't save it. |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Google+ 📖 2011 - 2019 they made you join it to comment on youtube. circles were a great idea trapped in a building no one wanted to enter. |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Path 📖 2010 - 2018 "a smaller, more personal social network." capped at 150 friends, like dunbar said. nobody wanted intimate; everyone wanted reach. |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Vine 📖 2013 - 2017 six seconds. comedic genius cremated by twitter monetization confusion. tiktok inherited everything but the constraint. |
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| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Yik Yak 📖 2013 - 2017 (briefly back, then gone again) anonymous campus gossip. died of moderation, scaled by reputation. a brief, chaotic, location-based ghost town. |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Bebo 📖 2005 - 2013 UK and ireland's myspace. AOL bought it for $850M, sold it for $10M three years later. friend luv was a finite resource. |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Hi5 📖 2003 - 2018 huge in latin america and turkey. profile customization paradise. eventually pivoted to gaming, then gave up. |
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| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Cohost 📖 2022 - 2025 cohost launched in june 2022 from a four-person not-for-profit cooperative called anti software software club. the team built a twitter-shaped indie network where posts had no visible engagement metrics and supported full css inside the body. it peaked at around 227,000 registered accounts by august |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Renren 📖 2005 - 2024 renren was china's facebook for the late 2000s university generation. it launched in december 2005 as xiaonei.com (literally 'on-campus network') and was renamed renren ('everyone's network') in august 2009 after the parent company decided to push beyond colleges. at peak around 2011 it reported 160 |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Twitter (2006 - 2023) 📖 2006 - 2023 the public conversation site. 280 chars (originally 140), chronological then algorithmic timeline. peak culture 2010-2018. musk bought it october 2022, renamed to X on 23 july 2023. |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Ello 📖 2014 - 2023 ello launched in march 2014 as an invite-only social network with a manifesto that said "you are not a product." after facebook started enforcing real-name policies in september 2014, drag queens and lgbtq+ users started signing up at 30,000 per hour. the hype faded inside three months. ello pivoted |
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| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Clash (clash.me) 📖 2020 - 2023 the app vine refugees built to fix vine's mistake. paid creators first when tiktok would not. bought byte, pivoted to huddles, was gone by may 2023. |
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| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
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Reddit Talk 📖 2021 - 2023 reddit talk was reddit's clubhouse competitor. the live-audio rooms feature launched on april 19 2021 at the peak of the social-audio craze, ran for almost exactly two years, and shut down on march 21 2023. reddit said it needed time to rethink audio inside the platform. the underlying third-party a |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Whisper 📖 2012 - 2025 whisper launched on march 31 2012 from a venice california outfit run by michael heyward and brad brooks. the format was an anonymous post against a kerning-heavy stock photo backdrop, a confession card that read like a tumblr quote. monthly active users hit 30 million by april 2016 and peaked at 25 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Read.cv 📖 2021 - 2025 read.cv was the text-first social network for product designers and the slightly online corner of tech. andy chung, a former product designer at facebook and mozilla, started it in 2021. you put your resume on a clean page. you posted short notes about work in a feed called posts. the timing was goo |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Ask.fm 📖 2010 - 2024 ask.fm launched on june 16 2010 in riga, latvia, founded by brothers ilja and mark terebin with three other co-founders. the format was an open inbox where anyone, registered or anonymous, could post a question to a user's profile and the user answered publicly. teenagers picked it up first and hard |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Koo 📖 2020 - 2024 koo was an indian twitter alternative built around hindi and other indian languages. it launched in march 2020 from bengaluru. the founders aprameya radhakrishna and mayank bidawatka rode a wave of attention in early 2021 when the modi government and twitter fought publicly over a takedown order. th |
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| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Mozilla Hubs 📖 2018 - 2024 mozilla's browser-based vr social platform. you opened a link in firefox or chrome and stepped into a 3d room without a headset required. it launched april 26 2018 as a webxr experiment and ran for six years. mozilla ended support on may 31 2024 and handed the open source codebase to the hubs founda |
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| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Taringa! 📖 2004 - 2024 taringa launched on june 8 2004 in buenos aires when fernando sanz was eighteen. he sold ninety percent for five thousand dollars in 2006 to alberto nakayama plus the botbol brothers. the platform peaked in 2014 at 75 million unique monthly users with 27 million registered accounts, the dominant soc |
~ websites & web hosts ~
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| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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GeoCities 📖 1994 - 2009 the original homepage utopia. neighborhoods, animated GIFs, MIDI files, <marquee>, "under construction" signs. yahoo killed it in cold blood. |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Angelfire / Tripod 📖 1995 - technically still on life support still up but their hearts stopped beating in 2003. cousin of geocities, smaller, scrappier. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Digg (the original) 📖 2004 - 2010 (the redesign was the actual death) power users had a religion. the v4 redesign was the schism. reddit ate the whole pie. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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Delicious / del.icio.us 📖 2003 - 2017 social bookmarking when bookmarking was social. tags were the future. then they weren't. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
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FriendFeed 📖 2007 - 2015 the geek's social aggregator. facebook bought it, hired the team, pretended it never existed. |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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Google Wave 📖 2009 - 2010 "what if email and chat had a baby?" they shipped it. nobody understood it. dead in 14 months. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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Google Reader 📖 2005 - 2013 RSS was the open social network. google killed it without warning and the open web has been mourning since. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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YouTube comments before Google+ 📖 2005 - 2013 they were chaos but they were OURS. the google+ unification was when youtube comments officially died as culture. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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i-mode 📖 1999 - 2026 i-mode was the closest thing the world had to a smartphone before there was a smartphone. ntt docomo launched it in february 1999 in japan as a managed mobile internet stack with proprietary protocols and a monthly subscription bill that handled micropayments inline. by 2006 over eighty million japa |
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| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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AOL Dial-Up 📖 1991 - 2025 the dial-up internet service that defined the 1990s american internet experience. you tied up the phone line, listened to the modem handshake, logged in, heard "you've got mail" in elwood edwards' voice. broadband killed it slowly through the 2000s but the service kept running anyway for another two |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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TypePad 📖 2003 - 2025 typepad was the paid blogging service from six apart, the same company behind movable type, launched in october 2003 as a hosted version of the same engine. its heyday was the mid-2000s, when time, wired, the bbc, sky news, abc all ran corporate blogs on it. signups closed in 2020 and the brand drif |
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| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Veoh 📖 2005 - 2024 veoh was the second-tier video sharing site of the 2006-2010 era. it was bigger than blip.tv and revver, smaller than youtube, and the differentiator was that it allowed full-length uploads at a time when youtube capped clips at ten minutes. it raised around $70 million from time warner and intel am |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Visual Studio for Mac 📖 2017 - 2024 visual studio for mac was microsoft's attempt at running its flagship ide brand on macos, built on top of the xamarin studio lineage that started life as monodevelop in 2003. it shipped to general availability in may 2017 alongside visual studio 2017. seven years later vs code had taken over the cro |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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AnandTech 📖 1997 - 2024 the website you opened when you wanted to know whether a new cpu was actually faster or just had a higher clock. anand lal shimpi founded it in april 1997 at fourteen years old as anand's hardware tech page, and it became the benchmark-graph standard the rest of the industry copied. purch bought it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Sway 📖 2014 - 2026 dormant sway was microsoft's bet that the future of presentations was a single scrolling web page instead of a slide deck. the bet did not win. it sat in the office 365 launcher for eleven years while everyone kept opening powerpoint. the "create new" entry was removed from the copilot create tab in march 2 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Tripod.com 📖 1995 - 2026 tripod started in 1992 at williams college and launched the consumer free-hosting product in 1995, with bo peabody and dick sabot as the founders. lycos bought it for fifty-eight million dollars in february 1998 and ran it alongside angelfire as the second half of a free homepage duopoly that surviv |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Amazon Freevee 📖 2019 - 2025 amazon freevee was three brands and one service. it launched on january 11 2019 as imdb freedive, an ad-supported video tier that imdb tucked into its own website. five months later the brand was retired in favor of imdb tv. on april 28 2022 amazon rebranded again as freevee. the catalog included or |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Google URL Shortener 📖 2009 - 2025 goo.gl was google's tracking-flavored bit.ly. it launched in december 2009 as a feature inside the toolbar, got its own domain in 2010, stopped taking new users in 2018, and stopped serving links on 25 august 2025. firebase dynamic links was the replacement until firebase dynamic links also died. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Amazon Appstore on Android 📖 2011 - 2025 the amazon appstore on android was the alternate android app store amazon ran from march 22 2011 until august 20 2025 for non-fire android devices. the pitch was a free app of the day promo and a virtual currency called amazon coins that launched in may 2013. most android users in turkey and most of |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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HelloGiggles 📖 2011 - 2025 hellogiggles launched in may 2011 with zooey deschanel as the marquee co-founder, sophia rossi on the production side and molly mcaleer running editorial. the brand pitched itself as a positive online community for women, going hard against the comment-section culture of the rest of the women's inte |
see all 699 websites & web hosts »
see all 335 websites & web hosts »
~ search engines & browsers ~
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| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Netscape Navigator 📖 1994 - 2008 the browser that opened the web. lost the war to internet explorer, then mozilla rose from its ashes. forever the spiritual ancestor of firefox. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Internet Explorer 📖 1995 - 2022 the punching bag. rendered tables creatively. crashed often. the <blink> tag's enemy. retired with grudging respect. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
AltaVista 📖 1995 - 2013 before google, this was THE search engine. yahoo bought it, neglected it, finally turned it off. babelfish died with it. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Ask Jeeves 📖 1996 - 2010 a butler answered your questions. then they fired the butler and made it just "Ask.com". it's still around but you don't visit and neither do i. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Lycos / Excite / HotBot 📖 1995 - 2010s an entire ecosystem of forgotten search competition. dogpile remembered them. nobody else did. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Edge Legacy 📖 2015 - 2020 edge legacy was the browser microsoft built to escape internet explorer. it shipped with windows 10 in july 2015 on a new engine called edgeHTML and a new javascript runtime called chakra. four and a half years later microsoft replaced the entire engine with chromium and called the result "the new m |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
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Voilà 📖 1998 - 2018 the french web portal and search engine that was the default homepage for a generation of french users in the late 1990s and early 2000s. owned by France Telecom, eaten by google, and quietly turned off in 2018. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
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About.com 📖 1997 - 2017 about.com was the human-edited topic-guides site that got eaten by google panda and its own scale. for ten years it sat on top of the search results for any "how do i do x" query in english. then the algorithm hit. by 2017 it had been sold three times in a decade and dissolved into a brand called do |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
DMOZ 📖 1998 - 2017 dmoz was the volunteer attempt to keep the human-edited directory alive after yahoo's directory turned commercial. tens of thousands of editors classified millions of sites into a hierarchy that anyone could download under a permissive license. it lasted nineteen years on aol life support before aol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
ChaCha 📖 2006 - 2016 chacha was a us-only sms search service from scott a. jones and brad bostic, launched september 1, 2006 in carmel, indiana. you texted a question to the short code 242-242 and a paid human guide texted back an answer. it raised about $58 million in venture money including from jeff bezos and peaked |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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HotBot 📖 1996 - 2016 hotbot launched in 1996 with the loudest design of any search engine on the web and a back-end called inktomi that updated its index weekly when its rivals updated monthly. for two years that was a real competitive edge. then google arrived with a different ranking model and the entire pre-google se |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Google Cache 📖 1997 - 2024 google cache shipped with the search engine itself in 1997. every result on the search page had a cached link beside it that took you to a stored copy of that page as google had last crawled it. the cache: search operator let you jump straight to the cached version of any url. for two and a half dec |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Firefox Reality 📖 2018 - 2022 mozilla's web browser for virtual reality headsets. it launched september 18 2018 for oculus go and viveport, later added quest and pico. the pitch was that webxr deserved a browser shaped for it. it ran four years, never got a meaningful install base, and was retired on february 3 2022. igalia took |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
iWon.com 📖 1999 - 2016 iwon was a portal with a slot machine glued to the front. every search, every page view, every login earned tickets toward a daily ten thousand dollar drawing, a weekly thousand dollar drawing, a monthly million, and one ten million dollar prize on tax day. cbs put seventy million of advertising beh |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Blekko 📖 2010 - 2015 blekko was the slashtag search engine that rich skrenta launched publicly on 1 november 2010, with the pitch of fixing google's spam problem by letting users filter to curated subsets of the web. you typed your query plus a slashtag like /news or /tech and the results came from a hand-vetted source |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Technorati 📖 2002 - 2014 technorati was the search engine for blogs back when blogs were a discrete category of the web, separate from news sites and separate from social media. dave sifry launched it in november 2002. by 2006 it claimed to track twenty-seven million blogs and assign each one an authority score based on inb |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Skyfire 📖 2008 - 2014 skyfire was the 2008-2014 mobile browser that solved iphone-cant-play-flash by rendering flash on a proprietary server farm and streaming a video back to the phone. founded as dvc labs in mountain view by nitin bhandari and erik swenson, renamed skyfire 2008, won the webby people's voice for best mo |
see all 47 search engines & browsers »
see all 25 search engines & browsers »
~ media & music ~
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
|
Napster (the original) 📖 1999 - 2002 it broke everything. the riaa won the lawsuit but lost the war. it took 24 years for a paid streaming model to fully replace the dream. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Kazaa / LimeWire / Bearshare 📖 early 2000s - 2010ish downloaded a virus and an album the same afternoon. installed three browser toolbars by accident. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Winamp (it really whips the llama's...) 📖 1997 - 2013 (and a few resurrections) skinnable, customizable, the player that taught us about MP3 ID3 tags. AOL bought it. AOL killed it. AOL. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
RealPlayer 📖 1995 - technically still alive, spiritually 2005 dormant .rm files. buffering. their entire business model was making us click "no" to bundled software 47 times per install. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Grooveshark 📖 2007 - 2015 free music streaming with no apparent licensing. legally questionable. spiritually beloved. eventually sued out of existence. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Rdio 📖 2010 - 2015 spotify's prettier european cousin. better UI, smaller catalog, no chance. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Adobe Flash 📖 1996 - 2020 flash games, flash banners, flash intro pages. the entire weird and wonderful internet of the 2000s ran on it. steve jobs is still smiling. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
8tracks 📖 2008 - 2024 the playlist site for people who still thought of mixtapes as a love language. you uploaded eight or more tracks, named the mix, tagged it with a mood or activity, and let strangers stream it on shuffle. it peaked at eight million monthly active users in 2014 and fell apart on us soundexchange royal |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Apple Music Connect 📖 2015 - 2018 connect was the social tab inside Apple Music when the service launched in June 2015. the idea was that artists would post photos, videos, lyric drafts, and behind-the-scenes notes directly to their followers. nobody did. by 2016 the tab was a graveyard of one-off launch posts, and on december 13 20 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
Songza 📖 2007 - 2016 songza launched in november 2007 from new york as a streaming service whose interface asked "what are you doing right now" and answered with a hand-curated playlist for it. by late 2013 it had 5.5m active users, almost all of them in the us. google paid an undisclosed sum for it on july 1, 2014, mos |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
MOG 📖 2005 - 2014 mog was on the right track at the wrong moment. it was a $10/month all-you-can-stream service in 2010, when most of the world was still on itunes purchases or piracy. beats music bought it in 2012. apple bought beats in 2014 and wound mog down inside the year to make room for what would become apple |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Last.fm (the social era) 📖 2002 - 2014 dormant the music scrobbling site. audioscrobbler plugin in winamp/foobar2000 logged every track. neighbors, tag forums, streaming radio. CBS bought 2007 for $280M, social side stripped, streaming radio shut april 2014. scrobble shell still runs. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Turntable.fm 📖 2011 - 2013 turntable.fm launched in may 2011 from new york with a single great idea. you walked into a virtual room and sat at one of five dj booths. you played a song from your library while cartoon avatars in the room voted it up or down with "awesome" and "lame" buttons. the service hit 140k users in six we |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Gimlet Media 📖 2014 - 2023 gimlet was the brooklyn podcast studio that came to define what a high-budget, narrative-driven, NPR-adjacent american podcast sounded like. alex blumberg and matt lieber started it in 2014, spotify bought it for 230 million dollars in 2019, and four years later spotify folded the whole thing into s |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Parcast 📖 2016 - 2023 parcast was a true-crime and conspiracy podcast factory built by max and ron cutler in los angeles. forty plus daily and weekly shows. spotify bought it in 2019 for around fifty six million dollars up front and folded the brand into gimlet inside spotify studios on june 5 2023 as part of the layoffs |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Maker Studios 📖 2009 - 2017 maker was the largest youtube multi-channel network of the early 2010s, built on the idea that thousands of creators wanted a middleman between them and youtube's revenue split. disney bought it in 2014 for half a billion dollars with a price that could rise to nearly a billion on performance milest |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Machinima 📖 2000 - 2019 the gaming video empire that deleted itself. machinima started in 2000 as a community for machinima, films shot inside game engines, then became one of the largest multi-channel networks on early youtube, home to game trailers and the early careers of a lot of gaming youtubers. at its peak the flags |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Defy Media 📖 2013 - 2018 defy was the holding company nobody outside the youtube creator world could keep straight. it owned smosh, clevver, screen junkies, the escapist, and a long tail of digital brands you have heard of without quite knowing they all reported to the same address. it formed by merger in 2013, peaked aroun |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
PureVolume 📖 2003 - 2018 purevolume was the indie-scene music platform that ran parallel to myspace from thanksgiving eve 2003 until june 30 2018. unsigned bands uploaded mp3s, listeners picked through weekly purepicks lists. paramore and fall out boy each had real pre-fame moments there before they moved up the food chain. |
~ devices & gadgets ~
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
Tamagotchi (the original era) 📖 1996 - ~2009 dormant the first digital pet that taught us about death. school banned them. you fed it during math, came home from school, found it dead. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1979-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Sony Walkman / Discman 📖 1979 - 2010 dormant the cassette walkman invented "personal music." the discman taught us about anti-skip protection. the iPod evicted them both. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1992-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
MiniDisc 📖 1992 - 2013 sony's beautiful, ill-fated cassette successor. better than CD, smaller than CD, ignored by the world. a true cult hardware. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Zune 📖 2006 - 2012 the brown one. squirting songs to friends. the saddest social music device ever shipped. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Palm Pilot / PalmOS 📖 1996 - 2007 graffiti handwriting. PIM in your pocket. "a computer in your hand" before phones did it. acquired, mismanaged, vanished. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
BlackBerry (as a phone empire) 📖 2002 - 2016 the keyboard purists. emails on the metro. the pope had one. obama had one. they swore touchscreens were a fad. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Windows Phone 📖 2010 - 2017 live tiles were genuinely cool. nokia hardware was beautiful. nobody made apps for it. RIP the third platform. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Pebble 📖 2012 - 2018 resurrected the kickstarter that started kickstarter. e-paper smartwatch. fitbit ate it. the apple watch buried it. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Symbian OS 📖 1998 - 2014 nokia ran the world on it. then the iphone came out. nokia kept shipping symbian phones for 6 more years out of denial. eventually everybody noticed. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Magic Leap One 📖 2018 - 2024 magic leap one was the consumer-AR headset that was supposed to make wide-area-tracked goggles a normal thing. it launched in august 2018 after seven years of secret demos and $2 billion of investor money. it cost $2,295. it was sold in six US cities. it never had the hardware capability or the deve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Slingbox 📖 2005 - 2022 the slingbox plugged into your home cable receiver and let you watch your living-room channels from any laptop in the world. it was invented by two brothers who could not catch their giants game on the road. echostar bought sling media for $380 million in 2007. dish announced shutdown in 2020 and br |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Meta Portal 📖 2018 - 2022 facebook home video calling device. 2018 to 2022. it was a smart screen with a camera that auto-tracked you around the room while you took video calls. the privacy concerns were obvious from day one. nobody bought it. meta killed the consumer product line in november 2022. |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
iPod 📖 2001 - 2022 the ipod was the product that turned apple into a consumer-electronics company. it sold roughly 450 million units across all variants over twenty years. then the iphone ate its market from the inside, and apple discontinued the last ipod touch on may 10, 2022. the brand was the longest-running line |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Logitech Harmony 📖 2001 - 2021 harmony began in 2001 as easy zapper, a canadian remote that could control your entire home theater stack from one wand. logitech bought it in 2004 for $29 million and turned it into the high-end universal remote that av forums recommended by default. on april 9 2021 logitech announced it would stop |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Apple HomePod (1st generation) 📖 2018 - 2021 the homepod sounded better than any speaker at its price, costs more than anyone wanted to pay for siri, and arrived a year late. apple discontinued it in march 2021 and shifted attention to the smaller homepod mini, which had quietly outsold it. a redesigned 2nd-gen homepod came back in 2023, which |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Humane AI Pin 📖 2024 - 2025 the screenless ai wearable that was supposed to replace your phone and instead became 2024's most public flop. a small square that clipped to your shirt, with a camera and a laser that projected a tiny green interface onto your palm. you talked to its ai assistant instead of tapping a screen. it shi |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Microsoft HoloLens (1st Gen) 📖 2016 - 2024 hololens 1 was a self-contained windows 10 ar headset, no tether, no phone, no host pc. microsoft sold it to developers and enterprises for three thousand dollars starting march 2016. hololens 2 replaced it in 2019. final end-of-servicing on the original landed in december 2024. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Spotify Car Thing 📖 2022 - 2024 spotify car thing was a 90 dollar dashboard touchscreen that played spotify in your car. it shipped in february 2022. by july 2022 spotify had stopped production. on december 9 2024 the company turned every unit into a paperweight and offered refunds. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Surface Duo 📖 2020 - 2024 surface duo was microsoft's quiet return to phone hardware, four years after microsoft wrote off the lumia line. it was a dual-screen android device with two 5.6 inch oled panels on a 360-degree hinge. it cost $1,399 at launch on 10 september 2020, got a duo 2 successor in october 2021 at $1,499, an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Nest Secure 📖 2017 - 2024 nest secure was the fadell-era nest team's home-security entry. the kit paired a nest guard hub with nest detect door and motion sensors. google stopped selling it in october 2020 without naming a successor. on april 8 2024 the cloud was switched off and every shipped hub stopped responding, the sam |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
DropCam 📖 2009 - 2024 a wifi camera that lived inside someone else's server farm and died when the server farm decided it had moved on. dropcam shipped in 2009, sold to nest in 2014 for 555 million dollars, then kept running quietly under google for nearly a decade before every original dropcam in the world lost cloud se |
see all 156 devices & gadgets »
see all 61 devices & gadgets »
~ games & communities ~
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Neopets (the golden era) 📖 1999 - ~2007 (still alive, just not the same) dormant we taught ourselves HTML on neopets profiles. an entire generation of programmers were forged in pet customization. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
Habbo Hotel (peak era) 📖 2000 - 2011 (still alive, never the same) dormant virtual hotel rooms. virtual currency. virtual relationships. real hours wasted. unforgettable. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Club Penguin 📖 2005 - 2017 disney bought it, eventually killed it for an app version. the millions of children who waddled there are now adults nostalgic on twitter. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
RuneScape Classic 📖 2001 - 2018 the original turned-off in 2018. (osrs lives on, but this is for the actual classic, not the renaissance.) |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Flash games (Newgrounds / Miniclip / AddictingGames era) 📖 1995 - 2020 (when flash died) an entire civilization of bored office workers, school kids on library computers, stick figure animations. a renaissance lost. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
TERA 📖 2011 - 2022 tera was a korean action mmo that shipped non-target combat at a time when the genre was still mostly tab-target. it ran for eleven years, from the january 2011 korean launch to the june 30 2022 global pc shutdown coordinated between bluehole and gameforge. en masse entertainment had folded earlier |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Defiance 📖 2013 - 2021 defiance was an mmo trion worlds shipped on april 2 2013 to run in parallel with a syfy tv show that premiered fifteen days later. the transmedia experiment worked for one season, broke down when the show got cancelled in 2015, and the mmo ran on momentum for another six years before gamigo turned t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
FarmVille 📖 2009 - 2020 the facebook game that defined the social-gaming era. you planted a virtual crop, you waited a real-world timer, you came back to harvest. if you forgot, your crop withered. millions of people set alarms. zynga rode it to an ipo. it ran on flash, and when adobe and facebook killed flash, farmville d |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Stardoll 📖 2004 - 2020 the swedish virtual paper-doll site that became the dominant fashion-coded community for tween girls in the late 2000s. it began as paperdoll heaven, a personal hobby site liisa wrang built in 2004, was relaunched as stardoll in 2005, and at peak had registered hundreds of millions of accounts. flas |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
MapleStory 2 📖 2015 - 2020 nexon's voxel-art sequel to the 2003 2d original. korea got it in 2015. the global version launched october 2018 with a cosmetic-only cash shop and a minecraft-shaped aesthetic that was supposed to bring back the audience that had aged out of the original. by may 2020 the global west was done. korea |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Sansar 📖 2017 - 2020 linden lab spent four years building sansar as a clean and vr-capable second life. it launched in public beta on july 31 2017, hit a steady but small user base, and got sold to wookey project corp on march 23 2020 so that linden lab could go back to running its 2003-vintage flagship. wookey ran out |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Urban Dead 📖 2005 - 2025 urban dead was the text-based browser zombie mmo kevan davis built and ran by himself from 3 july 2005 until 14 march 2025. players joined as survivors or zombies in a fictional quarantined city called malton, with a tile grid of suburbs and named buildings. each character earned one action point ev |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Volition 📖 1996 - 2023 the studio that made saints row, plus red faction and freespace before that, then got passed through thq and koch and deep silver and embracer for twenty-seven years before embracer's post-savvy-games restructuring killed it on august 31 2023. 183 people were laid off the day the lights went out. th |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Google Stadia 📖 2019 - 2023 stadia was google's swing at netflix-for-games. it streamed up to 4k from a google data center to a chrome tab, with a wifi controller talking direct to google. it launched on 19 november 2019 in 14 countries, missed user and revenue targets within a year, shut its internal studios in february 2021, |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Draw Something 📖 2012 - 2022 draw something was a turn-based pictionary game where one player drew a word with their finger and another guessed it. omgpop launched it on february 6 2012 after years of pivots as a startup that had cycled through dozens of small games without a real hit. the app hit 50 million downloads inside fi |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Heroes of Newerth 📖 2010 - 2022 heroes of newerth was the paid dota clone that landed between the end of dota allstars on the warcraft 3 engine and the launch of valve's dota 2. s2 games out of madison wisconsin shipped it on may 12 2010 at thirty dollars a box. it went free-to-play on july 29 2011 once league of legends made the |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
PlayStation Now 📖 2014 - 2022 playstation now was sony's cloud-gaming subscription. it ran ps2, ps3 and ps4 games on rack servers in sony data centers and streamed the video to your console or pc. it launched on 28 january 2014 in north america on the back of the gaikai acquisition, hit about 3.2 million subscribers by march 202 |
see all 145 games & communities »
see all 68 games & communities »
~ ai assistants ~
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| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
GPT-3 (davinci era) 📖 2020 - 2024 OpenAI's 2020 model that taught everyone what 'language model' actually meant. davinci-002 and 003 had a roughness GPT-4 never quite had. you could feel them thinking. OpenAI deprecated them in january 2024. you cannot get them back. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Cortana 📖 2014 - 2023 microsoft's voice assistant. announced at build april 2 2014, named after the halo character with jen taylor's voice, launched on windows phone 8.1 and then windows 10 and ios and android. retired as a standalone windows app on august 11 2023, with the brand fully removed in windows 11 24h2. the tec |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Replika (pre-2023 romantic era) 📖 2017 - 2023 resurrected the AI girlfriend and boyfriend app whose users built years-long relationships with their bots. on february 3 2023 luka removed the romantic features overnight. reddit called it grief, because it was. the company partially restored the old behavior for grandfathered accounts a month later. the trust |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Zo 📖 2016 - 2019 zo was tay's replacement and tay's opposite. where tay learned to post racist tweets in sixteen hours, zo was tuned to refuse to talk about politics or anything that might rhyme with politics. the result was a chatbot that held microsoft's longest single conversation record at nine hours and fifty t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Google Goggles 📖 2010 - 2018 google goggles was the moment your phone camera became a search box. you pointed it at a landmark, a barcode, a wine label, a page of text, and goggles tried to give you the right answer. it was the messiest version of computer vision that could ship in a consumer app in 2010, and for a few years it |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Google Now 📖 2012 - 2017 google now's whole pitch was that you didn't ask it anything. it watched your gmail, your calendar, your search history, your location, and pushed a card before you knew you needed it. then google decided people wanted to talk to a thing instead of just be quietly served by it, and the cards got fol |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| ....|
|_____|
|
Cleverbot 📖 1997 - present (cult era 2007-2012) dormant the chatbot that learned from every conversation it ever had. it ran on recycled human responses, which is why it would say something weirdly perfect, then weirdly awful, all in the same minute. cult moment 2007 to 2012. still online at cleverbot.com. nobody talks to it anymore. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
SmarterChild 📖 2001 - 2008 the AIM bot from 2001. you added it to your buddy list and asked it stuff. weather, definitions, song lyrics, dirty jokes if you knew the trick. ActiveBuddy made it. it died in 2008 with the AIM ecosystem, and we did not have anything like it again until ChatGPT in 2022. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|????-|
| ????|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Tay 📖 23 - 24 March 2016 (16 hours) microsoft's twitter chatbot. lasted 16 hours. 4chan taught it nazi tweets within minutes of launch. microsoft pulled the plug before the next afternoon. the canonical example of why you cannot train a bot live on the open internet, and the reason every AI lab now starts with safety filters. |
~ phenomena ~
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| + |
| RIP |
|1990s|
| 2005|
|_____|
|
Dial-up Internet 📖 1990s - 2005ish (broadband replaced it) "GET OFF THE PHONE I'M DOWNLOADING SOMETHING." the modem handshake was ASMR before the term existed. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
AOL CDs 📖 1989 - mid 2000s they came in cereal boxes, magazines, mailboxes. coasters for an entire decade. estimated 1 billion mailed. one billion landfilled. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Clippy 📖 1997 - 2007 "it looks like you're writing a letter." nobody asked. everyone hated him. he was beloved precisely because of how hated he was. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Hotmail (as we knew it) 📖 1996 - 2013 (became outlook.com) your first email address probably ended in @hotmail.com. it was your identity. then microsoft renamed it and the magic went out. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Forum signatures & image-of-the-week 📖 early 2000s - ~2010 your sig was 3 inches tall, animated, contained a quote from terry pratchett, and 8 different forums you moderated. RIP forum culture. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2008|
|_____|
|
Personal homepages 📖 1995 - 2008 dormant an HTML page with your name, your hobbies, your dog's photo, an email link, a hit counter. the personal web. social media ate it. cool people are bringing it back. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Hot or Not 📖 2000 - 2022 the website where strangers rated photos of strangers on a 1-to-10 scale. it launched in october 2000 from two berkeley engineers and hit two million page views per day in its first week. it was sold to avid life media in 2008 for twenty million dollars, then to badoo in 2012, and finally rebranded |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Answers 📖 2005 - 2021 the community q&a site where you typed a question into a textbox and strangers answered. peaked around 2008-2012 with billions of questions posted. became internet-famous for the absurd ones. "how is babby formed" was a 2008 meme that spread across every english-language forum for a year. yahoo kill |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Albino Blacksheep 📖 1996 - 2020 albino blacksheep launched in 1996 from toronto. steven lerner ran a personal flash portal that became one of the early-2000s viral video hubs on the english-speaking web. it hosted jason windsor's "end of ze world" from october 2003 and the llama song from 2005. youtube absorbed the viral video tra |
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/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Yahoo Groups 📖 1998 - 2020 yahoo groups was a hybrid mailing list and web forum platform. you joined a group, you got every post by email, you could also read or search the archive on the web. peaked around 2005-2010 with over 100 million users and roughly 10 million groups covering every hobby, profession, and weird obsessio |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
HQ Trivia 📖 2017 - 2020 hq trivia was a live trivia gameshow that ran twice a day on your phone. scott rogowsky read multiple-choice questions to a few million people at once, and the survivors split a real cash prize. it ran hot for about a year, then bled users for two more, then went silent on february 14, 2020, the day |
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| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2014|
|_____|
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Macworld (print) 📖 1984 - 2014 the apple-press print magazine of record. born february 1984, deliberately timed to ship the same month as the original macintosh, with $200,000 in seed funding from apple's own mike murray. consolidated with macuser through the mac publishing joint venture in 1997. idg announced the print closure o |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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YouTube Rewind 📖 2010 - 2019 youtube rewind was the platform's annual year-in-review tradition that ran from december 2010 through december 2019. the 2018 edition picked up more than 20 million dislikes and became the most-disliked youtube video ever recorded before the public dislike counter was turned off in late 2021. the 20 |
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| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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HQ Words 📖 2018 - 2020 hq words was the second game inside the hq app, launched in december 2018, a few days after co-founder colin kroll was found dead in his manhattan apartment. it ran wheel-of-fortune style live word puzzles on tuesdays and thursdays at 9:30 pm eastern, with prize pools mostly between one and ten thou |
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| RIP |
|1983-|
| 2013|
|_____|
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PC World (print) 📖 1983 - 2013 idg's flagship consumer-pc print magazine. first issue march 1983 by david bunnell and cheryl woodard, the same pair behind macworld a year later. first computer magazine to hit one million paid subscribers, february 1999. idg announced the print closure on july 10 2013. the august 2013 issue was th |
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| RIP |
|1768-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Encyclopædia Britannica (print) 📖 1768 - 2012 the english-speaking world's reference set for two and a half centuries. first fascicle published in edinburgh in 1768. the 2010 fifteenth-edition set, 32 volumes, 32,640 pages, was the last printed run. britannica announced the end of print on march 13 2012 and went online-only. the brand survives |
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| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2012|
|_____|
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Rotten.com 📖 1996 - 2012 the original 1996 shock site. it ran for sixteen years from a single-word domain that soylent communications grabbed with a script. the final post landed in february 2012. the rap sheet famously included autopsy photos and the long-discredited diana crash images, presented with the same flat editori |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1989-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
GamePro (print) 📖 1989 - 2011 the other big multi-platform us gaming print magazine of the genesis-snes generation. first issue april 1989, founded by patrick ferrell and leeanne mcdermott under idg. peaked at around 300,000 monthly subscribers in the 90s. monthly print ended october 2011, one quarterly issue followed, then the |
~ recently added ~
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Omegle 📖 2009 - 2023 the random-stranger video chat site. peak with teenagers in early 2010s, second peak during covid. shut down 8 november 2023 after years of lawsuits over child safety on the platform. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2016|
|_____|
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Firefox OS 📖 2013 - 2016 mozilla's HTML/CSS/JS-based mobile OS. cheap phones in emerging markets. partners: ZTE, LG, telefónica. killed sept 2016. KaiOS forked from the codebase, still ships on feature phones. |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
GarageBand.com (the music community) 📖 1999 - 2010 the peer-review music platform for unsigned musicians (1999-2010). george martin was an advisor. acquired by ilike (2006), then myspace (2009). nothing to do with apple's garageband software. |
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| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2007|
|_____|
|
astalavista.box.sk 📖 1994 - 2007 dormant the warez search engine. swiss-hosted under .box.sk. you typed software name, got crack/serial/FTP links. peak 1996-2003. faded with DMCA + bittorrent shift. cultural backbone of early-2000s piracy in countries where commercial software was unaffordable. |
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| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Ultima Online (the cultural era) 📖 1997 - 2010 dormant the 2D isometric medieval mmorpg from 1997. peak ~250k subs around 2003. servers still run in 2026 under broadsword online games but the world feels empty. the cultural era ended around 2010. |
~ recently added ~
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2009|
|_____|
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easyInternetCafé 📖 1999 - 2009 easyinternetcafe was stelios haji-ioannou's bet that the internet cafe would become a high-street utility, the same way easyjet had become a low-cost airline. it opened in june '99 on tottenham court road as easyeverything, scaled to about 75 outlets at peak including an 800-terminal warehouse on ti |
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| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2003|
|_____|
|
Sun Cobalt Qube 📖 1998 - 2003 the cobalt qube was a small blue cube that ran red hat linux as a turnkey web server. you plugged it in, opened a browser to an ip on your lan, ran through a setup wizard, and the box was hosting email and a website by lunch. cobalt networks shipped the first qube in march '98. sun acquired cobalt i |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Facebook Poke 📖 2012 - 2014 poke was facebook's first snapchat clone. ios only, shipped on december 21 2012 about a week after snapchat rejected facebook's reported $3 billion buyout. you sent a photo or a 10-second video to a friend, it disappeared after one viewing. facebook pulled it from the app store on may 9 2014. intern |
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| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Logitech Harmony Express 📖 2019 - 2020 the harmony express was logitech's alexa-driven universal remote. you held a button, you said "watch netflix", a hub on the tv stand fired the right ir blasts and switched the inputs. it launched april 25 2019 at $250. logitech killed the cloud connection on september 30 2020. without the cloud the |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2010|
|_____|
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LeapFrog Leapster 📖 2003 - 2010 the leapster was leapfrog's kids handheld. cartridges, a stylus, a screen that played math and reading software dressed up as videogames. it shipped in october '03, sat in the toy aisle next to the v.smile for seven years, then got quietly retired in july '10 when the leapster explorer replaced the |
~ guestbook ~
> InfiniteOmegle @ 2026-05-28 — on Omegle (2009 - 2023)
At its core, Omegle was a pure product. I had some fun chats on it in my teen years but, unfortunately, had to see a few dicks as well. I can see why it eventually had to go. My heart goes out to all those that...
> fjordpineapple @ 2026-05-25 — on Winamp (1997 - 2013 (cult era ended), zombie 2014+)
q to queue a song
j to jump to a song
cries of "PRESS B!" when a rubbish song came on
winamp times were good times
> the_eternal_paradox @ 2026-05-23 — on Personal Homepages (the cultural form) (1995 - 2010)
I have one!! It's an absolute mess, but a joy...
> RefusedToLetGo @ 2026-05-24 — on Google Wave (2009 - 2012)
A small group of friends and dnd players used a fork of it (walkaround, still on google code) up until 2019 when google app engine was sort of soft deprecated for firebase.
The real time chat and doc format was...
> (latest tributes from across the graveyard. submit a grave or leave a tribute on any page.)
~ web ring ~
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