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 ~
- Async Art died 3 years ago (23 October 2023). async art was the san francisco nft platform built around an unusual mechanic. a piece had a master and a set of layers
- 10.or died 5 years ago (23 October 2021). huaqin technology builds phones that leave the factory wearing other companies' names, and in september 2017 it put its
- PandoDaily died 7 years ago (23 October 2019). pandodaily was the tech blog sarah lacy started after leaving techcrunch, funded by the same silicon valley figures it c
- Koubachi died 7 years ago (23 October 2019). zurich, 2009: an ETH spin-off decided a houseplant should be able to ask for water. the sensor it built worked for ten y
- AllMyVideos died 10 years ago (23 October 2016). an anti-piracy trade report had put this one at just under a million dollars a year in profit on an 85 percent margin. t
- Miso TV died 12 years ago (23 October 2014). the television check-in was a real idea for about two years. miso launched it at sxsw in march 2010, raised money from g
- True.com died 13 years ago (23 October 2013). forty-three million member records were the most valuable thing left when true beginnings went into chapter 11 in 2013,
- Ceefax died 14 years ago (23 October 2012). ceefax was the bbc's teletext service. it ran for thirty-eight years inside the vertical blanking interval of the analog
- and 2 more on this day
~ 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 |
|2009-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Samsung Messages 📖 2009 - 2026 samsung messages was the stock sms client samsung shipped on galaxy phones from the touchwiz era onward. samsung announced its end-of-service in early 2026 and told users to migrate to google messages. the galaxy s26 line shipped without it on day one. after july 2026 the app was pulled from the gal |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Messenger.com 📖 2015 - 2026 messenger.com was the standalone web client for facebook's chat product, spun out from facebook chat in 2015 and folded back into facebook.com eleven years later. the desktop apps for windows and mac were killed in december 2025. the website died in april 2026. the messenger app on phones is still a |
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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 |
|2002-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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NateOn 📖 2002 - 2025 dormant nateon was the korean instant messenger that overtook msn in its home country in may 2005 and stayed on top for the rest of the decade. sk communications built it as a bolt-on to the nate portal and welded it to the cyworld minihompy boom. by 2009 the subscriber count was ten million. kakaotalk holl |
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| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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HeyTell 📖 2010 - 2025 two people ran heytell for fifteen years, which is longer than most funded messengers manage. steven hugg and jen harvey shipped it in february 2010 under the company name voxilate: you held a button down and talked, and letting go put a short audio file on somebody else's phone a second later. it p |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Tinychat 📖 2009 - 2024 tinychat launched in february 2009 as a way to open a video chatroom inside a browser tab. by 2011 it was raising money from ashton kutcher and diddy. paltalk bought it in december 2014 and kept it running for another decade as a side property. the shutdown notice appeared on the site on december 16 |
see all 118 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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|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 |
|2008-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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PHOTOHITO 📖 2008 - 2026 kakaku.com runs japan's price comparison site, and in february 2008 it hung a photo community off the camera half of its own database. for eighteen years every picture on photohito carried the body and the lens that made it, which turned the whole site into an argument about equipment conducted enti |
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| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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LINE VOOM 📖 2021 - 2026 japan does not use whatsapp, it uses line, and for five years one of the four tabs at the bottom of that app was a tiktok. line voom replaced the friends-only timeline in november 2021 with an algorithmic video feed nobody had asked for. it was switched off around 11am on 30 september 2026 and the l |
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| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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DataLounge 📖 1995 - 2026 datalounge opened in may 1995 as a gay web portal run out of new york and turned into an anonymous forum that outlasted almost everything it started alongside. thirty-one years, more than thirty-six and a half million posts, one webmaster persona and a house style it never updated. it closed on 31 j |
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| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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holoearth 📖 2022 - 2026 three point one nine nine billion yen is what cover wrote off when it closed holoearth at nine in the evening on a sunday in june 2026. the hololive metaverse had been open to the public since late 2022 and had only been a finished 1.0 for fourteen months. the reason cover gave was a change of devel |
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| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Horizon Worlds (Quest) 📖 2021 - 2026 horizon worlds on the meta quest headset was zuckerberg's metaverse bet in its purest form, the vr social world the avatar selfie was supposed to sell. it launched december 2021 for quest owners in the us and canada, struggled to keep more than a few hundred thousand monthly users, became a meme abo |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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iSpot 📖 2009 - 2026 on 27 june 2009 the open university put up a website where you could post a photograph of an insect and have somebody who knew insects tell you what it was. seventeen years later the university decided it could no longer provide the support the site needed, and switched it off. by then 77,000 observ |
~ software & apps ~
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| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Microsoft Publisher 📖 1991 - 2026 microsoft's cheap desktop-publishing app for anyone who was not a designer. it shipped alongside word and excel in office starting 1991, taught a generation of school computer labs how to lay out a bulletin without opening a real page-layout tool, and got quietly retired on 13 october 2026 when micr |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Struckd 📖 2016 - 2026 two founders in zurich shipped a phone app in july 2016 that let you assemble a 3d game by dragging pieces around, with no code anywhere in it. by april 2021 people had made over a million games on it and the user base was somewhere around six million, grown without paid marketing. unity bought the |
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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TV Time 📖 2012 - 2026 tv time started as tvshow time, a paris startup that shipped a tv-episode tracking app around 2012. an american company called whipclip acquired it in december 2016 and rebranded the whole product to tv time in may 2017. it grew to over twenty million registered users and became the biggest tv-track |
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| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Microsoft SharePoint Designer 📖 2006 - 2026 frontpage died in 2006 and left two children. expression web took the general web design work and died young. this one took sharepoint, and it survived because it was the only way to build a workflow without opening visual studio: you picked a condition and an action, and it published to the list. m |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Microsoft 3D Viewer 📖 2016 - 2026 3d viewer arrived in the windows store on 11 march 2016 under the name view 3d. after two renames it shipped in the box with windows 10 as the place your machine opened a 3d model. it was one leg of the creators update program built around paint 3d and remix 3d, and it outlived every other part of t |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Tenor API 📖 2015 - 2026 the tenor api was the gif search endpoint that powered the discord picker, the whatsapp gif tab and a long bench of other chat clients. it grew out of riffsy, the gif keyboard startup founded in february 2014. google bought tenor in march 2018. on january 13, 2026 google announced the public api wou |
see all 1131 software & apps »
~ streaming & video ~
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| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Naver TV 📖 2012 - 2026 by march 2026 youtube was taking about half of all the time koreans spent in entertainment apps, 50 million of them, 44 hours each a month. naver tv had been the domestic answer to that since july 2012, first as naver tv cast and then under the shorter name, and it was where you went for the legal c |
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| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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NetEase CC 📖 2009 - 2026 hangzhou, december 2009: netease's research institute shipped a voice client for gamers because yy and is had already proved the market would install one. it stayed plumbing until may 2016, when the company renamed it cc直播 and pointed it at cameras. netease owned the games and ran the official tourn |
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|2019-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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BET+ 📖 2019 - 2026 tyler perry owned a piece of this one, which is most of the reason it existed. bet+ launched on 19 september 2019 with his catalog as its spine and spent seven years making scripted series for an audience the large streamers kept treating as a genre rather than a market. paramount skydance bought hi |
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|2020-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Trovo 📖 2020 - 2026 trovo was tencent's twitch competitor, launched july 2020 in the united states after a brief private beta under the name madcat. it opened with a reported $30 million creator partnership fund and tiered subscriptions similar to twitch's model. it never closed the gap to twitch or youtube gaming. ten |
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|2015-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Kakao TV 📖 2015 - 2026 kakao tv launched in june 2015 as the video layer inside the messenger every korean phone already had. it carried my little television, it absorbed daum's live broadcasting service in 2017, and in 2020 it spent real money on vertical dramas made for a phone screen. none of it held. kakao removed the |
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|1989-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Super! drama TV 📖 1989 - 2026 for seventeen years it was called super channel and star trek ran on it without a single gap. the rename to super! drama tv in 2006 came with a new strategy of chasing first-run american hits, which worked until the streaming services arrived with more money. j:com dropped the channel in september 2 |
see all 382 streaming & video »
~ news & publishing ~
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|2001-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Autistici/Inventati 📖 2001 - 2026 for twenty five years an italian volunteer collective ran free email and blog hosting for people the police were interested in, and it survived every server seizure aimed at it. in august 2026 the us treasury designated a/i a specially designated global terrorist. the bank account froze, the domain |
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|1995-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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ProHosting 📖 1995 - 2026 across the top of free.prohosting.com, all through the 2000s, ran a line of text saying the company had hosted over 2,122,500 sites since 1996. that was the free floor of a web host in provo, utah that made its money on paid plans, and the floor was switched off on 1 january 2011 with a note telling |
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| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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SAPO Blogs 📖 2003 - 2026 sapo blogs was the free blog host attached to portugal's own portal, opened in november 2003 when publishing in portuguese meant either blogger or nothing. it carried the portuguese blogosphere through its whole decade and then carried its remains for another one. sapo announced the end on 12 januar |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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4Columns 📖 2016 - 2026 ten years was the whole plan. a private foundation paid for four reviews a week, every friday, starting in september 2016, and the budget was scoped to run out in the summer of 2026. it did, on schedule, and the magazine stopped publishing. the archive stayed up, which was also part of the plan. |
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|1998-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Digilander 📖 1998 - 2026 digilander was the free web space that came with an italian internet account, first from infostrada and then from libero, and for most of thirty years it was where the italian amateur web actually lived. italiaonline emailed users on 29 april 2026 and closed the whole community on 9 june, taking the |
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|1927-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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CBS News Radio 📖 1927 - 2026 a memo on 20 march 2026 from bari weiss and tom cibrowski told the radio staff and about seven hundred affiliate stations that the service would end on 22 may. ninety-nine years of network radio news finished at around 11:31 that friday night with christopher cruise saying the words cbs news special |
see all 630 news & publishing »
~ the dot-com graveyard ~
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|1992-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Spirit Airlines 📖 1992 - 2026 at 3 a.m. eastern on 2 may 2026 spirit stopped flying, and the last airplane in the yellow paint had already come down at dallas fort worth after midnight. thirty four years earlier it was a michigan charter operator running gamblers to atlantic city. in between it taught every large american carrie |
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|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Foundation 📖 2021 - 2026 the designer-favorite ethereum nft marketplace ran the second curated wave of digital art from 2021 onward. blackdove agreed to buy it in january 2026 and walked away in april after due diligence. founder kayvon tehranian came back to handle the wind-down. roughly $230 million in primary sales and a |
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|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Arkham Exchange 📖 2024 - 2025 arkham exchange was the trading subsidiary of arkham intelligence, the blockchain analytics company. it launched as a crypto derivatives venue in october 2024, expanded into us spot trading in early 2025, added a mobile app and a moonpay fiat onramp in late 2025, and shut on 15 december 2025 after r |
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|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Good Glamm Group 📖 2017 - 2025 good glamm group was india's first beauty-commerce unicorn, founded in 2017 by darpan sanghvi as the direct-to-consumer brand myglamm. it grew into a "house of brands" holding company that stacked owned d2c products under one parent alongside a portfolio of digital media properties. between 2020 and |
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|1670-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Hudson's Bay Company 📖 1670 - 2025 charles ii handed a charter to his cousin prince rupert and seventeen other men on 2 may 1670, giving them the trade of every river draining into hudson bay, which turned out to be roughly a third of canada. the company outlived the fur trade by turning into a department store chain, and then it ran |
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|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Builder.ai 📖 2016 - 2025 builder.ai raised over 450 million dollars on the pitch that an AI called natasha could build your app. wall street journal exposed in august 2019 that a lot of the AI was actually about 700 human coders in india. the company kept going for another six years anyway. a lender seized 37 million from i |
see all 316 the dot-com graveyard »
~ file sharing & p2p ~
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|2005-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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360doc Personal Library 📖 2005 - 2026 360doc opened in 2005 as somewhere to clip an article you wanted to keep. twenty years later it held more than eighty million accounts and 1.1 billion saved pieces of writing, almost none of it written by the people who saved it. in january 2026 the owners offered the whole platform to anyone able t |
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|2022-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Myrient 📖 2022 - 2026 myrient was 390 terabytes of verified game preservation sets served over plain http by one administrator, with no account and no queue and no torrent client required. it held the no-intro and redump sets alongside the arcade and dos collections, which made it the address people sent each other inste |
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|2017-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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YggTorrent 📖 2017 - 2026 on the night of 3 to 4 march 2026 a hacker calling himself gr0lum deleted ygg's servers, and the largest french-language torrent tracker on the internet was gone by the next morning. it had six million members and had survived court-ordered isp blocks and years of domain seizures. what it did not su |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Listly 📖 2011 - 2025 on 15 september 2025 listly published a shutdown plan, and on 15 november it closed. for fourteen years it made a list that other people could add to, embedded inside somebody else's blog post, which is a curation tool and a comment section wearing one interface. the stated reason was spam. subscrib |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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MemeStreams 📖 2001 - 2025 on 8 november 2025 the dns zone for memestreams.net was edited and the address record came out of it, which is how a community that had been answering since 2001 stopped having a location. tom cross and nick levay built it as an experiment in recommending links to strangers whose taste you had come |
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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BookmarkSync 📖 1999 - 2025 november 1998, a company called syncit shipped a tray icon that watched your favorites folder and copied every change to a server, so the same bookmarks appeared on whichever computer you sat down at. that was a genuine problem in 1999 and the fix was free. a server failure in september 2003 ended t |
see all 198 file sharing & p2p »
~ 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|
|_____|
|
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 |
|2005-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Amazon Mechanical Turk 📖 2005 - 2026 twenty-one years of piecework, named after a fake. amazon posted the closure notice on its own homepage on 25 august 2026 and gave everyone five weeks. mturk ended on 30 september. the machine learning industry it had fed spent the last two years moving to annotation firms that pay vetted specialist |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Sina Cloud 📖 2009 - 2026 november 2009, six months after google app engine opened to the public, sina shipped the first alpha of sina app engine and china had a platform-as-a-service of its own. you pushed php or python at it and paid for the run in a currency called cloud beans. seventeen years later the notice went up: ev |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Relay.app 📖 2021 - 2026 every automation product in 2023 was selling the removal of people from the loop. relay.app sold putting one back in: a workflow that stopped, waited for a human to approve the draft, then carried on. jacob bank left google in july 2021 to build it and raised $8.1 million from khosla ventures and an |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
NFTfi 📖 2020 - 2026 nftfi was the largest peer-to-peer nft-collateralized lending platform on ethereum, launched in may 2020 by stephen young out of cape town, south africa. lenders offered eth or wrapped eth loans against borrowers' nft collateral (mostly bored apes, cryptopunks, doodles and other blue-chip pfp collec |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Manifest V2 📖 2012 - 2026 google took seven years to remove the interface that let a browser extension look at a network request and refuse to make it. manifest v2 was the format chrome extensions were written in from 2012, and its blocking webrequest api is what every serious content blocker was built on. the replacement ha |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Trinket 📖 2013 - 2026 three and a half million people wrote fifty million programs inside it, and on 31 august 2026 every one of those programs became unreachable on the same afternoon. trinket was a python and html sandbox that ran inside a browser tab with nothing to install, which is exactly why it ended up in school |
see all 1497 websites & web hosts »
~ search engines & browsers ~
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| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2008|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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 |
|2006-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Zapytaj Onet 📖 2006 - 2026 poland's largest question and answer site took its last question on 21 september 2026 and switched off nine days later. zapytaj had been running since august 2006, and it closed holding 22.7 million questions against 304 million answers from 4.1 million accounts. ringier axel springer said the habit |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Halalgoogling 📖 2013 - 2026 on 9 july 2013 a search engine launched that did not index anything. it passed queries to google and bing, ran the answers through a filter for content it judged haram, and handed back what was left. the press cycle lasted a week and the site then sat there for thirteen years, serving a front page t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Mullvad Leta 📖 2023 - 2025 on 6 november 2025 mullvad gave its search proxy three weeks to live. leta had spent most of its two and a half years behind a paid vpn account, passing queries to google through a shared cache so that no search could be traced back to the person who typed it. it opened up to everyone in march 2025 |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
goo 📖 1997 - 2025 at one in the afternoon on 25 november 2025, ntt turned off a portal that had been running since 1997. goo started as a japanese-language crawler a year before google existed, grew a whole family of services under one brand, and then spent its last decade serving search results out of google's index |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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TCM Movie Database 📖 2006 - 2025 the american film institute licensed its catalog of feature films to turner classic movies in 2006, and tcm wrapped it in a free public database that grew past 130,000 titles and 1.25 million names. for nineteen years it was where you went to settle an argument about a character actor's filmography. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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AOL Shield Pro 📖 2017 - 2025 aol shield pro was a chromium-based windows web browser that aol sold on a subscription for about $3.99 a month with a 30-day free trial. it launched around late 2017 as a paid successor to the earlier free aol shield browser, aimed at users who wanted a chrome-compatible browser with layered securi |
see all 348 search engines & browsers »
~ media & music ~
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| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2002|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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Rdio 📖 2010 - 2015 spotify's prettier european cousin. better UI, smaller catalog, no chance. |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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 |
|2019-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Luminary 📖 2019 - 2026 one hundred million dollars of venture capital went into a paid app for a medium whose whole distribution model was free and open. luminary launched on 23 april 2019 with more than forty originals and spent its first week watching publishers pull their shows off it. the app went dark on 30 september |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1955-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Columbia House 📖 1955 - 2026 seventy-one years, sixteen million members at the top, and the whole thing ran on one piece of arithmetic: twelve albums for a penny, then a fixed number of albums at the real price with shipping on each. columbia records started it in 1955 to reach people who had no record shop within driving dista |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Nina Protocol 📖 2021 - 2026 jack callahan and his two co-founders spent five years building the thing every musician says they want, a store where the artist keeps everything and no algorithm decides what gets heard. warp and hyperdub put records on it. it still could not pay for itself, and the five people running it said so |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Juno Download 📖 2006 - 2026 on monday 1 june 2026 the store simply stopped selling. twenty years of dance music downloads ended with no countdown and no closing sale, just a farewell note where the catalog used to be. the reason given was that labels can reach their fans directly now, so a webstore in the middle matters less t |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Napster (streaming) 📖 2003 - 2026 the napster brand had a long second life as a streaming service. roxio bought the corpse in 2002 and launched napster 2.0 in october 2003 as a paid music store. ownership passed through best buy, rhapsody, melodyvr, and finally infinite reality. on 1 january 2026 infinite reality cut subscribers off |
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| + |
| RIP |
|1981-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
MTV Music Channels 📖 1981 - 2025 five linear music-video channels died together on 31 december 2025. mtv music, mtv 80s, mtv 90s, club mtv, mtv live. paramount let the distribution contracts expire across europe and on new year's eve they all went dark in the same window. the flagship mtv channel lives on, but it shows reality tele |
~ 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|
|_____|
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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 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 |
|1995-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
HP Pavilion 📖 1995 - 2026 a 75 mhz pentium and a pair of altec lansing speakers in a beige tower, sold on 14 august 1995 as the first computer hewlett-packard ever built for a living room rather than a lab. the pavilion name then spent thirty-one years on the machine that families, students and small offices bought when they |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Mac Pro 📖 2006 - 2026 wwdc, 7 august 2006, and the mac pro arrived as the last mac to leave powerpc, wearing the power mac g5's aluminum case with a couple of extra drive bays in it. the 2013 cylinder made it smaller and made it impossible to upgrade, and that cost apple six years of the professional market. the 2019 lat |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Belkin Wemo (cloud) 📖 2012 - 2026 belkin wemo was the smart-home line that launched at ces 2012 with a wifi smart plug and a motion sensor. it ran on belkin's own cloud for fourteen years across smart plugs and switches with a long tail of cameras and kitchen gear. belkin (owned by foxconn since 2018) announced the end of support on |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Asus ZenFone 📖 2014 - 2026 asus announced the first zenfones at CES in january 2014 and spent twelve years never quite getting to scale. the line's best years were 2021 to 2023, when the zenfone 8, 9 and 10 were the only phones left that put a top-end chip in a body you could work with one hand. then asus made it big like eve |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Gumstix 📖 2003 - 2025 gordon kruberg started gumstix in 2003 and had a full linux computer measuring 20 by 80 millimeters on sale by may 2004, which was most of a decade before a hobbyist could buy a raspberry pi. the boards went into robots and research instruments, anywhere the computer had a weight budget, and geppett |
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| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Limitless Pendant 📖 2024 - 2025 limitless was the second life of rewind ai. rewind had shipped a mac screen-recording app in 2022, then in april 2024 the team rebranded as limitless and pre-announced a $99 clip-on pendant that recorded and transcribed every conversation it heard. meta acquired the company on 5 december 2025, stopp |
see all 547 devices & gadgets »
~ games & communities ~
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| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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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|2015-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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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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|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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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 |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Star Conflict 📖 2012 - 2026 fourteen years, which is the number gaijin kept returning to in its goodbye letter. star conflict opened in beta in july 2012 and switched its servers off on 9 october 2026 at 10:00 gmt, one day earlier than the april announcement had promised. the stated reasons were infrastructure costs and a play |
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| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Mario Kart Tour 📖 2019 - 2026 276 million downloads over seven years, and an estimated 268.5 million dollars, which works out to under a dollar a head. that was mario kart tour, nintendo's gacha version of the only racing game it has ever needed. new content stopped in october 2023 and the servers stopped at 11pm pacific on 29 s |
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| RIP |
|2023-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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World Dai Star: Yume no Stellarium 📖 2023 - 2026 on 17 july 2026 kms posted the notice, nine days short of the game's third birthday. yumesute was the game arm of a bandai namco filmworks project about teenage stage actors in asakusa and ueno, and it ran rhythm charts you could not actually fail. the servers went off on 29 september. the refund ma |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Let It Die 📖 2016 - 2026 the apocalypse in this game is dated 2026, and 2026 is when the servers went off. let it die dropped you at the bottom of a tower on a drowned piece of tokyo with no clothes on, free to play, supervised by a grim reaper on a skateboard, and when you died your corpse was shipped into somebody else's |
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|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Warface: Clutch 📖 2013 - 2026 on 25 august 2026 my.games switched off the last console servers and the international warface was gone, thirteen years after its worldwide release and fourteen after the russian beta. crytek's kyiv studio had built it as a free shooter for markets that were never going to pay sixty dollars for one, |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Crazy Arcade 📖 2001 - 2026 crazy arcade opened in korea on 16 october 2001 with one mode: eight people in a small grid dropping water balloons on each other until one was left. it was in every pc bang in the country within a year, and by late 2002 nexon was counting thirty-five million registered players. hudson soft sued ove |
see all 942 games & communities »
~ ai assistants ~
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| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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Replika (pre-2023 romantic era) 📖 2017 - 2023 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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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 |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Google Assistant 📖 2016 - 2026 a billion devices had it installed and about five hundred million people used it every month. google announced in august 2026 that it would be discontinued on 4 september. what killed it was the technology that replaced it: the assistant ran on intent parsing and hand written actions, and the large |
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| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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MindMeld 📖 2011 - 2026 cisco paid $125 million in may 2017 for a conversational ai platform and open-sourced it two years after that. the code sat on github collecting 694 stars and 193 forks, and stopped getting releases in november 2022. on 28 july 2026 somebody added a notice to the readme saying the thing had been sur |
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| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Project Mariner 📖 2024 - 2026 google deepmind showed project mariner on december 11, 2024 as a chrome extension that took screenshots of your active tab, sent them to gemini, and clicked its way through whatever you had asked for. it scored 83.5 percent on webvoyager as a single agent, which was state of the art at the time, and |
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| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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Yupp AI 📖 2024 - 2026 yupp was a crowdsourced ai model-picker site launched in late 2024 by pankaj gupta and gilad mishne, both ex-linkedin. users could run the same prompt through 800-plus models across every major lab and vote on which output they preferred. the anonymized preference data was meant to be sold back to m |
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| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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OpenAI Sora 1 📖 2024 - 2026 sora 1 was openai's first text-to-video product. the research preview landed 15 february 2024, the public sora turbo release dropped on 9 december 2024 inside the 12-days-of-openai launch window, and the us retirement landed 13 march 2026 when sora 2 became the default for all us users. the web and |
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|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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Supermaven 📖 2024 - 2025 jacob jackson had already built tabnine when he started supermaven in february 2024, and the pitch was speed. a completion model called babble, with a context window that opened at 300,000 tokens and reached a million by july. bessemer led a $12 million round in september and cursor bought the compa |
~ phenomena ~
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| RIP |
|1990s|
| 2005|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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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|1997-|
| 2007|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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|
|_____|
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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 |
|2008-|
| 2026|
|_____|
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bokete 📖 2008 - 2026 eighteen years of people writing one line under somebody else's photograph, and the counter went past a hundred million of those lines. bokete did not run out of users, it ran out of a codebase anyone could safely repair, and a weak yen made every month of hosting heavier than the last. the posting |
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| RIP |
|2025-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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DogeQuest 📖 2025 - 2025 four weeks is the entire life of this one. the domain was taken out on 17 march 2025 through an anonymous registrar, the site put the names and street addresses of american tesla owners on an interactive map with a molotov cocktail for a mouse cursor, and by 14 april the server behind it had stopped |
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| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
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CBP One 📖 2020 - 2025 nearly a million people had booked through it, about 1,450 a day. on 20 january 2025 the scheduling function was removed at noon eastern and every pending appointment was cancelled. seven weeks later the app updated itself on the same phones and came back under a different name, with a button for re |
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| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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CongressEdits 📖 2014 - 2024 an ip address inside the us capitol complex edited a wikipedia article, and a bot announced it in public. that was the entire product. ed summers wrote congressedits on 8 july 2014 after seeing the british version of the same idea, and then released the code so that nine other countries could run th |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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Odd Todd 📖 2001 - 2024 todd rosenberg lost his job in june 2001 and put a flash cartoon called laid off: a day in the life on the web that november. it was about doing nothing all day and it went around the whole broke american internet fast enough to knock his hosting over. people tipped him through a link on the page, a |
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| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2024|
|_____|
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ExitMundi.nl 📖 2001 - 2024 "captivating text and appropriate images... delivered with unremitting good cheer. but still, you are gonna die." new scientist's line sat on the front door of exitmundi.nl for years, next to a single link that said enter. maarten keulemans built the site in 2001, sold fifty of its scenarios as a du |
~ recently added ~
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|????-|
| ????|
|_____|
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BATON=RELAY 📖 2020 a hundred and thirty days. i-tron spent seven months building a voice-actress project around sixteen newcomers, with a known manga artist on character design, then put it on television in april 2020 and announced its shutdown on 30 june. the cd signing event went ahead a week later anyway, for a gam |
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| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Yumeiro Cast 📖 2015 - 2019 six weeks separated the third anniversary broadcast from the shutdown notice, which is the whole emotional arc of a live-service game compressed into a single autumn. sega closed it on 15 january 2019 at 13:59. the strange part is everything after: an offline archive app in 2024, then the voice cast |
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| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2020|
|_____|
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Fight League 📖 2017 - 2020 mixi shipped this one into six countries and territories at once in june 2017, which is more confidence than most japanese phone games get on day one. it ran two years and nine months and spent the back half of that being rescued. it got an anime in february 2019 and a transfusion of monster strike |
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| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2022|
|_____|
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BlazBlue Alternative: Dark War 📖 2021 - 2022 announced in august 2017 for a 2018 release, shipped in february 2021, dead by january 2022. arc system works gave this one three and a half years of development and eleven and a half months of life, and the story it existed to tell never reached its ending. the producer apologized for that specific |
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| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
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Digimon Links 📖 2016 - 2019 bandai namco put a digimon raising game on phones in march 2016 and ran it in two languages, linkz in japan and links everywhere else. both halves stopped on the same day in july 2019, three years and four months in. the replacement, rearise, lasted until april 2022 and then did exactly the same thi |
~ guestbook ~
> hyperflame @ 2026-10-11 — on Newgrounds (1995 - present)
i still use newgrounds on a daily basis for listeining to music
im gonna be real sad when it dies
> JENŐ @ 2026-10-09 — on Freewebs / Webs.com (2001 - 2023)
Ne hiányolj.
Nem mentem el.
Egyszerűen azzá váltam, amit mindketten szeretünk.
Naplemente.
Szentjánosbogár.
Csillagfény.
A nyárfa.
Minden olyan szép dolog, ami miatt megállsz egy pillanatra ...
Hol találsz meg...
> a53 @ 2026-10-21 — on 8tracks (2008 - 2024)
i found 8tracks through tumblr just before lockdown and discovered so many wonderful songs through there. shoutout to all the fan playlist lovingly put together <3 i still think of them when their songs pop up on my...
> josephm101 @ 2026-10-16 — on MSN Messenger (1999 - 2014)
There was something special about having to wait to get home before you could see who was online and what new messages were waiting for you.
> (latest tributes from across the graveyard. submit a grave or leave a tribute on any page.)
~ web ring ~
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~ a webring of forgotten things ~
