DeathWatch – notable web sites that have died
Posted on October 27th, 2009 by Richard Catto 586 views
Like me, there exist many people who have a morbid fascination with the demise of web sites they once regularly used, read or visited. I recently discovered Archive Team which keeps track of online mortalities. Their Death Watch page, which lists web casualties, makes for fascinating reading. Yahoo features frequently on the page due to the large numbers of Yahoo sites recently shutdown.
What brought this topic on? After a long hiatus, I decided to go back and revisit my old Yahoo 360 blogs that I had created back in 2006, only to discover that the whole of 360 had been wiped out by Yahoo! They didn’t bother to migrate them to my profile, because that was supposed to be done by me. Yahoo did send me an email to this effect on June 30 2009 notifying about this, but they neglected to copy the message to my gmail address, even though I had indicated in my yahoo profile that my gmail address was my primary email address! I have never used my yahoo email address for anything. So all my 360 data is gone for good. Oh well.
Yahoo has recently gone on a crazy shutdown spree, wiping out huge portions of the Internet that they used to control, like GeoCities, for instance. There’s a fascinating article about the origins of GeoCities here. The real story in the article was how badly Yahoo mismanaged that valuable online real estate, and now they’ve just shut it all down, obliterating huge amounts of legacy web sites. The Archive Team tried their best to back it up and mirror GeoCities before Yahoo pulled the plug yesterday, October 26 2009, but guess what? Yahoo refused to assist them in any way to archive the data! Now that’s just mean!
Another site on Death Watch that caught my attention was ma.gnolia.com. Magnolia was a popular social bookmarking site like Delicious or Reddit. It was launched in 2006 and died in a single day on January 30 2009 when all data was lost due to disk failure. The crazy thing was that the owner self-hosted the 500GBs of user created data and had no useable backup. The service is being relaunched now at gnolia.com and is by invitation only. The owner has apparently learnt his lesson and will be using all the data redundancy hosting services that money can buy this time around. This post sums up what went wrong at Magnolia.
One local web site that I used to enjoy reading on and off was tashitagg.co.za. (also tashitagg.com). If you do a search on Wikipedia for tashitagg, you’ll find 6 different articles have a reference link to a tashitagg article, none of which are still accessible, which is a great shame. Tashi Tagg, and her husband, Luke, created tashitagg from their home in Kenilworth, Cape Town. It was originally centred around the first South African Big Brother reality TV show. It gathered a large readership from being ranked high for that show and went on to discuss a whole slew of other reality TV programs, such as The Amazing Race.
Luke wrote a no-holds barred column called The Daily Smoke (link goes to archived site) which was often entertaining reading. As TashiTagg grew, they decided to add blogs to their original site, which also had very active forums. However, I believe the blogs feature proved its undoing as they allowed it to completely takeover the site and ultimately led to a large falling out with their audience over an argument over who owned the copyright to material posted. Tashi and Luke Tagg clarified the issue by telling their contributors that all the content they had added in the blogs didn’t belong to the authors, but to Tashi Tagg, at which point, many blogs were promptly erased and many members departed in anger. That crucial misstep by the owners ultimately led to the disbandment of tashitagg, both of whom now edit tvsa.co.za.
What dead sites do you miss?
Tags: Dead web sites
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