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 ~
» get a weekly grave digest in your inbox «
one short email each sunday. no tracking. unsubscribe with one click.
~ 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 ~
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Yahoo! Messenger 📖 1998 - 2018 BUZZ! BUZZ! the loudest possible way to say i miss you. its emoticons were unmatched. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) 📖 1997 - 2017 the running yellow guy. away messages were poetry. door slam - "snoozyboi89 has signed off." gut punch. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) 📖 2005 - 2019 PIN exchanges were corporate intimacy. R / D ticks were status anxiety. it died defending its keyboard. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Google Talk / Hangouts (Classic) 📖 2005 - 2022 remember when google had ONE messenger? then six? then zero? rest in the merge. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Mail.ru Agent 📖 2003 - 2024 mail.ru agent was the messenger for the russian internet of the 2000s. it launched in may 2003 as an email notifier and grew into a full im client with voice, video, free sms and integration into the mail.ru email account. at peak it ran around 11 million monthly users with about 2 million online at |
see all 89 messengers & chat »
~ social networks ~
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2011|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2002-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Friendster 📖 2002 - 2015 the first social network most americans used. then it became a gaming site. then it disappeared. timeline of a forgotten pioneer. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
Orkut 📖 2004 - 2014 google's first social network attempt. weirdly enormous in brazil and india. 300 million users couldn't save it. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Path 📖 2010 - 2018 "a smaller, more personal social network." capped at 150 friends, like dunbar said. nobody wanted intimate; everyone wanted reach. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Vine 📖 2013 - 2017 six seconds. comedic genius cremated by twitter monetization confusion. tiktok inherited everything but the constraint. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Hi5 📖 2003 - 2018 huge in latin america and turkey. profile customization paradise. eventually pivoted to gaming, then gave up. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Workplace by Meta 📖 2016 - 2026 workplace launched on october 10, 2016 as facebook's bet that the office wanted its own facebook. it grew out of an internal collaboration tool the company already ran, then opened as a paid product where admins paid per seat and employees got news feed, groups, chat, and live video aimed at coworke |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
X Communities 📖 2021 - 2026 twitter announced communities at analyst day in february 2021 and started the beta on september 8 2021. it was meant to be a reddit-style topic forum inside twitter where posts only went to community members but stayed publicly visible. it never crossed 0.4% of platform usage. by 2026 the feature wa |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Triller 📖 2015 - 2025 triller was the loudest of the tiktok rivals during the 2020 india ban and the trump-era tiktok-divestiture noise. ryan kavanaugh wrapped it in a boxing-event marketing budget, claimed user numbers that nobody verified, burned through SPACs and IPO attempts, then got delisted from nasdaq on 30 decem |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Amino 📖 2012 - 2025 amino shut down without warning on 19 december 2025. the servers stopped responding and the apps stopped loading. medialab ai, which had owned the platform since january 2021, never issued a public statement. amino was originally launched in january 2012 by yin wang and ben anderson, who came up wit |
~ software & apps ~
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Samsung Max VPN 📖 2018 - 2026 samsung max was the data-saving vpn samsung shipped on galaxy phones from 2018 onward, born from the corpse of opera max after opera killed its data-saver in 2017. samsung bought the discontinued service, rewrapped it in a galaxy ui, and let it sit on the play store for eight years with somewhere ov |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Lens 📖 2014 - 2026 microsoft lens was the office team's document scanner. it started as office lens on march 17 2014 for windows phone, then expanded to ios and android on april 2 2015. it cropped and de-skewed whiteboards and printed pages, ran OCR, exported to word, pdf, onenote or onedrive. it was free and one of t |
~ streaming & video ~
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2015-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
AnimeKai 📖 2024 - 2026 the largest pirate anime streaming site of early 2026. surfaced after hianime's march 2026 shutdown. died on may 10, 2026 after a fire at its data center power supply, reported around almere in the netherlands. picked up traffic that had nowhere left to go. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
DLive 📖 2017 - 2026 dlive was the blockchain-livestreaming platform charles wayn and cole chen launched in december 2017 as a twitch alternative on the steemit chain. it ran on lemons, a tip currency credited inside the wallet rather than to creators in cash, and built a small big-name moment with the pewdiepie exclusi |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
WWE Network 📖 2014 - 2026 wwe put its entire pay-per-view catalog and every live event behind one $9.99 monthly subscription on february 24, 2014, at a moment when a single ppv night cost fifty or sixty dollars on cable. it was the first serious direct-to-consumer move by a company that owned both the content and the rights, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Mola 📖 2019 - 2025 mola was a streaming service owned by a clove cigarette fortune. djarum took the indonesian rights to the english premier league away from bein sports in october 2018 and launched a platform the following august to carry them. the rights ran out in 2022 and nothing that came after was worth a subscr |
see all 226 streaming & video »
~ news & publishing ~
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Wikinews 📖 2004 - 2026 wikinews was the wikimedia project where volunteers wrote original news reports instead of encyclopedia articles, which meant doing journalism by committee against a deadline nobody could enforce. it launched on 8 november 2004 and never found the volunteers to keep it filled, because wikipedia's ow |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Infowars 📖 1999 - 2026 infowars ran out of austin, texas from 1999 and ended because of a defamation bill it could not pay. the families of the children killed at sandy hook elementary won judgments against alex jones worth close to one and a half billion dollars, and the courts spent four years converting his company int |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Relevo 📖 2022 - 2025 vocento hired seventy-odd journalists off marca and as, pointed them at readers under forty, and told them to cover the sports the old papers ignored. in august 2023 that newsroom broke the story that ended luis rubiales, which is a bigger scoop than either of the papers it was built against managed |
see all 257 news & publishing »
~ the dot-com graveyard ~
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
RTFKT 📖 2020 - 2025 benoit pagotto co-founded rtfkt studios in january 2020 with steven vasilev and chris le as a digital fashion studio building nft sneakers and ar try-on filters. an early collaboration with the artist fewocious in february 2021 sold seven hundred pairs of digital sneakers for 3.1 million dollars in |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Cruise 📖 2013 - 2024 cruise was a general-motors-owned autonomous ride service that ran driverless robotaxis in san francisco and a handful of us metros. on 2 october 2023 a cruise vehicle dragged a pedestrian for about 20 feet after another car hit her; the california DMV pulled the permits three weeks later and cruise |
see all 183 the dot-com graveyard »
~ file sharing & p2p ~
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2001-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Subscene 📖 2001 - 2024 subscene was a search box on top of a pile of text files. it never hosted a single film. people who had already found the film came here for the words underneath it, in whatever language the copy they had did not carry. the notice went up on 2 may 2024 and the site was gone the next evening, the own |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2011-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
BayFiles 📖 2011 - 2023 bayfiles was gottfrid svartholm and fredrik neij's 2011 attempt to run a file-hosting service that followed the rules. they hired dmca agents. the terms of service explicitly banned copyrighted uploads. the site closed briefly around neij's 2014 arrest, came back under new operators in 2018 as an an |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
RARBG 📖 2008 - 2023 rarbg ran torrent listings out of bulgaria for fifteen years and collected court-ordered blocks in a dozen countries, which cost its users about the length of one dns change. no police force ever closed it. on 31 may 2023 the operators posted that some of the team had died of covid complications and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Zippyshare 📖 2006 - 2023 zippyshare was the polish-run cyberlocker that lived from 2006 to 2023. forty-five million monthly visits at its peak. the blue download button at the bottom of a forum thread carried mp3 albums and software cracks across seventeen years. killed by ad blockers cutting revenue to near zero and the 20 |
see all 98 file sharing & p2p »
~ websites & web hosts ~
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2009|
|_____|
|
GeoCities 📖 1994 - 2009 the original homepage utopia. neighborhoods, animated GIFs, MIDI files, <marquee>, "under construction" signs. yahoo killed it in cold blood. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
Delicious / del.icio.us 📖 2003 - 2017 social bookmarking when bookmarking was social. tags were the future. then they weren't. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
FriendFeed 📖 2007 - 2015 the geek's social aggregator. facebook bought it, hired the team, pretended it never existed. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Google Wave 📖 2009 - 2010 "what if email and chat had a baby?" they shipped it. nobody understood it. dead in 14 months. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2013|
|_____|
|
Google Reader 📖 2005 - 2013 RSS was the open social network. google killed it without warning and the open web has been mourning since. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
YouTube comments before Google+ 📖 2005 - 2013 they were chaos but they were OURS. the google+ unification was when youtube comments officially died as culture. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1999-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1991-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2005-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Botanix 📖 2022 - 2026 botanix was a bitcoin layer-two network built by botanix labs, founded in june 2022 by belgian engineer willem schroé. the pitch was an evm-equivalent layer running on bitcoin via a design schroé called the spiderchain, which used a rotating federation of orchestrator nodes rather than a single cust |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Binance NFT 📖 2021 - 2026 binance nft launched 24 june 2021 as the largest centralized NFT marketplace by trading volume, at the top of the 2021-2022 NFT boom. it ran through the market crash of 2022-2024 with progressively narrower feature scope (bitcoin ordinals support dropped 4 april 2024, polygon support dropped septemb |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Loopring 📖 2017 - 2026 loopring was one of the first decentralized exchange protocols to bring zero-knowledge rollups to ethereum, founded in 2017 by daniel wang, a shanghai-based software engineer previously at google and jd.com. the lrc token ico in august 2017 raised about $45 million in ether before the china crackdow |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
EliteSingles 📖 2013 - 2026 elitesingles was the berlin company affinitas spinning out their eDarling formula in english. it launched in 2013, targeting university-educated professionals through a long personality questionnaire scored on the big five model. it expanded into the US in 2014 and reached over 13 million users by t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Newtoki / Manatoki / Booktoki 📖 2018 - 2026 the largest illegal korean webtoon piracy hub and its two sister sites. ran from 2018 to april 27, 2026, killed by an operator who saw the emergency blocking law coming. monthly traffic across the three brands exceeded 100 million visits at shutdown. |
see all 668 websites & web hosts »
~ search engines & browsers ~
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Internet Explorer 📖 1995 - 2022 the punching bag. rendered tables creatively. crashed often. the <blink> tag's enemy. retired with grudging respect. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1995-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Lycos / Excite / HotBot 📖 1995 - 2010s an entire ecosystem of forgotten search competition. dogpile remembered them. nobody else did. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1997-|
| 2017|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2016|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1993-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
ALIWEB 📖 1993 - 2025 martijn koster announced aliweb on 30 november 1993 from nexor in nottingham, which makes it the first search engine anyone built for the web. it did not crawl. site owners wrote a small index file describing their own pages and registered where it lived, and aliweb fetched those files on a schedule |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1996-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
My Yahoo! 📖 1996 - 2024 my yahoo was yahoo's customizable portal homepage, launched july 15 1996 as a per-user version of the main yahoo directory. you picked modules from a catalog (stock quotes, weather, sports scores, your email preview), arranged them on a grid, set a color theme. by 2005 yahoo had layered RSS aggregat |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1998-|
| 2024|
|_____|
|
Pathfinder.gr 📖 1998 - 2024 the first greek web portal, online from october 1998, built by phaistos networks out of mires in crete. it had the full kit of the period, its own search engine over greek pages, its own mail at pathfinder.gr, and a whole community layer underneath. in april 2018 it closed all of that in one go and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2019-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Neeva 📖 2019 - 2023 neeva was a paid, ad-free, privacy-first search engine built by two ex-google ads executives. it launched to the us public in june 2021 for $4.95 a month, added generative-ai answers in january 2023, then announced the consumer shutdown on 20 may 2023. snowflake acquired the company two weeks later |
see all 172 search engines & browsers »
~ media & music ~
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2000-|
| 2010|
|_____|
|
Kazaa / LimeWire / Bearshare 📖 early 2000s - 2010ish downloaded a virus and an album the same afternoon. installed three browser toolbars by accident. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2007-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Grooveshark 📖 2007 - 2015 free music streaming with no apparent licensing. legally questionable. spiritually beloved. eventually sued out of existence. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2015|
|_____|
|
Rdio 📖 2010 - 2015 spotify's prettier european cousin. better UI, smaller catalog, no chance. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Monkeybuzz 📖 2012 - 2025 dormant monkeybuzz was a brazilian independent music site founded in 2012 by lucas repullo, who was twenty years old at the time. for thirteen years it covered alternative and independent records in portuguese, ran live nights with a sao paulo label and spent a stretch feeding mtv brasil's web portal. on 5 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Twitch Soundtrack 📖 2020 - 2023 twitch soundtrack was a rights-cleared background-music library that twitch launched into beta on 30 september 2020, in the same twitchcon feature push that had produced twitch sings the year before. the pitch was that dmca takedown notices from the riaa were tearing through streamer vods and clips, |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2008-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
NoiseTrade 📖 2008 - 2023 noisetrade was a nashville direct-to-fan music and book distribution platform founded in april 2008 by derek webb. the trade was simple: an artist uploaded a free album as zipped mp3s, a fan handed over an email address and a zip code in exchange for the download, the artist kept the email list. tip |
~ devices & gadgets ~
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2012|
|_____|
|
Microsoft Zune 📖 2006 - 2012 the brown one. squirting songs to friends. the saddest social music device ever shipped. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2012-|
| 2018|
|_____|
|
Pebble 📖 2012 - 2018 the kickstarter that started kickstarter. e-paper smartwatch. fitbit ate it. the apple watch buried it. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Logitech POP 📖 2016 - 2025 the logitech pop kit was a small wireless button paired with a wifi bridge. each button could fire up to three scenes depending on how it was pressed: a tap, a double tap or a long hold. the scenes triggered devices on philips hue lights or sonos speakers, with lutron blinds and nest support added l |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2022-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Peloton Guide 📖 2022 - 2025 peloton guide was a machine-learning strength-training camera launched 5 april 2022 in the us, uk, canada and australia at $295 (down from the announced $495). it plugged into a tv and used pose estimation to track reps, match member form to instructor form, and highlight recent muscle-group work. p |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2025|
|_____|
|
Moxie 📖 2020 - 2025 moxie was a small robot that talked with children between five and ten, and for a lot of families with autistic kids it reached something no app had managed. none of the intelligence was in the robot. speech recognition and the conversational model both ran on embodied's servers, so when a lead inve |
see all 261 devices & gadgets »
~ games & communities ~
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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.) |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2020-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
The Elder Scrolls: Blades 📖 2020 - 2026 bethesda's mobile elder scrolls spinoff launched in early access during 2018 and went 1.0 on may 12 2020. it ran first-person dungeons stitched together with a town-building meta-game and the timer-and-gem economy mobile demands. critics never warmed to it. it shut down on june 30 2026 after six yea |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Rec Room 📖 2016 - 2026 rec room was the seattle vr-social platform that ran from 2016 to 2026. it raised about $289 million and hit a $3.5 billion peak valuation in december 2021. with 150 million lifetime players it never figured out how to make the unit economics work. the founders announced closure on march 30 2026 and |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Turtle WoW 📖 2018 - 2026 turtle wow started in 2018 with about a hundred people on one realm and grew into the largest classic+ server on the internet, running the 2006 version of world of warcraft with fan-built zones and races blizzard never made. in august 2025 it passed 44,000 concurrent players. that same month blizzar |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2016-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Pocket Mortys 📖 2016 - 2026 pocket mortys was a pokemon parody with enough licensing muscle to say so out loud. you played rick c-123. you caught wild mortys with manipulation chips and fused duplicates of a type into stronger ones, grinding toward the council of ricks. it ran a full decade on content drops and made enough mon |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
Real Racing 3 📖 2013 - 2026 real racing 3 was ea and firemonkeys' mobile racing flagship. it shipped february 2013 with licensed cars from porsche to bugatti and ran for thirteen years on a freemium grind that critics hated and players kept paying for. ea delisted the app in december 2025 and pulled the servers on 19 march 202 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2018-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
NBA Live 19 📖 2018 - 2026 nba live 19 was the 22nd and final installment of ea's basketball series, released september 7, 2018 on ps4 and xbox one. it was developed by ea tiburon as a relaunch attempt after the cancelled nba live 20. metacritic 75/73, decent sales, no successor ever scheduled. ea pulled it from digital store |
see all 423 games & communities »
~ ai assistants ~
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2024-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Cortana 📖 2014 - 2023 cortana was microsoft's answer to siri, a voice assistant with a name borrowed from halo and a personality it never quite needed. it launched on windows phone and rode along into windows 10 on every desktop. the trouble was that hardly anyone talked to their pc, and the ones who did were not on micr |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Kite 📖 2014 - 2022 adam smith started kite in 2014 to autocomplete code with machine learning, years before anybody used the word copilot for that. it reached roughly half a million developers a month on almost no marketing spend and converted nearly none of them into revenue. the founder's own goodbye said the team h |
~ phenomena ~
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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. |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| 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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1984-|
| 2014|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2004-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Numa Numa 📖 2004 - 2023 gary brolsma was eighteen when he pointed a webcam at himself in december 2004 and lip-synced an o-zone song from the shoulders up. it reached roughly seven hundred million views, which made it the second most watched video on the internet before the internet had a video site. he wanted no part of t |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1990-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Entertainment Weekly (print) 📖 1990 - 2022 ew was the american pop-culture weekly. movies, tv, music, books, the weekly report cards for the fall network schedule. time inc launched it on 16 february 1990, meredith absorbed time inc in 2018, dotdash bought meredith in 2021 for two point seven billion dollars. in february 2022 the new owner a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|1994-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
InStyle (print) 📖 1994 - 2022 instyle was the american celebrity-fashion monthly that time inc launched in june 1994 out of the people magazine editorial workshop. martha nelson ran it from a quarterly test issue to a monthly with a million subscribers inside its first year, and the peak circulation of about one point seven six |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2010-|
| 2019|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2006-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
XTube 📖 2006 - 2021 xtube was the first adult site to import the youtube-style user-upload model on a serious scale. it launched on march 12 2006 out of ontario as a webnovas technologies product, then moved under mindgeek (now aylo) before the end of the decade. the peak was 9 million registered users and roughly an a |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2021-|
| 2021|
|_____|
|
Sulli Deals 📖 2021 - 2021 sulli deals was a web app that put photographs of indian muslim women up as fake auction lots, each one labeled a deal of the day. nothing was for sale and nobody was bidding. the point was to gather over ninety named women, most of them journalists or activists who had criticized hindu nationalism, |
~ recently added ~
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2014-|
| 2020|
|_____|
|
Lightbox (New Zealand) 📖 2014 - 2020 lightbox was new zealand's first subscription streaming service, launched by the phone company spark in august 2014, six months before netflix arrived in the country. it grew mostly by being free with a spark broadband plan, which got it past 355,000 subscribers and also explains why it was never re |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2017-|
| 2023|
|_____|
|
Gimme Radio 📖 2017 - 2023 gimme radio was an internet radio station for metal, built on the idea that the person choosing the next song should be a person. it launched from san francisco in june 2017 with shows hosted by musicians, a live chat running beside the stream, and a buy button on whatever was playing. gimme country |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2013-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
Spinnup 📖 2013 - 2022 spinnup was universal music's do-it-yourself distributor, started in sweden in 2013. you paid a flat fee, kept all your royalties, and your record went to spotify and apple music like anyone else's, while universal's scouts read the platform as a talent pipeline. more than a hundred thousand artists |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2003-|
| 2026|
|_____|
|
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 |
___
/ \
| + |
| RIP |
|2009-|
| 2022|
|_____|
|
U17 📖 2009 - 2022 u17, known in chinese as 有妖气, is where china's original web comics scene lived for about six years. it opened commercially in 2009 as a place for amateurs to serialize their own work, carried more than forty five thousand titles, and produced the properties that the animation studios then came shopp |
~ guestbook ~
~ web ring ~
« previous |
random |
next »
~ a webring of forgotten things ~