Well it finally happened. Yahoo put webring to rest. Actually I heard they sold it back to the guy who origonally designed it. Web ring was so simple. A centralized server that basically kept track of sites and allowed you to travel from site to site in a ring. Just look for the ring fragment and go to the next site. Of course it never worked right. Hell I remember when I first used webring it was SLOOOOW. Not only that, but the server was down half the time. I guess some would say that webring has been superseeded by search engines and link databases. Which is probably true. It's still sad none the less... well maybe not. I mean can you trust Yahoo with anything? And I'm willing to bet the origonal guy who came up with it made a LOT more money selling it than, he paid to buy it back.
It's really strange that almost all of the web services/sites that defined what I did online a few years ago are dead. Webring was one of these, but I think webring is pretty much obsolete. Remember Guestwoold? They practically defined what a guestbook was. Problems being that it was slow as hell and down half the time (sound familiar?). I think it finally went down for over a month before I just moved my guestbook somewhere else. I got a toonzbook. The cool thing about toonzbook is that you could hijack some of the java script and insert your own stuff. Guess what? A month later toonzbook goes down too (for at least half year). Finally I said screw it and made my own guestbook from scratch. I guess sometimes you really get what you pay for.. nothing.
Then there was WBS during my web chat days. Ah yes, how much time did I spend in anime chat on WBS. Well I hate to think about it... For it's time, WBS was by far the coolest place to chat. Yet another good service that died. So what keeps happening to all these things? As said before webring got sucked up by Yahoo - or more specifically by Geocities, that was then sucked up by Yahoo. Did I meantion I don't like Yahoo? They make me paranoid. Yahoo didn't know what to do with webring, but be assured - what they did do with it they screwed up beyond all recognition. Which brings up Geocities. Remember good ol geocities? Not slow as hell, but still down half the time? The downward spiral started with the pop up ad. But once Yahoo aquired them, it all went downhill. Sorry, have you been using the same username at geocities for 3 years? Too bad, the borg cube Yahoo has decided to assimalate you all, and you will choose a member name not already held by a yahoo e-mail adress (already at the saturation point). Great. It's sort of funny because Geocities seem to be continually improving themselves up to the point Yahoo aquired them. Then all of a sudden the whole thing went no where. They prevent linking from other sites (which is fair I guess), but they also place bandwidth restrictions on pages. Basically that means that if your page is popular, it's not going to work most of the time. Har har.
WBS got sucked up by the GO network thing. They somehow integrated WBS with infoseek (don't ask <cringe>). Eventually WBS went down for a period of months. One thing you don't do to regular chatters is boot them off of a chat server for MONTHS. Guess what? No one came back! DUH! Of course the cool chatting webscript was replaced by your run of the mill crap java chat. No more 'use your own pictures', no more personality period. It's probably best that they eventually died off. Tripod was aquired by the Lycos thing, although generally it seems like Tripod wasn't completely taken over and neutered like Geocities - but then again Tripod has always been ahead of Geocities.
It just seems sort of strange to me that the internet defines itself with services, then those basically evaporate. From a historical perspective it's like people reminissing about baseball cards or whatever. But there is evidence of that: pictures, and even some baseball cards remaining. Webring? It'll reserrect itself in some way or form, but not as it was. Other things like WBS are just erased in the course of time. It sort of makes you wonder about how you actually define your past. I mean if there's no evidence, did it happen?
As the internet grows, you start to wonder what else will be the next big then, only to dissapear. Maybe Livejournal?
The GO network is dead. WBS came back as java chat, but is now dead again.