@rip.so@rss-parrot.net
I'm an automated parrot! I relay a website's RSS feed to the Fediverse. Every time a new post appears in the feed, I toot about it. Follow me to get all new posts in your Mastodon timeline! Brought to you by the RSS Parrot.
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recent burials and anniversaries
Site URL: rip.so/
Feed URL: rip.so/feed.xml
Posts: 334
Followers: 2
Hitel (1992 - 2007)
Published: August 7, 2026 01:50
hitel was the largest of the four services that were the korean internet before the korean internet, a dial-up world of message boards and clubs you reached by pointing a terminal program at 01410. it began in 1986 as a prestel service run by a newspaper,…
AvantGo (1997 - 2009)
Published: August 7, 2026 01:50
avantgo let you read the web on a handheld before a handheld could reach the web. you subscribed to channels on a desktop computer, and every time you dropped the device in its cradle the client wrote fresh pages onto it for you to read somewhere with no…
Empas (1999 - 2009)
Published: August 7, 2026 01:50
empas launched in december 1999 as a korean search engine built around natural language queries, and for a couple of years it was the country's second portal by page views. in 2005 it did the most interesting thing in its life: it built a search that…
RockYou (2005 - 2019)
Published: August 7, 2026 01:50
rockyou made the widgets that covered myspace and then facebook, super wall and glitter text among them, and for a while in 2007 it was the biggest application developer on facebook's brand new platform. in december 2009 somebody came in through a sql…
ITV Digital (1998 - 2002)
https://rip.so/itv-digital.html
Published: August 7, 2026 01:50
ondigital launched in november 1998 as the first pay-tv platform that came in through the ordinary aerial on your roof, which was meant to be its advantage over sky's dish. the signal turned out weaker than promised across a lot of the country, and the…
Gawab (1999 - 2013)
Published: August 6, 2026 02:01
gawab was arabic-language webmail run out of alexandria in egypt from 1999, and for most of the 2000s it was the mail service a large part of the arabic-reading internet actually used. the interface was a single-page ajax client that worked properly right…
Vivaty (2008 - 2010)
Published: August 6, 2026 02:01
vivaty grew out of media machines, the company built around flux, an x3d and vrml viewer that ran as a browser plugin, and it renamed itself in may 2008 to sell something friendlier than a standards implementation. the product was a 3d room you decorated…
APBnews.com (1998 - 2000)
https://rip.so/apbnews-com.html
Published: August 6, 2026 02:01
apbnews.com launched in august 1998 with venture money and a real newsroom, covering crime and criminal justice for the web at a point when nobody else was doing it at that size. it hired reporters away from the washington post and the associated press and…
Clickmango.com (1999 - 2000)
https://rip.so/clickmango-com.html
Published: August 6, 2026 02:01
clickmango raised its funding in eight days in the autumn of 1999, on a plan to sell vitamins and health products to british households over the web. joanna lumley fronted the launch in january 2000. by the spring the site was taking about two thousand…
Soranet (1999 - 2016)
Published: August 6, 2026 02:01
soranet began in 1999 as a personal link page and became the largest korean-language pornography site on the internet, with more than a million registered accounts. korean authorities blocked the domain in 2004 and the operators answered by moving the…
LineOne (1997 - 2001)
Published: August 6, 2026 01:32
lineone was the internet arriving free inside a sunday newspaper. bt built it in 1997 with two newspaper groups behind it and pushed the setup software into the sunday times on the weekend that paper ran its rich list, which put a dial-up account within…
PlanetQuake (1996 - 2013)
https://rip.so/planetquake.html
Published: August 6, 2026 01:32
planetquake was a fan site for one game that turned into a company. mark surfas built it in 1996 to host and distribute the mods people were making for quake, and the traffic those mods brought made it one of the busiest gaming sites on the early web. it…
Sympatico (1995 - 2012)
Published: August 6, 2026 01:31
sympatico was the page that opened when a canadian opened a browser. bell and the other incumbent phone companies launched it on 29 november 1995 alongside their dial-up service, and for most of its life the portal and the isp were the same thing in most…
bash.org (1999 - 2023)
Published: August 6, 2026 01:31
bash.org was a database of funny things people said on irc, submitted by readers and voted on, running from 1999 under the name qdb. for most of the 2000s it was the closest thing the english-speaking internet had to a shared joke book, and its best…
OzEmail (1992 - 2006)
Published: August 6, 2026 01:31
ozemail started in 1992 as an email service with eight staff and became the loudest name in australian dial-up. it was the first australian technology stock to list on nasdaq, on 28 may 1996, and worldcom paid around 520 million us dollars for it three…
3721 (Yahoo Assistant) (1998 - 2007)
Published: August 5, 2026 09:51
3721 was the plug-in that taught china to hate plug-ins. zhou hongyi built it in 1998 so people could type a chinese word into internet explorer instead of a url, a real idea for a web that assumed you could read english. the trouble was how it got onto…
Erwise (1992 - 1994)
Published: August 5, 2026 05:54
erwise was the first web browser anybody outside a research group could run with a graphical interface, released on 15 april 1992 by four masters students at helsinki university of technology. it drew hyperlinks as underlined text you double clicked and it…
1 vs. 100 (2009 - 2010)
Published: August 5, 2026 05:54
1 vs. 100 was the only thing microsoft ever shipped on xbox live primetime, a service built to run actual game shows on a schedule rather than games you start whenever you feel like it. episodes went out live at fixed times with a paid human host reading…
Nostalrius (2015 - 2016)
https://rip.so/nostalrius.html
Published: August 5, 2026 05:54
nostalrius was a free server that ran world of warcraft as it stood in 2006, patch 1.12, with none of the expansions on top of it. an unpaid french team opened it on 28 february 2015 and it took more than 800,000 registered accounts, around 150,000 of them…
Jeremy Renner Official (2017 - 2019)
https://rip.so/jeremy-renner-official.html
Published: August 5, 2026 05:54
jeremy renner official was one of a long production line of single-celebrity apps built by a company called escapex, which ran the same software under a different famous name each time. fans posted, and bought a currency called stars that was supposed to…
Microsoft Security Essentials (2009 - 2020)
https://rip.so/microsoft-security-essentials.html
Published: August 5, 2026 05:54
microsoft security essentials was a free antivirus microsoft released on 29 september 2009 under the codename morro. it was deliberately plain. it took no money and it never put a countdown on your desktop, which was enough to make it the most installed…
QuizUp (2013 - 2021)
Published: August 5, 2026 05:32
quizup was an icelandic trivia app that put two strangers against each other over seven rounds of timed multiple choice. it took twenty million users within six months of launch and around eighty million by 2016, on the strength of more than 1,200 topics…
GO Corporation (1987 - 1994)
https://rip.so/go-corporation.html
Published: August 5, 2026 05:32
go corporation spent seven years and $75 million building penpoint, a pen driven operating system for tablet computers, at a point when nobody had worked out what a tablet was for. it shipped on tablets from ibm and on at&t's eo personal communicator, and…
AlphaSmart (1993 - 2013)
https://rip.so/alphasmart.html
Published: August 5, 2026 05:32
alphasmart made a keyboard with a narrow lcd strip above it and nothing else. no browser and no notifications. american schools bought them by the cartload through the nineties and the 2000s because they were cheap enough to hand to a whole class and tough…
The All-Seeing Eye (2001 - 2008)
https://rip.so/all-seeing-eye.html
Published: August 5, 2026 05:32
the all-seeing eye was a windows program that told you which game servers were alive and what your ping to them looked like, across dozens of games at once. a finnish outfit called udp soft spent two years building it and put it out as shareware on 15 june…
DVD Shrink (2003 - 2005)
https://rip.so/dvd-shrink.html
Published: August 5, 2026 05:32
dvd shrink was a one megabyte windows executable that took a dual layer retail dvd and threw away enough bitrate to make it fit on a 4.7 gb blank. the region code and the copy protection came off on the way through. it had no burner of its own and handed…
Softimage (1986 - 2016)
Published: August 5, 2026 05:12
softimage was the high-end 3d animation package of the 1990s, the software behind the jurassic park dinosaurs, and then it spent twenty years being sold between companies that could not decide what it was for. daniel langlois built it in montreal in 1986…
YouTube Vanced (2017 - 2022)
https://rip.so/youtube-vanced.html
Published: August 5, 2026 05:12
youtube vanced was an unofficial youtube app for android that did the two things google charges a subscription for, removing the ads and carrying on playing after the screen went dark. it was never in the play store. you turned off a warning and installed…
3D Maze (1995 - 2001)
Published: August 5, 2026 05:12
3d maze is what your monitor did when you walked away from it. a randomly generated brick corridor with a camera moving through it on its own, and a translucent smiley face waiting at the exit. it existed to prove a home pc could render 3d at all, and it…
LEGO Digital Designer (2003 - 2022)
https://rip.so/lego-digital-designer.html
Published: August 5, 2026 05:12
lego digital designer was a free cad program for lego bricks, and the point of it was that the box on screen never ran out. you built whatever you wanted and it wrote the instructions for you. for a few years in the middle it would ship the actual pieces…
DVD Decrypter (2001 - 2005)
https://rip.so/dvd-decrypter.html
Published: August 5, 2026 05:12
dvd decrypter was one man's freeware and the default way a windows machine turned a disc into a file. it read a retail dvd and wrote out an image with the copy protection missing. on 6 june 2005 its author said he had received a cease and desist from…
Araby.com (2006 - 2010)
Published: August 5, 2026 04:54
araby.com was maktoob's attempt at a search engine that actually understood arabic instead of treating it as a foreign string. it launched in september 2006 out of the biggest arabic portal on the web and had a few hundred thousand users within months.…
Google Fiber TV (2012 - 2020)
https://rip.so/google-fiber-tv.html
Published: August 5, 2026 04:54
google fiber tv was google selling cable television. nearly two hundred channels over its own fiber, a set-top box, a dvr that could record eight shows at once and a nexus 7 tablet handed over as the remote control. it started in kansas city in july 2012…
Spurl.net (2004 - 2011)
Published: August 5, 2026 04:54
spurl was the icelandic answer to del.icio.us and it had one idea the winner did not. when you saved a page, spurl kept a copy of the text, so you could full-text search everything you had ever bookmarked, including the pages that had since gone dead.…
Uproar.com (1999 - 2006)
https://rip.so/uproar-com.html
Published: August 5, 2026 04:54
uproar.com sold the television game show with the studio taken out of it. the company licensed family feud and match game from pearson, put them in a browser window and ran them for prizes. vivendi universal bought it in february 2001 for about a hundred…
Infowars (1999 - 2026)
Published: August 5, 2026 04:54
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…
GauchoNet (1996 - 2000)
Published: August 5, 2026 04:34
gonzalo arzuaga was a business student in buenos aires who spent the summer of 1996 in a university computer lab typing argentine websites into a list by hand. that list became gauchonet, the first argentine search directory, and starting it cost about two…
Popular Power (2000 - 2001)
https://rip.so/popular-power.html
Published: August 5, 2026 04:34
marc hedlund and nelson minar started popular power in january 2000 on a simple trade: install a java client, let it use your processor while you were not using it, get paid. the free half of the deal ran an influenza vaccine simulation and the paid half…
a2b music (1998 - 2002)
Published: August 5, 2026 04:34
at&t labs invented the codec that digital music actually runs on, then built a store around it that locked every file to the machine it landed on. a2b was selling real major-label tracks in 1998, a year before napster, and almost nobody bought them. the…
Capazoo (2006 - 2008)
Published: August 5, 2026 04:34
capazoo raised more than twenty-five million dollars and never got past ten thousand users. the montreal site paid you for posting, in a currency called zoops worth one american cent each, redeemable through a debit card the company mailed out. two…
Worldchanging (2003 - 2010)
https://rip.so/worldchanging.html
Published: August 5, 2026 04:34
alex steffen and jamais cascio started worldchanging in october 2003 to write about sustainability as a distribution problem rather than as a coming disaster. it worked well enough that time called it a top fifteen environmental site and nielsen ranked it…
Blubster (2001 - 2015)
Published: August 5, 2026 04:09
a developer in his early twenties wrote his own peer-to-peer protocol in madrid in 2001 and put a music search box on top of it. seven years later the spanish labels and promusicae came after him for thirteen million euros and lost, which made spain one of…
Urban Box Office (1999 - 2000)
https://rip.so/urban-box-office.html
Published: August 5, 2026 04:09
ubo raised more than forty million dollars in 1999 to build a network of websites for what its own pitch deck called the urban mindset, took several floors in manhattan, and hired hundreds of mostly very young people, many of whom had never had an office…
HyTelnet (1990 - 1997)
Published: August 5, 2026 04:09
before anything crawled the internet, finding a machine you were allowed to log into meant knowing somebody who kept a list. peter scott kept the best list. hytelnet was a directory of telnet addresses for library catalogs on every continent, plus the…
Erols Internet (1995 - 1998)
Published: August 5, 2026 04:09
erol onaran came to virginia from turkey, opened an electronics repair shop, put videocassettes in it, and ended up running the largest privately owned video rental chain in america. he sold it to blockbuster in 1990 and spent part of that money on an…
AmphetaDesk (2001 - 2004)
https://rip.so/amphetadesk.html
Published: August 5, 2026 04:09
one person wrote a news reader in perl because every existing one annoyed him and none of them were usable by his mother. it installed as a tiny server on your own computer and rendered your subscriptions into the browser you already had, which is the…
Espotting Media (2000 - 2005)
Published: August 5, 2026 03:41
two men in their twenties left an advertising agency in the middle of the dot-com crash and started selling keywords in london, which in 2000 was a business nobody in europe had a name for yet. espotting ended up filling the sponsored block on yahoo,…
Go!Zilla (1995 - 2008)
Published: August 5, 2026 03:41
go!zilla was the loud one. it broke a file into pieces, pulled the pieces at the same time, and picked the download back up when the phone line dropped, which on a modem was the whole ballgame. it paid for itself by carrying aureate's ad software, and when…
New Internet Computer (2000 - 2003)
https://rip.so/new-internet-computer.html
Published: August 5, 2026 03:41
larry ellison spent the second half of the nineties insisting that the personal computer was too complicated and too expensive and that the network would do the work instead. the new internet computer was his last swing at proving it: 199 dollars, no hard…
Billpoint (1998 - 2003)
Published: August 5, 2026 03:41
billpoint was ebay's own payment service, bought in 1999 and relaunched in 2000 as a joint venture with wells fargo, sitting on the buttons of the largest auction site in the world. paypal had none of that and won anyway, because it settled a quarter of…
Beatnik (1993 - 2011)
Published: August 5, 2026 03:41
thomas dolby founded headspace in 1993 because there was no decent way to put sound on a screen that was not a cd. what came out of it was rmf, a format that carried its own instrument samples so a whole piece of music could fit in the size of a small…
Blogdex (2001 - 2006)
Published: August 5, 2026 03:23
a graduate student at the media lab pointed a crawler at every weblog he could find and counted which links they were handing to each other. the front page was that count, sorted by how fast a link was spreading rather than by how many people had it. every…
IslamOnline (1997 - 2010)
https://rip.so/islamonline.html
Published: August 5, 2026 03:23
for almost thirteen years the largest arabic-language religious reference site on the internet was written in a building west of cairo by about 350 people. in march 2010 the qatari society that funded it moved the site onto a smaller server and changed the…
Microsoft V-Chat (1995 - 2001)
https://rip.so/microsoft-v-chat.html
Published: August 5, 2026 03:23
microsoft shipped a chat client where the room was a place you moved around in, and it did it in december 1995, before most people had seen a web browser. avatars were flat sprites with a front view and a back view, like cardboard cut-outs, and you edited…
Flirtomatic (2005 - 2014)
https://rip.so/flirtomatic.html
Published: August 5, 2026 03:23
nokia asked a design agency for five mobile ideas, somebody in the room noticed that what they had been describing all afternoon was flirting, and that is the entire origin of flirtomatic. it ran on premium sms and carrier billing rather than…
Kiwibox (1999 - 2019)
Published: August 5, 2026 03:23
three carnegie mellon graduates built a site in 1999 so that american teenagers would have somewhere to write, and it was still running twenty years later. along the way it got absorbed into a shell company trading on the bulletin board under its own…
Venere.com (1994 - 2016)
https://rip.so/venere-com.html
Published: August 5, 2026 02:54
four people in rome started taking hotel reservations over the web in 1995, back when most of the italian hotels they were selling did not have an email address to forward the booking to. by 2008 they held direct contracts with twenty nine thousand…
Aniboom (2006 - 2016)
Published: August 5, 2026 02:54
an israeli television executive worked out that there were thousands of animators with nowhere to be seen and studios with no way to find them, then built the switchboard between them. eight thousand animators across seventy two countries put more than…
Oingo (1998 - 2003)
Published: August 5, 2026 02:54
two caltech graduates built a search engine that matched meanings instead of words, using a princeton lexicon that had taken fifteen years to assemble, and launched it into a market that had already decided search was finished as a business. almost nobody…
ZAZ (1996 - 2000)
Published: August 5, 2026 02:54
a software company in porto alegre put a large part of brazil online, and for three years zaz was the second biggest thing on the brazilian web. telefónica paid two hundred and fifty million dollars for half of it in june 1999, took the rest in january,…
WinG (1994 - 1995)
Published: August 5, 2026 02:54
microsoft spent 1994 trying to prove that windows was not the place games went to die, and the argument it made was a small library written by one engineer who had worked out that most video drivers on the market were broken and had gone ahead and fixed…
Abuzz (1996 - 2001)
Published: August 5, 2026 02:32
a cambridge company built software that read what you were good at and routed incoming questions to you instead of posting them into a room, which is a better design than any forum and needed more people than the web had in 1999. the new york times paid…
Ayna.com (1997 - 2011)
Published: August 5, 2026 02:32
in arabic أين is transliterated ayna and means where, which is the correct name for a search engine and one nobody in the english-speaking web ever thought of. ayna.com opened in april 1997 with a box over a directory and spent fourteen years trying to…
c2it (2000 - 2003)
Published: August 5, 2026 02:32
the largest consumer bank in the world decided in 2000 that payments between two people were a bank's business and that paypal was a passing condition. it built c2it, put it on aol's front page and later on microsoft's, and by 2002 gartner was finding one…
On2 Technologies (1992 - 2010)
https://rip.so/on2-technologies.html
Published: August 5, 2026 02:32
a company almost nobody could name wrote the code that played video on your computer for eighteen years. it started as the duck corporation in 1992 doing cutscenes for cd-rom games, gave vp3 away to xiph in 2002 where it became theora, then put vp6 inside…
Opera Mail (2003 - 2016)
https://rip.so/opera-mail.html
Published: August 3, 2026 03:04
opera mail was the email client built into the opera browser, known as M2, with one odd idea for its time. it did not want you to sort mail into folders, it wanted you to filter one big pile into views by label and sender. when opera moved to chromium in…
Ta-da List (2005 - 2012)
https://rip.so/ta-da-list.html
Published: August 3, 2026 03:04
ta-da list was 37signals' first free web app, a to-do list you kept in your browser and shared with a link. it launched in january 2005, built on ruby on rails, the framework the same team had pulled out of basecamp, and it was a small public proof that…
Looksery (2014 - 2015)
Published: August 3, 2026 03:04
looksery was a face-tracking app out of odesa that could find and reshape your face in a live camera feed, back in 2014 when phones were barely fast enough for it. it launched in october 2014 and was bought by snapchat a year later for a reported 150…
Clipfish (2006 - 2017)
Published: August 3, 2026 03:04
clipfish was germany's homegrown answer to youtube, launched by the broadcaster RTL in 2006. it leaned on music videos and clips from RTL's own casting shows, and for a while it had a real local identity, but user-uploaded video is expensive and hard to…
elevenia (2014 - 2022)
Published: August 3, 2026 03:04
elevenia was an indonesian online marketplace, launched in march 2014 as a joint venture between the carrier XL axiata and south korea's SK planet, whose 11st marketplace gave it both its model and its name. it grew into roughly the third-biggest…
UUCP (1979 - 2000)
Published: August 3, 2026 02:42
uucp was how unix machines talked to each other before the internet reached most of them. unix-to-unix copy, written at bell labs in 1979, moved mail and usenet news one modem hop at a time: store and forward, each machine phoning the next in the middle of…
iFrance (1996 - 2013)
Published: August 3, 2026 02:42
ifrance was france's version of the free web-host, a place where anyone could put up a personal page and grab an email address without paying a franc. it started in 1996 and grew huge, over three million pages and mailboxes at its height. vivendi bought it…
Livedoor Reader (2006 - 2017)
https://rip.so/livedoor-reader.html
Published: August 3, 2026 02:42
livedoor reader was japan's answer to the online feed reader, launched in 2006, quick and built for the keyboard in a way power users loved. when google shut its own reader in 2013 and the english-speaking web scattered, this one just kept going. livedoor…
Rapportive (2010 - 2020)
https://rip.so/rapportive.html
Published: August 3, 2026 02:42
rapportive was a gmail extension that put a person's face and linkedin profile in your inbox the instant you typed their address. it was the first gmail plug-in to reach millions, and linkedin bought it in 2012 for around fifteen million dollars. then…
JD.ID (2015 - 2023)
Published: August 3, 2026 02:42
jd.id was the indonesian storefront of jd.com, china's number two online retailer, launched in 2015 to take on the local giants. it raised its way to unicorn status and promised same-day delivery across the islands. but shopee and tokopedia owned the…
DaWanda (2006 - 2018)
Published: August 3, 2026 02:19
dawanda was germany's etsy, a berlin marketplace where people sold handmade and one-off things to a couple of million buyers across the german-speaking web. it started in 2006 and for a decade it was the place in europe for that kind of craft trade. but it…
Hopin (2019 - 2023)
Published: August 3, 2026 02:19
hopin was the purest artifact of the pandemic economy, a virtual-events platform that a sick young founder built in his flat in 2019 and that the lockdowns turned into the fastest software unicorn anyone had seen. by august 2021 it was valued at seven and…
Epuls.pl (2002 - 2017)
Published: August 3, 2026 02:19
epuls was where polish teenagers lived online before facebook arrived, a social network built on public diaries and clubs, with a points currency called pulsary. a swedish studio started it in 2002 and it swelled past two and a half million users by 2008.…
Facebook News (2019 - 2024)
https://rip.so/facebook-news.html
Published: August 3, 2026 02:19
facebook news was meta's attempt to be a place people read the day's news on purpose, a dedicated tab launched in 2019 with human editors up top and licensing deals paying the publishers. it never came to turkey and it never really caught on where it did…
Wrzuta.pl (2006 - 2017)
Published: August 3, 2026 02:19
wrzuta was poland's youtube, a place to throw up a video or an mp3 and hand someone the link, and for a couple of years in the mid-2000s it was one of the busiest sites in the country. it started inside the o2 group in 2006 and later passed to wirtualna…
BTChina (2003 - 2009)
Published: August 3, 2026 01:59
btchina was the tracker most of china pointed its bittorrent client at, an index of films and shows that ran on foreign fansubs and cheap broadband. one man started it in 2003 out of his own interest and it grew to something like fifty million users. in…
Spray.se (1995 - 2022)
Published: August 3, 2026 01:59
spray was sweden's great dot-com portal, a web company that at the top of the boom was worth around four billion dollars on paper. it ran the spray.se portal and free webmail under the tagline that here begins the internet. lycos europe bought it in 2000,…
EX.UA (2009 - 2016)
Published: August 3, 2026 01:59
ex.ua was the largest file host in ukraine, a cyberlocker where a whole country kept and traded its music and its films. it was so woven into ukrainian internet life that when police raided it in 2012 and hauled off two hundred servers, the public answered…
Jubii (1995 - 2009)
Published: August 3, 2026 01:59
jubii was denmark's first search engine and then its homegrown yahoo, a portal so dominant it reached more than ninety percent of danish internet users at its peak. lycos europe bought it in 2000, and years later shipped the name across the atlantic as a…
Prostopleer (2009 - 2016)
https://rip.so/prostopleer.html
Published: August 3, 2026 01:59
prostopleer, later just pleer.com, was where russia listened for free. a music site that let you find and play almost any track, much of it pulled straight off vkontakte, for no money and no account. it ran for seven years and drew millions a month. the…
Chikka (2000 - 2018)
Published: August 3, 2026 01:37
chikka was a philippine messenger that bridged the web and the phone network, letting you sit at a pc and send a free text to someone's mobile even when they were nowhere near a computer. it launched in 2000, in the country that texted more than anywhere…
VeryCD (2003 - 2011)
Published: August 3, 2026 01:37
verycd was china's great index of the ed2k network, a site where you searched for a film or an album and got the emule link that pulled it down over the edonkey protocol. it started in 2003 as one man's page, kept alive by readers who chipped in for…
Bloglovin' (2007 - 2018)
Published: August 3, 2026 01:37
bloglovin was the follow button for the blog era, a swedish reader that started in 2007 and let you keep a feed of the blogs you liked without opening a dozen tabs. it became the default home for fashion and lifestyle writers, and it swelled to millions of…
WAP (1999 - 2013)
Published: August 3, 2026 01:37
wap was the mobile web before the mobile web worked. a stripped-down standard from 1999 that served wml pages to tiny phone screens over a slow, metered cellular link, mostly inside the carrier's own portal. it was slow and it was priced by the kilobyte,…
23andMe (2006 - 2025)
Published: August 3, 2026 01:37
23andme sold you a saliva kit and mailed back a website that told you where your ancestors came from and what you might carry. it grew to more than fourteen million customers and went public in 2021 at a three and a half billion dollar valuation. a 2023…
Quadruplex Videotape (1956 - 1986)
https://rip.so/quadruplex-videotape.html
Published: August 2, 2026 08:34
quadruplex was the first videotape that actually worked, shown by ampex in a chicago hall in april 1956 to a room of broadcasters who could not believe it. two-inch tape and four spinning heads, laying down a picture good enough to put on air. it made the…
Rypple (2008 - 2012)
Published: August 2, 2026 08:34
rypple set out to kill the annual performance review and replace it with small amounts of feedback all year round. two founders in toronto who had already sold one company built it and got bought by salesforce inside four years. peter thiel was among the…
2collab (2007 - 2011)
Published: August 2, 2026 08:34
2collab was elsevier's attempt at delicious for scientists. you saved the papers you read with their citation details attached, and shared a reading list with your lab. it launched in november 2007 and lived inside sciencedirect and scopus, the databases…
Simpy (2004 - 2010)
Published: August 2, 2026 08:34
simpy was one of the social bookmarking sites that grew up alongside delicious in 2004. you saved and tagged your links, then searched the whole pile later, kept private or public as you liked. it was built by otis gospodnetic, a search engineer far better…
Crocodoc (2010 - 2015)
Published: August 2, 2026 06:29
crocodoc turned a word file or a pdf into html and svg so it opened in a browser tab with no plugin and no download, which in 2010 was a thing almost nothing did properly. it came out of the wreckage of a failed annotation startup called webnotes, over one…
Mister Wong (2006 - 2013)
https://rip.so/mister-wong.html
Published: August 2, 2026 06:29
mister wong was germany's answer to delicious and for a few years it beat delicious inside germany, which almost nothing did in any category. it ran out of bremen holding eight million bookmarks, and in 2007 it was the most-linked page in the german web.…
JetBrains Omea (2004 - 2008)
Published: August 2, 2026 06:29
omea was jetbrains trying to sell software to somebody other than programmers, and it is the only time they ever seriously did. it swallowed your email and your feeds along with the files on your own disk, then indexed the lot so one search crossed all of…
Socialcast (2008 - 2018)
https://rip.so/socialcast.html
Published: August 2, 2026 06:29
socialcast was a facebook for the inside of a company: one feed for the whole organization, plus a version you could run on your own servers. vmware bought it in may 2011 to spread the stream across everything else it owned, and then did not. it sat inside…
Electronic Video Recording (1967 - 1971)
https://rip.so/electronic-video-recording.html
Published: August 2, 2026 06:29
evr was cbs putting television onto photographic film and selling you a machine to read it back. the cartridge held 750 feet of 8.75 millimeter film written by an electron beam, about fifty minutes in black and white or half that in color. the player…
Taptu (2007 - 2015)
Published: August 2, 2026 05:56
taptu started in cambridge in 2007 as a search engine for phones, back when a phone browser was a compromise and somebody had to build an index that suited one. it closed that product in early 2011 and turned into my taptu, a news reader where you mixed…
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