When I was introduced to the internet in early 2000, there are websites that are very popular. I remember my first website, it was hosted on Geocities.com, but then I remembered what happen to them? I havent heard about them in years, now we got blogger and wordpress, and how about Napters.
One of the most popular website that has died is Friendster and Myspace they both loss to Facebook. Now they have new owners and trying to make a big comeback.
And this are some of the most popular websites during those times but failed to survive on the internet.
encarta.msn.com (1993-2009)
Encarta was a hugely popular digital multimedia encyclopedia which was published by Microsoft between 1993-2009; the final English language version (2008) contained some 62,000 articles, as well as thousands of photos and illustrations, music clips, video clips and maps. The encyclopedia was also available in a wide variety of other languages, featuring entirely unique rather than translated articles, and was available either online as a yearly paid subscription or offline as a collection of CD-ROMs and, later, a single DVD-ROM. In March 2009 Microsoft announced the decision to discontinue both the online and disc versions in all countries - with the exception of Japan - on 31st October 2009; the Japanese version was closed on 31st December 2009. The Encarta dictionary is the only thing that remains hosted on its website; whilst the free encyclopedia Wikipedia (itself in danger of collapse) is cited as the primary cause of death.
Yahoo! GeoCities (1994-2009)
Surely you have all heard of GeoCities? The site was an absolute institution for the best part of a decade, offering free hosting for very basic websites; originally each website would be categorised into a different 'city' depending on the topic or niche of that website. For example, entertainment sites were categorised as 'Hollywood'. This changed around the time that Yahoo! acquired the network in 1999. Originally founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner, before being launched in December 1994 with the name Beverly Hills Internet (BHI), the site was attracting thousands of new users per day by December 1995. Fast forward another year to December 1996 and the company was headquartered in Santa Monica with a major office Manhattan. By June 1997 GeoCities was the fifth most popular website on the Internet, globally, and by October 1997 it had its 1 millionth user. In August 1998 the company went public, listing on NASDAQ with an IPO price of $17; this price rose rapidly post-launch and at one point reached an astonishing $100. By early 1999 GeoCities was the third most visited site on the web; the company moved headquarters once more to Los Angeles.Yahoo! aquired the site in January 1999, at around the peak of the dot-com bubble, for an astonishing $3.57bn in Yahoo! stock and Yahoo! took full control of the business on May 28th. The sale proved extremely unpopular amongst users, many of whom were particularly upset by terms-of-service changes, and the site began to rapidly lose users. The decline was halted when Yahoo! chose to amend certain aspect of those terms accordingly. Yahoo! drastically changed the environment in 2001 when it limited the data transfer of free accounts to 3GB per month. Those with well established and high traffic sites, some of which may have been used to promote online or offline business, had no option but the pay for premium hosting. This change in model led to some leading analysts and industry journalists to speculate that the site was yet to make a profit. It had, after all, announced a loss of $8m for the final quarter of 1998. In April 2009 Yahoo! announced that it would be closing its US branch of GeoCities, and stopped accepting any further registrations. In June 2009 they updated the homepage to state "GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009."
Social.FM (2003-2008)
Social.FM was massively marketed as a revolutionary music website, and for a brief period it was accepted as such. It was a social network which allowed its users to search and listen to music from a database of over 3 million unique songs by other 200,000 unique artists , as well as to fully customize their profiles and webcast playlists of music to other Social.FM users. The website offered songs through streaming only, and was amongst the very first to do so. The site actually had some great web 2.0 functions, including the ability to find music by viewing recent searches, synchronise their personal music collections with their playlists (to share to other users through webcasts), explore mixes, as well as search for artist biographies and discographies, artist reviews, images, and podcasts.The site also offered 100,000 channels of digital radio, the ability to stream podcasts from leading music providers, and support for any Windows 5.0 based smartphone or Pocket PC. So why did such an extensive site die? Some respected bloggers seem to think that it hyped itself up too much, and the result was dozens of new competitors being developed before it had truly established itself. Last.FM, a site which managed to launch a year earlier, has remained very successful despite having a very similar format to Social.FM. Some would argue that Social.FM was the more technically advanced of the two sites.
Napster.com (1999-2001)
The Napster.com domain may still exist, as does the original logo, but the original site is long gone. Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing service for music, created by Shawn Fleming in 1998 whilst he attended Northeastern University in Boston. The site allowed users to share their music collection with each other in MP3 format, as well as their movies, a format which led to instant and highly inevitable illegal file sharing of copyrighted material. The original service was shut down by court order in July 2001. Attempts were made in 2002 for the site to become legal, but traffic was much reduced; the business was almost sold for $85m to a German business before the move was blocked by an American bankruptcy judge. Instead the businesses assets were liquidated and the companies brand and logos were acquired by Roxio, the owners of the Pressplay music service. Roxio subsequently used them to re-brand Pressplay as Napster 2.0, before making a substantial profit when the business was sold to electronics retailer Best Buy in September 2008 for $121 million.
Yahoo! Auctions (1998-2007)
Do you remember Yahoo! Auctions? It was launched in 1998 to challenge eBay but simply lost the battle. The service did have a degree of success in some countries, before it was turned into a free service and was overcome by spam. There were still plenty of buyers and sellers using the service at time of closure. The UK and Ireland service was closed in 2002, the US and Canada service was closed in 2007, and the Singapore service was closed in 2008. The site still operates in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Yahoo! also operated its auction site in Australia for a brief period after aquiring SOLD.com.au in 2001 and giving it a new address within the Yahoo! domain, SOLD had been a major competitor to eBay. In 2003 Yahoo! informed members that SOLD would be closed down and they, rather unusually, directed users to eBay. They had displayed a similar message when closing the UK and Ireland service, perhaps an admission of defeat to a superior platform.source: -ryankett.hubpages.com-
