history

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This history provides brief one-line descriptions of contextually historic website events of and around the indieweb, including blogging precursors, and the rise & fall of notable social network silos.

When writing history, please mention people involved, dates, and sources for each.

See Also:

• timeline for a brief history of key indieweb ideas, standards, achievements, implementations, and in-person events.
• founders for a brief history of IndieWebCamp itself.

Contents 1 Key 2 1994 3 ... 4 1997-2002 5 2002 6 2003 7 2004 8 2005 9 2006 10 2007 11 2008 12 2009 13 2010 14 2011 15 2012 16 2013 17 2014 18 Unknown dates 19 See Also

Key

• (L) - Launched. Site, service, or group launched.
• (A) - Acquired. Site or service acquired.
• (F) - Finality known. Site shutdown announced.
• (D) - Died. Site shutdown, crashed and didn't recover, or otherwise came to an untimely demise.
• (Z) - Zombified. Site/domain still up but permalinks/posts/content gone or heavily removed/damaged. Functionality drastically reduced or changed.

In chronological order, grouped by year:

When adding from site-deaths, please shorten description of event to a minimal one-liner, keep citations in bracket [] form, and only include events about notable social network silos.

1994

• 1994 (L): Geocities launched

...

1997-2002

• Your personal domain/blog was a way to host identity and data
• People learned how to program and to do web development through their blogs
• RSS emerged, diverged

2002

• 2002-03-22 (L): Friendster launched[1]

2003

• 2003 (L): Upcoming launched
• 2003-08 (L): MySpace launched[2]

2004

• 2004 (L): Lavabit launched
• 2004-02-04 (L): Facebook launched[3]

2005

• 2005-07 (A): MySpace acquired by News Corp.[4]

2006

• 2006-07-15 (L): Twitter launched

2007

• 2007 (L): Gowalla launched

2008

• 2008 (L): Posterous launched
• 2008-02-03 (I): XMPP PubSub Federation implemented between Twitter and Jaiku silos by Blaine Cook and Ralph Meijer respectively, at Social Graph FooCamp.[5][6]
• 2008-11 (D): AOL Hometown shutdown (with only 2 weeks notice)

2009

• 2009 (D): Geocities shutdown by owner Yahoo

2010

• ...

2011

• 2011-06-29 (A): MySpace acquired by Specific Media[7]
• 2011-12-02 (A): Gowalla acquired by Facebook[8]

2012

• 2012-03-12 (D): Gowalla shutdown[9]
• 2012-03-12 (A): Posterous acquired by Twitter

2013

• 2013 (D): Lavabit shutdown
• 2013 (D): Upcoming shutdown
• 2013-02 (F): Posterous shutdown announced[10]
• 2013-04-30 (D): Posterous shutdown
• 2013-06-13 (Z): MySpace deleted nearly all existing user content[11]

2014

• 2014-07-21 (L): W3C Social Web Working Group launched with a wiki home page, and a charter citing key IndieWeb technologies: IndieAuth, Webmention, h-entry, h-card, h-cite, and web actions.

Unknown dates

If you know specific dates for the launch, acquisition, death, or zombification of these sites (or any of the above year-only or year-month-only dates), please edit and move to the appropriate year, preferably with online citation.

2002-2006: Rise of Social Networks Silos

• Friendster (2002) (what was significant about Friendster in 2002?)
• Facebook (2005) (what was significant about Facebook in 2005?)
• Myspace (2004) (what was significant about Myspace in 2004?)

Trends:

• Integrated UI and subscription model
• One click signup

See Also

• timeline
• silos
• site-deaths
• site-changes
• Posts about the IndieWeb
• http://www2.uncp.edu/home/acurtis/NewMedia/SocialMedia/SocialMediaHistory.html