EP: GRLab Note on Dead Web Sites

Dead Web Sites

Posted by Jack Powers | February 3, 1997
Follow up to GRLab Note on Web Site Remodeling
Clients: Summer Internet World 97 seminar.

This is a list of web sites that have gone dark. Many deceased sites simply disappear, but some leave behind farewell messages, poignant reminders of early Internet hopes and dreams. (As of February 3, 1997 all of these links were active; if you find any that are completely gone, please send me a note.)

Mirsky's Worst of the Web, one of the Internet's first hot sites, shut down last November. Says Mirsky, "When I started the site, almost two years ago, I'd hoped it would eventually provide me with financial independence and greater creative opportunities. Neither happened." Many of the worst web sites he found are no longer live, either.
AT&T Business Network is still running but will no longer be updated; the news site will go dark permanently in early April. Last summer, AT&T's New Media Services unit merged with Industry.Net in a spin-off called Nets Inc. with Jim Manzi, former president of Lotus, at the helm. AT&T got into the interactive business when it bought Ziff Davis' Interchange on-line service for $50 million a few months before the web made on-line services obsolete. Interchange didn't last very long, and now the AT&T Business Network is going too, leaving 54 people out of work.
Open Markets Commercial Directory was an early search engine for business sites that I used in hundreds of seminars in 1995 and 1996. Not able to keep up with the serious search site competition from Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek and the others, Open Marhets pulled the plug and left the message "please do not contact us to help you find a business on the Web."
The Florida Interactive Yellow Pages may be history, but the domain has been taken over by a laser toner cartridge recycler. "Save your envirnoment!" [sic] and re-use those old URLs.
The Cold Meat Industry site in Sweden won an Editor's Choice award after the author decided to shut it down. He suggests we "follow the coldmeat mailinglist" for more news.
The Recovery Page farewell sounds a bit testy, blaming a lack of time and "a lack of other peoples' interest." I hope things are working out for its twelve-stepping author.
The OS/2 Announcement Gopher/Web Site farewell message laments that "a server which is frozen in the early days of OS/2 Warp is of limited usefulness," proving that those who live by high tech will die by high tech.
Lifestyle Markets left the forwarding addresses of three customers who apparently have gone on to successful web activities.
Great Lakes Environmental Wire (GLEW) looks like it was co-opted by Great Lakes Information Network (GLIN), maybe a case where the less unfortunate acronym won.
Our_Club left its hands-around-the-world logo behind along with who-knows-how-many dreams of cyber community.
The #Mormon Photo Page once had photos of people in Mormon chats, but the farewell message pleads, "please do not send me mail asking what kinds of LDS graphics or art I have. I don't have any" and doesn't leave an email contact or forwarding address for the author.
Computer Lawyer News died after just six issues. Maybe the pages weren't pretty enough.

Comments, questions, suggestions or updates?
Visit The EP Diary Forum.