???? – 2008retired
Google Music Search
“Free, legal, and lovable - just never profitable. The hardest chorus to sing.”
“Every eight seconds, a new homepage. We never did learn HTML, and didn't need to.”
AOL Hometown gave AOL subscribers 12 megabytes of server space to publish their own websites, no HTML knowledge required. Its 1-2-3 Publish form-wizard and Easy Designer WYSIWYG builder made homepage-making something anyone could do. By 2002 it held 14 million websites, with a new one appearing every eight seconds at its 2001 peak.
On 31 October 2008, the lights went out. The shutdown angered Jason Scott enough to found Archive Team, which later helped the Internet Archive rescue GeoCities when it faced a similar fate in 2009. Hometown's death, in other words, taught the internet how to save itself.
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“Free, legal, and lovable - just never profitable. The hardest chorus to sing.”
“It played the losing side's movies beautifully, and never once complained about it.”
“It let you edit your friends' pages, and no social network has trusted us since.”