The Mourner

AIM passed on 15 December 2017, having lived twenty years as the primary means by which a generation learned to speak to one another in real time. Born in May 1997 in AOL’s laboratories, it introduced the Buddy List, the away message, and the sound of a door opening. At its peak in 2001, thirty-six million people used it; more than six million were often online at once. Its parent company cited the rise of mobile messaging. No replacement was offered. By the morning of 15 December, the servers had gone quiet. He is survived by every chat window that has replaced him. None has reproduced the particular intimacy of a friend’s name appearing on a list, of knowing they were there, and choosing to say nothing at all.

AltaVista passed on 8 July 2013, having lived eighteen years as the first search engine that made the web searchable. Born in December 1995 in Digital Equipment Corporation’s laboratories, it indexed the web when indexing was the hard problem. At its peak it processed millions of queries daily. Yahoo acquired it in 2003 as part of a larger purchase. Google had already won. AltaVista was not developed further. Yahoo announced the shutdown on 28 June 2013. A week later, the domain redirected to Yahoo Search. He is survived by every search box that replaced him, and by the conviction that someone, somewhere, still remembers how to use Boolean operators.

Ask Jeeves passed on 27 February 2006, having lived ten years as a search engine that promised to answer questions. Born in 1996, it offered a butler and a text box. Users typed in sentences. Jeeves, in theory, understood. The natural-language approach never quite worked, but the butler endured. At its peak the service held nearly seven percent of the search market. In 2005 it was acquired for nearly two billion dollars. The new owner decided Jeeves had to go. The butler reminded users of broken promises. On 27 February 2006, Ask.com launched without him. He is survived by Ask.com, which has no face, and by the conviction that the right question, asked plainly, might still be answered.

Bebo passed in August 2013, having lived eight years as the social network that found its home in Britain and Ireland. Born in 2005, it offered a profile and a quiz. At its peak it claimed forty million users. AOL acquired it in 2008 for eight hundred fifty million dollars. Facebook arrived. Users left. The company sold it for less. In July 2013 the founder bought it back for one million. In August he shut it down. A video announced the end: I think we can all agree, it’s time to wipe the slate clean. The traffic crashed the site. The relaunch failed. He is survived by the memory of a platform that was never American but was home to millions, and by the conviction that sometimes the only way forward is to wipe the slate clean.

BlackBerry Messenger passed on 31 May 2019, having lived fourteen years as the messenger that made a BlackBerry worth carrying. Born in 2005, it offered free messaging between BlackBerry users. The pin. The delivered check. The read receipt. At its peak it was the reason to buy the phone. The iPhone arrived. BlackBerry did not adapt. The company licensed BBM to other platforms. It arrived on Android and iOS too late. A partnership with a tech company kept it running. In April 2019 the shutdown was announced. Users had until 31 May to download their data. On that day the consumer service went dark. He is survived by BBM Enterprise, which charges for what was free, and by the memory of a time when a keyboard and a messenger were enough.

Digg passed in August 2010, having lived six years as the place where the crowd decided what mattered. Born in 2004, it offered a button: digg. Users voted. The front page emerged. At its peak it claimed more than forty million monthly visitors. Power users controlled the front page. The company rewrote the site. Digg v4 removed the bury button, favoured publishers over users, and eliminated the upcoming queue. Traffic dropped twenty-six percent in a month. The engineering team had left. There was no way back. The founder announced that v4 was here to stay. It was. The users were not. He is survived by Reddit, which received the exodus, and by the conviction that the crowd, when trusted, will leave.

Flash passed on 31 December 2020, having lived twenty-four years as the medium in which the early web learned to move. Born in 1996 as FutureSplash Animator, it became Adobe Flash and gave the internet cartoons, games, and interfaces that no markup language could. At its peak it ran on nearly every computer. In April 2010, Steve Jobs published “Thoughts on Flash,” refusing to support it on the iPhone. He was not wrong about its flaws. The letter was a death sentence. Adobe abandoned mobile Flash in 2011. Browsers deprecated it. Open standards replaced it. Adobe announced the end in July 2017. On 31 December 2020, it stopped. He is survived by the archives that preserve what he made, and by the platforms that killed him.

Flickr passed on 20 April 2018, though the body remains. Born in February 2004, it offered tags, groups, and the conviction that photos ought to be shared with metadata intact. At its peak it claimed tens of billions of photos. Yahoo acquired it in 2005. The company did not invest. Instagram arrived. Users left. Yahoo sold to Verizon. In April 2018 SmugMug acquired Flickr. The new owner promised to restore it. The body remains. Whether the soul returned is unclear. He is survived by the body, which still hosts photos; by SmugMug, which promised to care; and by the memory of a time when a photo could still have a home.

Friendster passed in June 2015, having lived thirteen years as the first social network that reached the mainstream. Born in 2002 in Mountain View, it introduced the idea of a visible social graph. At its peak it claimed more than one hundred million users. Technical failures and a disastrous redesign in 2009 drove users to Facebook. Acquired by a Malaysian company, it pivoted to social gaming in Asia. The gaming pivot failed. In 2015 the company announced it would be “taking a break.” The break never ended. He is survived by every platform that learned from his mistakes, and by the memory of what it meant to be first.

GeoCities passed on 26 October 2009, having lived fifteen years as the first place where anyone could build a home on the web. Born in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, it offered a neighbourhood, a street, and a page. Users chose where to live: Hollywood, Tokyo, Athens. At its peak it hosted more than three and a half million sites. Yahoo acquired it in 1999 for more than three billion dollars. Social networks arrived. Yahoo announced the shutdown in April 2009. Users had six months to save their sites. The Archive Team raced to preserve what it could. On 26 October the servers went dark. He is survived by the archive, which holds what was saved, and by the memory of a web that was once a place you could live.

Google Inbox, which served the electronic correspondence needs of the discerning and the overwhelmed in equal measure, was discontinued on 2 April 2019, having survived four years and five months in a state of invitation-only exclusivity followed by cautious general release. It was born of Google’s ATAP division in October 2014, and brought to the thankless labour of email a coherence — bundles, snoozing, smart replies, reminders threaded beside messages — that its users had not known they required until the moment it was taken from them.

It is survived by a Gmail application into which certain of its features were absorbed without ceremony, and which has not been forgiven for it. Google offered no apology for the discontinuation beyond the assurance that the best of Inbox would live on, a claim its former users received with the particular sorrow of those who know precisely what has been lost.

Google+ passed on 2 April 2019, having lived eight years as Google’s answer to Facebook. Born on 28 June 2011, it offered circles, streams, and the conviction that real names would improve the social web. It was mandatory for some Google services. At its peak it claimed hundreds of millions of accounts. Ninety percent of user sessions lasted less than five seconds. No one used it. Google cited low engagement and two data breaches. The second breach moved the shutdown forward by four months. On 2 April 2019, consumer accounts began to disappear. He is survived by every engineer who learned that distribution cannot substitute for desire, and by the memory of a social network that nobody wanted to be social on.

Google Reader passed on 1 July 2013, having lived eight years in the service of those who wished to read the internet rather than merely scroll it. Born on 7 October 2005 in Google Labs, he was the creation of engineer Chris Wetherell, who understood that information ought to come to the reader, and not the other way around. At his peak he was the daily companion of journalists, developers, and quiet obsessives the world over. Google cited declining use. No reason was offered that those who depended on him found sufficient. Within days of his death, half a million people had sought a replacement. None has been entirely satisfactory. He was not wrong. He was merely early, and then gone.

Google Stadia was born in November 2019 amid considerable fanfare, presented to the world at the Game Developers Conference that March as nothing less than the future of interactive entertainment. It promised to dissolve the barrier between player and game — no console required, no download endured, only a browser, a controller, and a reliable connection standing between any person and any experience. The ambition was not small. The execution, in time, proved smaller.

Stadia launched to a public that found it admirable in theory and compromised in practice. The library was thin. The latency, for many, was sufficient to disappoint. The business model shifted twice within its brief life, from subscription to free tier and back again, each revision carrying the scent of an organisation unsure what it had built or for whom it had built it. Google announced exclusive first-party studios, then shuttered them in February 2021, nineteen months before the service itself was wound down. Developers who had signed agreements, built pipelines, and oriented their futures around the platform received the news with a quietness that bespoke not surprise, but a particular species of exhaustion.

What Stadia represented, beneath its mismanagement, was a genuine technological thesis: that the machine in the data centre could replace the machine beneath the television, that geography and hardware wealth need not determine who plays and what they play. That thesis was not proven wrong. It was simply abandoned before the proof could be assembled. Nvidia’s GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Amazon Luna each carry fragments of the same argument forward, with varying degrees of commitment.

Stadia closed its servers on 18 January 2023. Google refunded the cost of all hardware and software purchased through the platform — a gesture of unusual decency from an organisation that had, by that point, spent several years demonstrating that decency alone does not constitute a product strategy. The controllers, those pale oval objects with their dedicated capture button and their Stadia logo, remain in households across several countries, repurposed now as Bluetooth gamepads for other services. They outlasted the platform they were designed to serve. There is something in that worth noting, though it is not clear what.

Google Wave passed on 30 April 2012, having lived three years as the future of collaboration. Born in May 2009, it combined email, chat, and document editing in a single real-time thread. It was invite-only. No one you knew had access. The interface was dense. The servers struggled. Users never learned what it was for. Google announced the end of development in August 2010. The service became read-only in January 2012. On 30 April the servers went dark. He is survived by every tool that does one thing well, and by the memory of a product that was right about convergence and wrong about timing.

iGoogle passed on 1 November 2013, having lived eight years as the place where the web could be home. Born in May 2005, it offered a personalised start page: widgets, feeds, weather, games. At its peak it claimed seven million users and twenty percent of Google’s homepage traffic. Mobile apps arrived. The start page became obsolete. Google announced the shutdown in July 2012. On 1 November 2013 the URL redirected to the search page. No announcement marked the day. The company had said the need had eroded over time. He is survived by every dashboard that replaced him, and by the memory of a time when the web had a front door you could decorate.

LimeWire passed on 26 October 2010, having lived ten years as the most popular way to share files. Born in 2000, it ran on the Gnutella network. Users searched, downloaded, and shared. At its peak it claimed fifty million monthly users. Ninety-three percent of the traffic, a court found, was copyrighted material. The Recording Industry Association of America sued. In May 2010 a judge ruled LimeWire liable. In October she ordered it to disable all searching, downloading, and sharing. The company complied. The website displayed a notice: downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorization is illegal. He is survived by every streaming service that charges for what he gave away, and by the conviction that music ought to be shared.

Megaupload passed on 19 January 2012, having lived seven years as one of the largest file-sharing sites on the internet. Born in 2005, it offered uploads, downloads, and the conviction that files ought to move. At its peak it claimed four percent of global internet traffic. Federal prosecutors accused it of costing copyright holders more than five hundred million dollars. On 19 January the U.S. Department of Justice seized eighteen domain names. Police in New Zealand arrested the founder and three executives. Servers were shut down. Users lost access to their files. The founder built Mega. Megaupload did not return. He is survived by the indictment, which has not reached trial, and by the conviction that the law, when it moves, moves fast.

MSN Messenger passed on 15 March 2013, having lived fourteen years as the primary means by which millions learned to chat. Born in 1999, it offered a Buddy List and the sound of a door opening. It was rebranded as Windows Live Messenger. At its peak it claimed more than one hundred million active users. Microsoft acquired Skype. In November 2012 the company announced the transition. Messenger would be retired. Users would move to Skype. The migration was mandatory. On 15 March 2013 the servers went quiet everywhere except China, where the service lingered another year. He is survived by every chat window that replaced him, and by the memory of a time when messaging was a place you went, not a thing you did.

MySpace passed in 2013, having lived ten years as the largest social network in the world. Born in 2003, it offered a profile, a playlist, and the freedom to make a page your own. At its peak in December 2008 it claimed nearly seventy-six million unique visitors. Bands found fans. Teenagers learned to code. Facebook offered real names and a feed. Users left. The company was sold and sold again. A rebrand focused on music. The music pivot failed. By 2013 the user count had collapsed. He is survived by every platform that learned that discovery matters more than decoration, and by the memory of a time when a profile could still feel like a room you built.

Napster passed on 2 July 2001, having lived two years as the first way to share music at scale. Born in June 1999 in a dormitory, it connected users’ folders. Search, download, share. At its peak it claimed eighty million users. Metallica sued. The Recording Industry Association of America sued. A judge ordered it to block copyrighted material. Napster could not achieve one hundred percent compliance. The company voluntarily shut down on 2 July. A judge ordered it to remain offline. The name survived in various forms. The original did not. He is survived by every service that learned that music ought to be shared, and by the conviction that the law, when it catches up, will follow what users already do.

Netscape passed on 1 March 2008, having lived fourteen years as the browser that gave the web to the world. Born in 1994, it made the internet navigable. At its peak it held more than eighty percent of the market. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows. The browser wars began. Netscape lost. AOL acquired it in 1998. The company open-sourced the code, which became Firefox. Netscape became a skinned version of Firefox. By 2008 its share had fallen to less than one percent. AOL announced the end of support. Users were directed to Firefox. On 1 March the last security update was issued. He is survived by Firefox, which carries his code, and by the conviction that the web ought to belong to those who use it.

Orkut passed on 30 September 2014, having lived ten years as the social network that found its home where Facebook had not yet arrived. Born on 22 January 2004 as a twenty-percent project, it offered a profile and a scrapbook. In America it never caught on. In Brazil it held half of all users. In India it held twenty percent. Google built Google+. In June 2014 the company announced the shutdown. Orkut would close. Resources would shift to YouTube, Blogger, and Google+. Users could export their data. The communities were archived. On 30 September the servers went quiet. He is survived by the archive, which preserves what was built, and by the memory of a platform that was never global but was home to millions.

Path passed on 18 October 2018, having lived eight years as the social network that promised to stay small. Born in November 2010, it limited users to fifty friends. The idea was intimacy. At its peak it claimed fifty million users and a valuation of five hundred million. The limit was raised to one hundred fifty. Facebook had billions. Path was acquired by a South Korean company. In September 2018 the shutdown was announced. Users had until 18 October to download their data. The app was removed from stores on 1 October. On 18 October the servers went dark. He is survived by every platform that learned that small was a feature, and by the memory of a time when a social network could still refuse to grow.

Picasa passed on 15 March 2016, having lived fourteen years as the way to organise photos on a computer. Born in 2002, it offered a folder, a timeline, and the conviction that your pictures ought to live on your disk. At its peak it claimed millions of users. Google acquired it in 2004. Google Photos arrived in 2015. In February 2016 the shutdown was announced. Picasa would close. Users would migrate to Google Photos. The desktop app would no longer be available for download. On 15 March support ended. He is survived by Google Photos, which lives in the cloud, and by the memory of a time when your pictures lived on your computer.

Posterous passed on 30 April 2013, having lived five years as the blog that let you post by email. Born in 2008, it offered a single idea: send an email to post. No dashboard. No login. Just write and send. At its peak it claimed sixty thousand daily logins and fifty-two million pages. Twitter acquired it in March 2012. In February 2013 the shutdown was announced. The team would focus on Twitter. Users had thirty days to migrate. Posthaven, founded by Posterous co-founders, promised to keep blogs forever. On 30 April the servers went dark. He is survived by every platform that learned that publishing ought to be simple, and by the memory of a time when a blog could be an email address.

StumbleUpon passed on 30 June 2018, having lived sixteen years as the first way to discover the web without searching. Born in 2002 in a graduate dormitory, it offered a single button: stumble. Click it and find something. Over the years it delivered content to forty million users and served nearly sixty billion stumbles. It predated the like button, the news feed, and the idea that discovery could be optimized. Its founder moved on to Uber, then to Expa, then to Mix. In May 2018 he announced the transition. StumbleUpon would become Mix. Users could import their favorites. The stumble button would not make the journey. He is survived by every feed that tells you what you want before you ask, and by the quiet conviction that the best things are still the ones you do not search for.

Tumblr passed on 17 December 2018, though the body remains. Born in 2007, it offered a dashboard, a reblog, and the conviction that the web could still be weird. At its peak it claimed hundreds of millions of blogs. Apple removed it from the App Store in November 2018. The platform announced a ban on adult content. Photos, videos, and GIFs showing nudity would be removed. The algorithm flagged art. Artists left. The platform sold for a fraction of what Yahoo had paid. He is survived by the body, which still hosts blogs; by the ban, which emptied the dashboard; and by the memory of a time when the platform belonged to those who built it.

Vine passed on 17 January 2017, having lived four years as the first home of short-form video. Born on 24 January 2013 in Twitter’s laboratories, it gave the world six seconds and a loop. At its peak it claimed more than two hundred million monthly viewers. Creators learned to compress comedy into a single breath; audiences learned that the smallest format could hold the most. Twitter announced its discontinuation in October 2016. The parent company cited cost-cutting and a shift in strategy. No one said it had lost to rivals who had learned its lessons. The app went quiet in January. The website lingered. He is survived by every platform that copied his constraints, and by the loops that still play, though no one makes them anymore.

Winamp passed on 20 December 2013, having lived sixteen years as the media player that taught a generation to organise music. Born in 1997, it offered a playlist, a spectrum analyser, and the conviction that software could have personality. It really whipped the llama’s ass. AOL acquired it in 1999 for more than eighty million dollars. Streaming arrived. The company did not adapt. In November 2013 AOL announced the shutdown. The website would go dark. The player would no longer be available for download. On 20 December it stopped. He is survived by every streaming service that replaced the playlist, and by the memory of a time when your music lived in a folder and a program you chose.

Xanga passed in July 2013, having lived fifteen years as the blog that felt like a journal. Born in 1998, it offered a page and a feed. Users wrote in public. At its peak it claimed millions of bloggers. The server lease was expensive. The company could not afford to renew. In May 2013 a fundraiser was launched: sixty thousand dollars by mid-July or the site would shut down. By July the campaign had raised sixty-three percent. The deadline was extended. The outcome is unclear. Some say it survived as Xanga 2.0. Some say it did not. He is survived by the memory of a time when the web had room for journals, and by the conviction that sometimes sixty thousand dollars is the difference between survival and silence.

Yahoo Answers passed on 4 May 2021, though the format remains. Born in December 2005, it offered a question, an answer, and points for participation. At its peak it received more than one hundred twenty million monthly visits. It was the second-largest reference site after Wikipedia. The answers were often wrong. The questions were often absurd. It became a source of memes. Yahoo announced the shutdown in April 2021. Users had until 20 April to post. On 4 May the site redirected to the Yahoo homepage. The archive was deleted. He is survived by Reddit and Quora, which learned to ask and answer; by the format, which endures; and by the memory of a time when the internet could still be wrong in public.