January 07, 2009
AOL Hometown was one of these Tripod/Geocities era sites that hosted simple web pages for people with AOL accounts. Unfortunately, as part of AOL's continually evolving business model/death spiral they decided to take Hometown offline forever. Many of these pages were quite old and represented a unique look at the early history of what people did with their space on the internet. They notified all the users that 4 weeks hence they were typing "format c:" and if you wanted it saved you'd better do it. Sockington's owner rightly believes that this was an epic travesty and that rules for "online eviction" should be in place just like they are offline. In this longer post he gives more detail and describes how he singlehandedly tried to wget everything from a dying site named Podango who gave its users 5 days warning starting Dec. 26 that they were going under. The Archive Team might spring into action more and more as small sites go down the tubes thanks to the recession. If you think it could never ever happen to the data you are asking Google or MSN or their ilk to keep on your behalf, think back to how strong AOL used to be in the days of Hometown...
Another turd in the internet utopia: sites like Facebook, Youtube, etc throttle server traffic to low-income countries because they pay out with low ad revenue.
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Also, there is a rumor that livejournal is about to die, or get severely cut back.
posted by Valatan at 07:31PM CST on January 07