LiveJournal, Grooveshark and 12 More Best Internet Relics We Left Behind
Figuring out the age of the Internet is like figuring out the age of the universe: we could date it to the 1960s and the ARPANET, or the introduction of TCP / IP in 1983, or the launch of America Online in 1985, or the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, or maybe be, the creation of the Netscape browser in 1994.
Regardless of how you feel about the dawn of the Internet, two things are undoubtedly true: technology has fundamentally changed modern life, and the modern Internet is completely corrupted by unnecessary software. Not only is it chock full of dead links and missing data , but many of the tools we once used with enthusiasm are either completely dead or exist today as ghostly, barely functioning time capsules . Heck, Google alone killed dozens of tools it launched with great fanfare and then dropped it almost immediately.
Sometimes this is due to a change in technology – after all, there were dozens of search engines before Google’s dominance in this space, and sometimes it is due to good old capitalist competition. Whatever the reason, we left behind many old relics of the Internet, and people of a certain age can be forgiven for their long attachment to them. Or a lingering morbid curiosity, because sometimes there is a certain element of WTF in older tools that we used to rely on. Here are some of the relics of the Internet that we have left behind as we tirelessly dive into the future.