A wistful look at Infoseek - the lean, efficient search engine that felt like a flashlight in the murky, dial-up web - and how its interface, priorities, and products left fingerprints on the sites and search engines that followed.
Before algorithmic timelines and attention-warping feeds, Yahoo! Groups was where strangers became neighbors, hobbies found homes and grief found company. This piece revisits those small, fiercely human corners of the web, shares the stories they produced, and asks what modern platforms could learn from their virtues and failures.
A brisk, nostalgic look at how GeoCities and Angelfire shaped the early personal web. This comparative analysis traces origins, features, culture, decline, and lasting influence - and explains why messy, pixelated homepages mattered more than we thought.
Xanga wasn't just a blogging platform - it was an incubator of intimacy, small-scale civic rituals, and the idea that social software could be both personal and public. This essay examines what Xanga got right (and wrong) and extracts practical lessons for today’s platforms, from attention design to archival stewardship.
Infoseek was one of the 1990s search pioneers: fast, simple, and briefly dominant. Then Disney bought it, the web turned meaner, and Infoseek vanished. This post unpacks what Infoseek did right, where it went wrong, and what modern search engines should learn from its arc.
Hotmail arrived like a tiny revolution - free, web-based email you could access anywhere. It grew fast, got bought by Microsoft, then stumbled as the web matured. This piece traces Hotmail's climb, its complacent plateau, and the lessons the tech world still ignores.
A short, evocative exploration of how the squeal and stutter of AOL's dial-up shaped early internet identity. Featuring first-person recollections, a brief technical primer, and three curated playlists inspired by those unforgettable tones.
From a Stanford project that organized the chaotic early web to a $5 billion sale to Verizon, Yahoo!'s arc is a tale of brilliant beginnings, strategic missteps, and hard lessons for today’s tech leaders. This article traces the company's milestones, analyzes where it went wrong, and draws practical lessons for modern startups.