This is like the Gashlycrumb Tinies but for websites:
It’s been interesting to see how websites die — from domain parking pages to timeouts to blank pages to outdated TLS cipher errors, there are a multitude of different ways.
I found this to be thoroughly engrossing. An articulate composition, you might say.
I couldn’t help thinking of J.G. Ballard’s short story, The Drowned Giant.
Spin the wheel: you’ll get a week and a death in 1665.
(Realistically, you probably would’ve died of plague, which outnumbers other causes of death by orders of magnitude.)
Ignore the clickbaity headline and have a read of Whitney Kimball’s obituaries of Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, OpenSocial, ConnectU, Tribe.net, Path, Yik Yak, Ello, Orkut, Google+, and Vine.
I’m sure your content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is perfectly safe.
147 dead properties and counting.
There’s something deliciously appropriate about using a painting cloning service to clone a photograph of some cloned dogs.
“Did you just order an oil painting of Barbra Streisand’s dogs?” is the most Simon and Natalie thing ever.
Although this comes close:
Digital seems like it’s forever because it’s infinitely reproducible, but someone has to think to make that canonical copy or it’s gone-gone.
In this five-year old eulogy for a BBS, Alexis Madrigal ponders the deaths of social networks. Friendster, MySpace, Vine …plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Justin has been thinking about how we ensure our digital legacy survives our passing.
Shane gave a talk recently where he outlined his reasons for publishing on the indie web:
Most people reading this will probably have an account at most or all of these sites: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Wordpress. Many also had accounts at Friendster, Tribe, MySpace, Delicious, Magnolia, Gowalla, Geocities. But no one has an account at any of those (on the second list) anymore. And all of the content that we created on those sites is gone.
All of those super emo feeling you posted to MySpace, they’re all gone. Some of the great web designers of our generation got started on Geocities. That stuff is gone forever. And sure, it was sparkling animated GIFs and neon colors. But that’s important history. Yahoo bought it, left it alone for a while, and then decided one day to turn it off.
Now this is how you shut down a service:
Web projects often lack hard edges. They begin with clarity but end without. We want to close Hi.co with clarity. To properly bookend the website.
And nary a trace of “We are excited to announce…” or “Thank you for joining us on our incredible journey…”
(Such a shame that the actual shut-down notice is only on Ev’s blog, but hopefully Craig will write something on his own site too.)
Having experienced the death of a friend, I wonder how many have considered the ghosts in the machine.
Realistically, what happens when you detonate a large metallic satellite (about the the size of the second Death Star) in orbit around an inhabited world (like, say, the forest moon of Endor).
It isn’t pretty.
How to think about drones—an in-depth and fairly balanced article by Mark Bowden on drone strikes and the politics behind them.
In the long run, careful adherence to the law matters more than eliminating another bad actor. Greater prudence and transparency are not just morally and legally essential, they are in our long-term interest, because the strikes themselves feed the anti-drone narrative, and inspire the kind of random, small-scale terror attacks that are bin Laden’s despicable legacy.
This powerful timeline illustrates how drone attacks have increased dramatically under Obama’s administration.
Documenting all the ways you could die in a choose-your-own-adventure book.
A new project from James, keeping track of the sites of illegal drone strikes.
I’m in Texas right now.
These are the final statements of men and women who have been executed by the state of Texas.
A superb piece of writing from Erin, smashing taboos with the edge of Bladerunner.
The final post in ten years of blogging. Derek is dead. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to write this.
The beautifully-written and moving story of a father’s last gift to his son. The father is Jef Raskin; the son is Aza Raskin.