The greatest defunct Web sites and dotcom disasters

NurseChrisThu 5 June, 2008 11:05am

What about Boo.com, in its first incarnation as a high end sport wear shop. Didn't it blow a start up cost of about 80 million?!?

Nick HideThu 5 June, 2008 11:39am

Sorry - Boo.com was always on the list, but was initally omitted due to an editing fail. It's on page 3 now.

NurseChrisThu 5 June, 2008 1:29pm

Good work, I thought it was too much of a glaring omission!

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 4:49pm

You didn't mention dEN (or DeN) - Digital Entertainment Network; I worked with them when they were starting up (as an IT consultant), it was amazing the things I saw. They had M$ and all the top players giving them kazillions, which they used to buy about a thousand Avid editing machines...huge yard sale less than a year later...they should definitely be on this list...

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 4:53pm

Excellent list. A few classics not included, but a good 10 to choose. And God I miss Jenni...

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 4:59pm

on the webvan article "...Within 18 months it had spent $1bn (over £500m at today's exchange rate)..."

is this exchange rate conversion assuming they are talking about 2008 dollars exchanged? or 1999-2001 dollars? because if you recall, the US dollar was doing pretty well in those days.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 5:21pm

what about webcrawler? That was big before hotbot... and altavista blew hotbot away in popularity at the time, though hotbot was the best i thought.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 5:50pm

Oh man, awesome article. Remember so many of these. Gunna bookmark for future plagarism in uni. Cheers. (I clicked an add. That's how your paid right?)

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 5:57pm

I really miss AudioGalaxy. Even my mother was able to find music she could like on this... The author is right in saying it was different. I guess nowadays it has been replaced by iLike.com
Thanks for these memories!

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 5:58pm

anyone remember the same sort of service as heat.net named Ten?

i used to play duke3d on that... that also failed big time like heat.net. haha.
<3

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 6:04pm

just for the record...anyone CANNOT edit Wikipedia. I saw a typo in an article, so I went to correct it (first time ever trying to edit Wikipedia) and there was some rule about registering then waiting several days before I could edit it! So just wanted to get out there that the whole freedom of Wikipedia is a myth.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 6:05pm

Ha - and again musicmaker.com misses mention...just like when it was alive.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 6:06pm

The people behind WebVAN is now operating Amazon Fresh. They seem to be doing well. I can't wait for them to start delivering to my zip code.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 6:35pm

No, anybody can edit Wikipedia. The only exception being a tiny percentage of articles that are locked-down. These are usually the controversial topics or bios that are often defaced.

Go find any "average" article. You can edit it without even registering.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 6:36pm

> just for the record...anyone CANNOT edit Wikipedia.

Huh? Without logging in almost all Wikipedia pages CAN be edited. Yes, there are a few frequently vandalized pages that are protected and creating new articles require a logon but that's all. And setting up a new account takes about 20 seconds - I just did it. I wonder if your IP address accidentally ended up on the list of blocked IP addresses or something ...

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 6:40pm

What about CNET's own Snap! Online?

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 6:41pm

Great list! What about sports site quokka.com ?

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 6:59pm

aww, audiogalaxy and stage6, i miss those. obviously the main attraction was the "piracy", but both had great user interfaces and solid technology. no one else seems to offer streaming as high res and as buffer-free as stage6, and while bittorrent is a pretty worthy successor to audiogalaxy for downloading albums, nothing compares for downloading single tracks and for exploring related music. damn, i really miss that site!

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 7:39pm

DrKoop.com anyone? He was a great surgeon general, but that didn't translate well into an internet startup.
Another one is VALinux, a linux distro that burned through millions as its stock flew skyward 700%, then declared bankruptcy when the investor money ran out.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 7:51pm

netpcs.com wacked idea without the scope to implement no matter who told them so.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 8:06pm

soulseek, I believe was it's name, was an excellent mp3 search engine in its day. And you can't talk about the GREATEST defunct websites w/o mentioning the original mp3.com, I found so much great music by bands that didn't hit the radio until years afterwards.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 8:09pm

I would have liked to see a list of dot-coms that didn't fail "In the Bust" as well as those that did.

Boo.com qualifies, I guess...

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 8:21pm

Or C-Net's Webshots... 8 years ago it was huge when i was in college. They didn't pick up on the whole social network thing and now its dead in the water because of facebooks ability to manage photos and show relations between photos and those in them.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 9:03pm

I'm curious why they chose heat.net instead of mplayer.com in their list of great former computer gaming sites. Sega simply bought Mplayer's technology for their own site, and they never had as many users or games as Mplayer did.

It's too bad that GameSpy bought Mplayer and basically destroyed it :(

Larry SangerThu 5 June, 2008 9:08pm

Larry Sanger here. The reporter has Citizendium wrong, I'm afraid. It is simply incorrect that, universally, our "articles go through a screening process and are written by certified academics and similar individuals."

In fact, we are nearly as open as Wikipedia. You don't have to be an expert to be involved. Many of us don't work in our areas of expertise, and some of us aren't really experts in much of anything. We have both Authors and Editors, and ten times as many Authors as Editors.

Also, we've been in existence for about 18 months, but most of our nearly 7,000 articles are both posted and still unapproved. We aren't proud of that, of course, but the point is that we do post our drafts publicly.

It would be good of CNET to correct the reporter's error, which was at the expense of a project that is working very well and which deserves CNET's support.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 9:19pm

Innoventry...

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 9:22pm

Remember dear old AllAdvantage.com? The folks that paid you to surf the internet? The folks who thought they could leverage your personal information to revolutionize the world and make everyone kowtow to the great behaemoth that was their userbase? The one that folks made hundreds of dollars off of by script-browsing the net?

LOL!

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 9:25pm

how about mp3.com?

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 9:44pm

Flooz.com

I got $200 bucks from a boss as a bonus - 3 days later it went out of business along with my bonus.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 9:44pm

Thought for sure Pointcast would make the list. They were huge in '96 - turned down a $400m acquisition offer and were eventually purchased for $2m

Nate LanxonThu 5 June, 2008 9:56pm

Thanks to the above poster, re Pointcast. Interesting nugget of information, that. Sorry it couldn't make the list. I'll be looking into it though, as that's one hell of a financial loss on its founder's part!

Nate LanxonThu 5 June, 2008 10:00pm

Mr Sanger, apologies for the oversight. Certainly it wasn't intentional. Please drop me an email on nate.lanxon(at)cnet.com at your earliest convenience.

AnonymousThu 5 June, 2008 10:34pm

man...mp3.com, that site was great. i remember they had an app that would scan your audio CDs, verify them against a database, and then give you access to the full album in mp3 form on their website, so you could stream it anywhere. that was genius.

AnonymousFri 6 June, 2008 5:02am

Audiogalaxy: Still exists. Not in the way that it did before Rhapsody stepped in and messed up a good (free) thing, but the site still exists.

AnonymousFri 6 June, 2008 6:23am

Snap.com was a pretty typical dot.com bust. Originally a cnet property bought by nbc for cash and stocks. They eventually mismanaged it into nothingness.

AnonymousFri 6 June, 2008 6:26am

millennium

dominant

AnonymousFri 6 June, 2008 12:28pm

how is boo.com a 'precursor next.co.uk'? Next is a successful high street chain from pre internet that has also sells online and via catalogue in additon to 100's of stores

AnonymousFri 6 June, 2008 1:11pm

What's been omitted is the basic reason ALL of the on-line eTailers like Boo and Pets.com (and WebVan) failed in the first place - PRICE!!!

Yeah - it's great that I can order the same bag of dog food or loaf of bread that I can get 3 miles from home - but the fact is that waiting for UPS to dump it on my doorstep as a "convenience" isn't going to compel me to pay 20% more (particularly after shipping) for the same product. I am astounded that these investors and "visionaries" couldn't see this basic principal. I learned this my first day in Economics 101.

The same still holds true today - at least for me. Ultimately what drives me to "consume" is cost. If a website doesn't offer something I can't get easily close to home, or save me a reasonable amount of cash compared to a local source - I'm not buying. Period.

AnonymousFri 6 June, 2008 5:10pm

Actually, plenty of people WERE willing to pay more for delivery. Just not A LOT more. 20% simply wasn't enough to cover the truly epic costs of delivering groceries door-to-door in large suburban ares. 200% markup probably wouldn't be enough. The whole idea is stupid. There is a good reason there is no longer any door-to-door milk delivery.

AnonymousFri 6 June, 2008 6:58pm

Have you people heard of the freespeechstore.com? Richard Morton Scoville, prop.

Google his name or that of his defunct website for a truly enlightening look at a true internet k00k.

AnonymousFri 6 June, 2008 10:50pm

Re Jenni: After a bit of searching I was able to find an archive of the "Best" of Jennicam. It's still out there.

AnonymousSat 7 June, 2008 5:30pm

I was a bit disappointed that you didn't mention the real reason that Jennicam shut down.

in 2000, after 4 years of being an Internet celebrity and making lots of money, Jenni spent a week visiting some friends in California -- a couple named Courtney and Dex. Jenni decided she wanted to move there, so, her friend Courtney found Jenni a house and then flew to Washington to help Jenni pack and move.

2 months later, Jenni was in bed with Dex and announced that they were "in love" and Dex was leaving Courtney to move in with Jenni. People were outraged that Jenni would do such a thing to her friend Courtney, and subscriptions began to drop. The fact that Dex was an ugly lazy unemployed slacker didn't help.

By early 2001, subscriptions to Jennicam had fallen off so much that Jenni had to go out and get a real job. This made matters worse since subscribers were now paying to look at an empty room while Jenni was at work. By 2003 the few remaining subscribers were asking for their money back. With her website generating very little money, and tired of the constant criticism for her involvement with Dex, Jenni shut down the site at the end of 2003.