history

This  history  provides brief one-line descriptions of contextually historic website events of and around the indieweb, including blogging precursors, and the rise & fall of notable social network silos.

When writing history, please mention people involved, dates, and sources for each.

See Also:
 * timeline for a brief history of key indieweb ideas, standards, achievements, implementations, and in-person events.
 * founders for a brief history of IndieWebCamp itself.

Key

 * (L) - Launched. Site, service, or group launched.
 * (A) - Acquired. Site or service acquired.
 * (F) - Finality known. Site shutdown announced.
 * (R) - Read-only. Site placed into read-only mode.
 * (D) - Died. Site shutdown, crashed and didn't recover, or otherwise came to an untimely demise.
 * (Z) - Zombified. Site/domain still up but permalinks/posts/content gone or heavily removed/damaged. Functionality drastically reduced or changed. Possibly resurrected by unaffiliated party and used for link spam.

In chronological order, grouped by year:

When adding from site-deaths, please shorten description of event to a minimal one-liner, keep citations in bracket [] form, and only include events about notable social network silos.

1994

 * 1994 (L): Geocities launched

1997

 * 1997-05 (L): AIM launched (Wikipedia)

1997-2002

 * Your personal domain/blog was a way to host identity and data
 * People learned how to program and to do web development through their blogs
 * RSS emerged, diverged

2002

 * 2002-03-22 (L): Friendster launched

2003

 * 2003 (L): Upcoming launched
 * 2003-08 (L): MySpace launched

2004

 * 2004-01-24 (L): Orkut launched (Wikipedia)
 * 2004-02-04 (L): Facebook launched
 * 2004 (L): Lavabit launched

2005

 * 2005-07 (A): MySpace acquired by News Corp.

2006

 * 2006-03-21 (L): Twitter first tweet
 * 2006-07-15 (L): Twitter launched

2007

 * 2007-07 (L): FFFFOUND launched (Wikipedia)
 * 2007-10-02 (L): FriendFeed launched (Wikipedia)
 * 2007 (L): Gowalla launched

2008

 * 2008 (L): Posterous launched
 * 2008-02-03 (I): XMPP PubSub Federation implemented between Twitter and Jaiku silos by Blaine Cook and Ralph Meijer respectively, at Social Graph FooCamp.
 * 2008-11 (D): AOL Hometown shutdown (with only 2 weeks notice)

2009

 * 2009 (A): FriendFeed acquired by Facebook
 * 2009 (D): Geocities shutdown by owner Yahoo

2011

 * 2011-06-29 (A): MySpace acquired by Specific Media
 * 2011-07-14 (L): Persona launched (blog post)
 * 2011-10-17 (L): OpenPhoto 1.2 launched (blog archive), no earlier versions on blog
 * 2011-12-02 (A): Gowalla acquired by Facebook

2012

 * 2012-03-12 (D): Gowalla shutdown
 * 2012-03-12 (A): Posterous acquired by Twitter

2013

 * 2013-01-14 (L): Branch launched (Techcrunch)
 * 2013-01 (D): MyVidoop.com (an OpenID provider) shutdown, after the company dissolved in 2009 (crickwaters.wordpress.com)
 * 2013 (D): Lavabit shutdown
 * 2013 (D): Upcoming shutdown
 * 2013-02 (F): Posterous shutdown announced
 * 2013-03-13 (F): Google Reader shutdown announced
 * 2013-04-30 (D): Posterous shutdown
 * 2013-06-13 (Z): MySpace deleted nearly all existing user content
 * 2013-07-01 (D): Google Reader shutdown

2014

 * 2014-01-13 (A): Branch acquired by Facebook
 * 2014-01-13 (A): Potluck acquired by Facebook
 * 2014-07-21 (L): W3C Social Web Working Group launched with a wiki home page, and a charter citing key IndieWeb technologies: IndieAuth, Webmention, h-entry, h-card, h-cite, and web actions.

2015

 * 2015-03-31 (D): The Photo Project (formerly Trovebox, launched as OpenPhoto) shutdown
 * 2015-04-10 (D): FriendFeed shutdown
 * 2015-06-03 (D): Branch shutdown

2016

 * 2016-09-30 (D): Orkut shutdown
 * 2016-11-30 (D): Persona shutdown

2017

 * 2017-03-14 (D): App.net shutdown
 * 2017-05-08 (D): FFFFound shutdown
 * 2017-12-15 (D): AIM shutdown

2018

 * 2018-01-27 (R): Lanyrd goes read-only after being down a bunch.
 * 2018-04-20 (A): Flickr acquired by SmugMug (USA Today)

Add More

 * Add one line summaries for each social media and/or open/federated/distributed/decentralized web service site-death (D) and preferably also (L)aunch date as well.
 * 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004
 * 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
 * 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
 * 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, ...

Unknown dates
If you know specific dates for the launch, acquisition, death, or zombification of these sites (or any of the above year-only or year-month-only dates), please edit and move to the appropriate year, preferably with online citation.

2002-2006: Rise of Social Networks Silos
 * Friendster (2002) (what was significant about Friendster in 2002?)
 * Facebook (2005) (what was significant about Facebook in 2005?)
 * Myspace (2004) (what was significant about Myspace in 2004?)

Trends:
 * Integrated UI and subscription model
 * One click signup