There once was a WebRing that escaped a giant.

I could fill pages with tales of sites that have been acquired and subsequently destroyed. Perhaps "destroyed" isn't the word -- sometimes web purchases are mainly done not for actual sites but for technology and people. From a web user's perspective (and that is the perspective I generally write from on this blog), though, services like Google's Dodgeball and AOL's XDrive have indeed been destroyed. They're no longer available to be used and enjoyed. It's almost as if they never existed at all in this crazy transient world we call the Internet, though Dodgeball fans should check out foursquare.

WebRing is an example of a rare happy story that can emerge when an acquisition goes wrong. A webring is basically a collection of related sites: you can think of it as a mini-directory that can be surfed not only at a centralized location but also at each site in the webring via a navigation bar. Years ago when I was starting out online webrings were pretty huge. They're much more obscure now, but just as useful -- I don't know of any other easier way to surf around the Web than to click on the "Next" link of a WebRing widget and it usually leads you to more relevant pages because webrings are human-edited. You can tell how big webrings once were by the fact that WebRing, the leading webring provider, was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 as part of its purchase of GeoCities. By 2001, Yahoo! had lost interest in the site as they are wont to do. Normally, this would have pretty bad...disastrously bad you might say...as it is how acquired sites tend to meet their end. Rather than being catastrophic, however, Yahoo!'s abandonment of WebRing actually led to something good: an independent site run by one of the original site workers. Now Yahoo! doesn't own any part of WebRing -- it's a completely independent, privately owned site. I tend to think of it as a beacon of hope for all those who have had to watch their site fade away after being acquired. Sometimes, albeit rarely, there is life after a bad acquisition!

In addition to its core webring service, WebRing now also offers free webspace and free blog hosting. It is currently actively recruiting GeoCities users to move their pages there in light of Yahoo!'s recent decision to shutter GeoCities. You know, it might not be such a bad idea for someone to create a startup that just attempts to provide alternative services to sites that the giants kill. As WebRing's story illustrates, just because a giant loses interest in a site doesn't mean it doesn't have any life left.