What's the One Dead Website You Wish You Could Revive?
Benj Edwards at The Atlantic just published this beautiful piece about a man's quest to rebuild Prodigy, the ancient web service dead since 1999. As the net has grown and changed, no doubt you've lost a favorite site or two. Say you've got a genie and all your other wishes fulfilled. Which website do you revive?
If you're over, say, 25 years old, you've probably got a whole list of long-dead (or just really heavily neglected) sites that you'd love to see working again. Maybe it's your old Geocities page, the one with the dancing baby GIF and a list of your best friends' initials from the eighth-grade lunch table. Maybe it's a defunct forum where you wrote a really well-thought-out takedown of someone's political ranting that totally should've gotten more attention.
Maybe it's the free webhosting site where, in the summer of 2003, you posted a bunch of grainy digital photos from a road trip you took with your friends, the first time anybody's parents would let them hop in a line of cars with a bunch of other unsupervised teens and patch out for the water park. Maybe you're feeling nostalgic, because it's summertime and that smell in the air always takes you back. Maybe there's a dull, aching thought in the back of your mind that makes you wish for one more glimpse at mix CDs long tossed in a landfill; first cars long ago wrecked, sold, or crushed; friends that are gone.
That's mine. What's yours?
