The strange saga of Yahoo and WebRing

The sad tale of a hip little software program for linking Web sites together that was swallowed by by a once-hip behemoth -- then crashed and burned.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Dec. 5, 2001 | It was a day known forever after as "Black Tuesday" or "The Day the Rings Died." On Sept. 5, 2000, the day Yahoo assimilated WebRing, the "ringmasters" responsible for tending the chains of Web sites linked together by WebRing software fumed with pitched fury.

Protest sites sprang up proclaiming the outrage of webmasters who saw themselves losing control to an all-devouring corporate overlord. On one especially melodramatic site, Edvard Munch's "Scream" wailed next to this lament: "The toll has been terrific. Rings are dead or dying everywhere ... Yet, we are victims and it's time that someone hears our Screams." Another site blared the theme music to "Mission Impossible" while displaying an image of a skull in a top hat with the logo of the new master.

WebRing is essentially little more than a way for sites devoted to similar topics to share links and boost each other's traffic. But to its fans, it makes beautiful order out of chaos. However, from all the wailing and moaning, you'd have thought a marauding King Kong bot had barged into these sites and started ripping out great hunks of HTML. Even now, more than a year later, after the somewhat anticlimactic liberation of WebRing from supposed Yahoo tyranny, the ringmasters are still angry.

"Yahoo took one of the best things on the Internet, a method by which ringmasters could create little garden paths through the uncharted wilds of the Web, and completely ruined it," says Richard Lowe, a webmaster whose sites include USA Memorial, a commemoration of Sept. 11.

The sorry saga of WebRing is just a squinty footnote in the history of one of the Web's biggest, still-standing companies, Yahoo. But it tells more about what was sacrificed on the Web in the Great Internet Bubble than a terabyte of spreadsheets detailing paper losses. It's what happened when a nifty little homegrown Web phenomenon that was never designed to make money got swept up and sucked in by the boom, only to be orphaned in the bust.

Today, WebRing once again has the chance to try to make it as an independent, guided by the members of its community. In mid-October, Yahoo sold WebRing to Tim Killeen, one of the early engineers who'd worked on the system. It seemed like a happy ending made for the Net: WebRing comes full circle!

But some ringmasters wish that the whole system had been put out of its misery: "Personally, I wish WebRing had just died. I think it's been decaying for quite some time and I don't see that it's going to be recovered," says Lowe.

And as for Yahoo? The once-mighty portal beloved by millions -- in part because it represented the original do-it-yourself spirit of the Net -- is now scrambling desperately, like everybody else, for ways to make a buck. Its inability to figure out what to do with WebRing is symbolic of the entire dot-com failure to transform the Net into a cash register.

Yahoo may still find the secret formula, though whether anyone will care is another question. After the boom and the bust, it's easy now to wonder if the do-it-yourself Net ever could have had a happy capitalist future. In any case, post-bubble, mid-recession, the execs of Yahoo and the ringmasters of WebRing are both struggling to survive. Now, Yahoo hopes to turn a fraction of its 218 million "users" into "customers," to make up for dramatically reduced advertising revenues. And WebRing has no greater ambition than to find a way to keep running obscure circles around the Net, without a multinational corporate parent to lean on or rail against.

Next page: Yahoo's days as darling of the Net