In the 90’s and early 2000’s there were a multitude of legendary internet companies. Altavista, Napster, ICQ or Second Life were once extremely popular online services that hardly anyone could do without. But what has become of the greats of the digital early days?
They were the high-flyers of online services in the 90s or installed as a standard program on every computer. They are now meaningless or have disappeared completely: Many Internet companies, but also programs from the early days of the Internet are now history. A round of memories:
“Second Life was a revolutionary idea to move a social network into a virtual world,” says Timm Lutter from the IT association Bitkom. Users move through virtual worlds as 3D avatars. The offer from the US company Linden Lab went online in 2003. The online service was a rarity in the early 2000s. But after an initial hype, it quickly became quiet about Second Life. “But the idea probably came too early, the widespread technology such as Internet bandwidth and graphics was not yet advanced enough for Second Life to be attractive to many people in the long term,” says the expert. Although the network is still online, user numbers are not available. Second Life is also strongly reminiscent of the idea of a metaverse now being promoted by Mark Zuckerberg. It seems similar with the future prospects of the new project – so far the meta group has only recorded losses and few user numbers with its project.
What happened to Netscape?
Long before Firefox, Chrome & Co, Netscape was the standard browser par excellence. “In the mid-1990s, Netscape had an 80 percent market share,” explains Daniel Crueger, a historian from Bremen who researches digital history and its cultural heritage. But: “The so-called first browser war began with the market launch of Microsoft Internet Explorer in 1995, for which Microsoft mobilized considerable financial and human resources as well as the market power of its Windows operating system,” says the expert.
Netscape could not win this unequal fight: “In 2003 Netscape’s market share had fallen to less than 4 percent, Internet Explorer had reached over 95 percent.”
Who still knows the real player?
The Realplayer and the format of the same name was available for all systems and brought two advantages in the mid-1990s: “It allowed high data compression, which was important in the early days of the Internet with its low bandwidths, and it was for video and audio -Live streams more suitable than competing formats such as Quicktime and MPEG,” explains Stephan Dörner from the digital magazine “t3n”. Ultimately, the Flash format replaced the player. “The Flash format became the quasi-standard for all multimedia formats on the web – including video.” The Realplayer still exists today in a current variant.
Google’s predecessor was called Altavista
The search engine went online in 1995 and was the market leader for many years. “Altavista created its search results primarily from the so-called meta data of a website, i.e. based on page titles or keywords assigned by the author,” explains Lutter. Today the online service from the 90s is almost forgotten. Because in 1998 the search engine with the catchy name Google started and made it “better”. Unlike Altavista, Google analyzes the entire text of a page. Things went steadily downhill for Altavista until the last owner, Yahoo, shut down the search engine in 2013 after several sales.
The German Facebook of 2005
Originally conceived as a student network and then expanded, StudiVZ was in the right place at the right time: “When the online service went online in the 2000s, the era of social media had just dawned, but German-language offers were still largely missing,” says Crueger. StudiVZ was the social media first point of contact for a whole generation, and at its peak, the VZ Group had around 16 million active users. “The fact that after the hype the deep fall came, is probably due not least to the strong and financially strong competition from Facebook,” says Crueger.
“While Facebook was optically and technically ahead, StudiVZ experienced stagnation on the software side in a critical phase,” says Dörner. The growing number of users and internationality of Facebook then led to countless StudiVZ accounts being orphaned – but the platform is still online.
ICQ: Chat with the flower
The messenger was launched in 1996 and at its peak stuck in the ears of more than 470 million users worldwide with its catchy “Uh-oh” when new chat messages arrived. It was one of the most popular online services of the 90s. However, ICQ missed the burgeoning smartphone revolution and has only been available for mobile use since 2010. Additional competition came with various social media offerings.
But the service has not disappeared completely: “ICQ illustrates very well that different user cultures exist in parallel on the World Wide Web, which can be geographically or linguistically differentiated from one another,” explains Crueger. Although ICQ has disappeared from our perception, it has remained strong in Russia and “even had an enormous impact on the web culture there”.
Napster lost to Spotify
At the end of the 1990s, the online service Napster made music file sharing a global phenomenon, regardless of the legal situation. The music exchange market established the MP3 audio format in 1999. “Free music files on demand, with this offer Napster has meanwhile become the fastest growing web community,” says Crueger. Shortly before its end in February 2001, the service had 80 million users worldwide. “But Napster cost the music industry immense sales, which is why they defended themselves against the service legally to the best of their ability” – in the end successfully. After the bankruptcy, the brand name was resold several times and is now managed by a fee-based music streaming service.
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What became of Winamp?
After its release in 1997, the free, slim music and video player quickly established itself as a quasi-standard. AOL wanted to benefit from the success and bought the company in 1999. However, newer, more and more overloaded Winamp versions brought more and more complaints – up to the point of mass migration of users. “Winamp was essentially replaced by two software solutions: iTunes and VLC player,” says Stephan Dörner. Winamp was originally supposed to be discontinued in 2013, but was sold again. So far, however, one has waited in vain for new versions.