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1994 Social Media Site Restoration

posted by LaminatorX on Sunday March 30 2014, @01:12PM   
from the Vive-le-Minitel dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Amsterdam had social media in 1994, back before normal people in most places even knew the Internet existed. It grew to 400,000 users before being privatized and thus killed. Now there is an effort to recover and preserve it.

• I remember that one. I remember that one. (Score: 4, Informative) by lx on Sunday March 30 2014, @02:19PM

  by lx (1915) on Sunday March 30 2014, @02:19PM (#23157)

  The self important people involved in this may hail it as the forerunner of facebook but
  as I recall it was an ordinary BBS and a half deserted and cheesy one at that. There were much better ones run by amateurs all over the country.

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• Re:I remember that one. (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday March 30 2014, @05:15PM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Sunday March 30 2014, @05:15PM (#23203) Homepage

  I think one reason why a lot of the nerdy types I know (such as me and my g/f) aren't into the "modern internet" that this is being compared to is that there really is nothing new about the modern internet.
  
  I remember inventing social media in 1993, when I created my CGI-driven "virtual pub fight" webpage. And even that was just ripping off stuff that had been done before (e.g. the ubiquitous* guestbooks).
  
  The internet was invented for the easy exchange of information. The infrastructure was inventive - all payloads are just payloads.
  
  [* ubiquitous to internet users at the time - the internet's expanded my many orders of magnitude since then.]

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

  Parent

• Re:I remember that one. (Score: 5, Interesting) by zim on Sunday March 30 2014, @05:30PM

  by zim (1251) on Sunday March 30 2014, @05:30PM (#23212)

  I really miss the true original BBSes. It was so damm nice to be able to BAN a jerkwad forever.
  
  And there were alot less of them to deal with. It took some measure of intelligence to setup a computer and get a term program going and call up a bbs.
  
  Altho i don't miss the bills for calling all over the world. And the bills for having 10 phone lines. And the fighting with the phone company that i wasn't actually a business but just a home user spending my own money to run the thing.

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