AOL Hometown
Encyclopedia
AOL Hometown was a web hosting
service offered by AOL
. It offered 12 megabyte
s of server space for AOL subscribers to publish their own website
s, and included an own WYSIWYG
online website builder
called 1-2-3 Publish not requiring knowledge of HTML
(AOLpress
had been AOL's website builder before the introduction of AOL Hometown). In 2001, AOL Hometown estimatedly had 11 million websites and a new website was added to it every eight seconds. By 2002, AOL Hometown had grown to 14 million websites. It was shut down on 31 October 2008.
Its shutdown led to the creation of The Archive Team by one angered Jason Scott Sadofsky
(commonly known as Jason Scott) which with the help of the Internet Archive
and other activist websites saved as much of GeoCities
as possible when it became the next "critical part of online history" and "important outlet for personal expression on the Web" to be shut down with short notice in October 2009.
publication dates from 2000, which is Quick Guide to You'Ve Got Pictures, Aol Exclusive Version by D. Peal. Prior to that, AOL Hometown was mentioned in a Deseret News article on September 30, 1999.
Two tools for AOL Hometown still available on the internet suggest a start date of 1999 or before. The copyright notice to the AOL Hometown StatCounter reads "Copyright 1999-2011". The imprint to the download page of James S. Huggins's AOL Hometown easyDesigner says that it was "created: before Thu, 01.Nov.2001", and its copyright notice reads "© 1997-2011"
Less reliable information for the start date of AOL Hometown can be found in forum posts and weblogs of its former users, particularly after its shutdown:
, CompuServe
, eAccess
, AcmeCity and others.
Therefore, it also contained an unknown number of websites that had been online for longer than the existence of AOL Hometown itself. On the German forum antispam.de, one poster complained in 2008 that with the shutdown of AOL Hometown, AOL had deleted his website that had remained on the internet "for more than 17 years" by then, that is, since at least 1991.
Web hosting service
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet...
service offered by AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
. It offered 12 megabyte
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
s of server space for AOL subscribers to publish their own website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
s, and included an own WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
online website builder
Website builder
Website builders are tools that allow the construction of websites without manual code editing. They fall into two categories: on-line proprietary tools provided by web hosting companies, typically intended for users to build their private site; and software which runs on a computer, creating pages...
called 1-2-3 Publish not requiring knowledge of HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
(AOLpress
AOLpress
AOLpress was an HTML editor available from AOL. It was originally developed as NaviPress by the company NaviSoft before being bought by AOL. It was discontinued in 2000. However, the last version can still be found on some websites. The HTML code used is very outdated and may not display more...
had been AOL's website builder before the introduction of AOL Hometown). In 2001, AOL Hometown estimatedly had 11 million websites and a new website was added to it every eight seconds. By 2002, AOL Hometown had grown to 14 million websites. It was shut down on 31 October 2008.
Its shutdown led to the creation of The Archive Team by one angered Jason Scott Sadofsky
Jason Scott Sadofsky
Jason Scott Sadofsky , more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist and historian of technology. He is the creator, owner and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which...
(commonly known as Jason Scott) which with the help of the Internet Archive
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
and other activist websites saved as much of GeoCities
GeoCities
Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan.GeoCities was originally founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet . In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages...
as possible when it became the next "critical part of online history" and "important outlet for personal expression on the Web" to be shut down with short notice in October 2009.
Start date
Official online information as to when AOL Hometown started out are scarce. whois.pho.to gives a register date of "before Aug-1996" for the domain of hometown.aol.co.uk, however that probably relates rather to the basic AOL domain itself since the "domain name" to the registration is given as "aol.co.uk". First mention of AOL Hometown in a Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online journals of Europe and America's largest...
publication dates from 2000, which is Quick Guide to You'Ve Got Pictures, Aol Exclusive Version by D. Peal. Prior to that, AOL Hometown was mentioned in a Deseret News article on September 30, 1999.
Two tools for AOL Hometown still available on the internet suggest a start date of 1999 or before. The copyright notice to the AOL Hometown StatCounter reads "Copyright 1999-2011". The imprint to the download page of James S. Huggins's AOL Hometown easyDesigner says that it was "created: before Thu, 01.Nov.2001", and its copyright notice reads "© 1997-2011"
Less reliable information for the start date of AOL Hometown can be found in forum posts and weblogs of its former users, particularly after its shutdown:
- "I have an AOL Hometown website which I started in 1998."
- "Being an AOL user for more than 10 years, I considered [the shutdown notice] a bad joke, especially because there was no notice whatsoever on the AOL Hometown site itself, but the official AOL sites for USA and UK are confirming it now." (German post made in 2008, thus suggesting a date of 1998)
- "I've been with AOL ever since these homepages were available in 1998."
- "AOL Hometown: Their FTP is as screwed up [as] back when I tried it in 1997."
- "Like most everyone else here, I had my web site on AOL Hometown too. Mine was on since May, 1996. I've been a paying member since 1995."
Legacy sites
Over the time of its existence, AOL Hometown incorporated websites of formerly independent services acquired by or merged with AOL, including, but not limited to Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, and NetscapeNetscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
, CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
, eAccess
EAccess
is a Japanese telecommunication company that provides ADSL services to other ISPs. The current CEO of the company is Sachio Semmoto. The company was established on November 1, 1999....
, AcmeCity and others.
Therefore, it also contained an unknown number of websites that had been online for longer than the existence of AOL Hometown itself. On the German forum antispam.de, one poster complained in 2008 that with the shutdown of AOL Hometown, AOL had deleted his website that had remained on the internet "for more than 17 years" by then, that is, since at least 1991.
Criticisms of shutdown
"Well it looks like AOL did it again. Another sneaky move. The Hometown pages all seem to have disappeared. [...] I only discovered this morning that AOL pulled the plug on Oct 31st, 2008." - taimantis.com, November 11th, 2008
"Lots of information on AOL Hometown very important to people who put hard work into these efforts is being lost, possibly without notice." - David Dillard, "Meet the Googles" Visits the Grave Site of AOL Hometown to Ponder Its Past All to Short Life
"I was surprised to find that AOL just shut down their homepage service on Oct. 31st. There were many great websites created through that service that simply no longer exist." - Dr. Jitters, November 12, 2008
"I knew this was coming, I just didn't know the day. I tried, with the help of some great people, to get AOL to donate ficlets to a non-profit, with no luck. I asked them just to give it to me outright since I invented it and built it with the help of some spectacular developers and designers. All of this has gone nowhere. [...] I'm disappointed that AOL's turned its back on the community, although I guess I shouldn't be surprised." - Kevin Lawver, Ficlets Est Mort
"A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it. AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down.
[...] It's all fine and good, those readers who sneer and say 'you get what you pay for' and 'ha ha, losers'. But the fact is, these people were brought online and given a place for themselves. Like a turkey drawn with a child's hand or a collection of snow globes collected from a life well-lived, these sites were hand-made, done by real people, with no agenda or business plan or knowledge, exactly, of how everything under the webservers worked. They were paying for their accounts, make no mistake – this was often provided to them as a tool combined with their AOL accounts. Some were absorbed from other companies as AOL purchased them. Some of these websites had existed for a decade. [...]
We're talking about terabyteTerabyteThe terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix tera means 1012 in the International System of Units , and therefore 1 terabyte is , or 1 trillion bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes, or 931.32 gibibytes...
s, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter." - Jason Scott, Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse
Weblinks
- Dillard, David (2008). "Meet the Googles" Visits the Grave Site of AOL Hometown to Ponder Its Past All to Short Life, Temple University, posted on Yahoo Groups, 18 November 2008
- Scott, Jason (2008). Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse, December 21st, 2008
- Dr. Jitter (2008). AOL hometown shut down. Finding old sites., House of Jitters, November 12, 2008
- How To Retrieve Your AOL Files, November 11th, 2008
- AOL Hometown Users: Your files are *not* deleted yet – grab’m while you can!, November 24, 2008