Webring recently announced that they will implement
yearly subscription fees ranging from $12 to $36
for both ringmasters and webmasters of sites submitted to the Webring system beginning in January of 2007.
Webring, according to
Wikipedia
, “was designed by
Sage Weil
” who was only seventeen at the time “using
his own
CGI script
in May 1994. The idea was based on
Denis Howe’s system
,
started at Imperial College in 1994, called EUROPa (Expanding
Unidirectional Ring Of Pages), but took off after Giraldo Hierro
conceptualized a central CGI script to enhance functionality, which
Weil coded himself. Weil’s script gained popularity, pushing Weil in
June 1995 to create an organization, named WebRing, which provided WebRing tools to
webmasters
. “
In
this burgeoning Web 2.0 world, webring.com may seem so very 1998-ish,
but for many who have been on the web for most of the past decade,
webring has in one way or another impacted their web surfing
experience. More often than not in positive ways. Webring offered for
many an opportunity for REAL social networking with webmasters. Where
primarily Usenet groups and BCC (Blind Carbon Copy email groups) were
responsible for spreading the word about related websites you might
enjoy in any particular topic, Webring made it simple for anyone to
find plenty of sites relating to the most obscure of topics, thus
yielding more precise results than the fledgling search engines of the
time.
Before blogs, Digg.com, and the ilk had made it possible to
garner attention in other ways, webring offered a real social network
that benefited websites whose niche might be extremely narrow (say the
salt & pepper shaker collectors groups) without costing
inordinately high amounts for such exposure.
Its clear that
the date January 15th, 2007, when these new rates go into effect, will
mark the end of webring as a viable choice by many webmasters. Already
in steep decline by subscribers who flocked to other choices, I can’t
imagine what in the heck Webring, Inc. must be thinking by doing this
move, unless it is to intentionally kill off any chance of being
involved in a serious way in the next evolutionary wave of the Internet.
My site,
www.thedeadpoets.org
,
currently belongs to or has belonged to many webrings over the years,
and my email inbox has become inundated recently with seriously miffed
users who are threatening to protest Webring Inc. over the recent
business decision. One of them, who we will call Tim, writes:
”
Hello Fellow Webringites (sic): You’ve probably already heard that Webring Inc. has decided to start charging people who have more than 5 websites or more than 2 webrings.And even if you do pay a hefty $36 USD per YEAR you will only be allowed 50 individual website listings (and a maximum of 30 webrings for webring managers). It is ridiculous and stupid.The Lilith eZine and Lilith Gallery is run by a group of four people. We’ve invested a lot of time and effort into making our webrings for people and manage 355 webrings and 19,842 site listings. Under Webrings new rules we would have to delete 325 webrings (and all the site listings in those webrings) by January 15th, 2007.And we’re not alone. According to Webring Inc. there are 25,000 webring managers who manage over 180,000 different webrings. Thats an average of over 7 webrings per manager. Some have more, some less. The vast majority have at least 5 webrings. That means about 60% to 72% of all webrings we will have to be deleted.Webring has over 21,000,000 individual site listings. If you type the word “webring” into Google it comes up with 33.8 million websites. Imagine if 70% of them were suddenly deleted.Webring brings the internet together. Its a bit like Grand Central Station in New York City. By itself, its not really that important, but as a network it connects millions upon millions of sites on related topics. Webring Inc. is making outrageous demands, the equivalent of Grand Central Station saying “You can only have 2 destinations and make only 5 trips per month.”Or to use another metaphor, it would be like Microsoft Inc. saying “You can only install five programs and play 2 games/day. Any extra and you have to pay us more money…” If Bill Gates ever said something that stupid we’d all think he’d hit his head or wasn’t taking his medication properly.So what can you do about all this?Protest. Email membership@webring.com
and tell them what you think of their outrageous demands. Tell them you’d be willing to pay for membership, but not at the outrageous and unfair rates they are currently offering.“Sure you can have a cell phone… but you can only have 2 phone numbers saved on it and make only 5 calls per month…”Seriously, how ridiculous can you get?”
While I don’t intend to bother with a protest, I do commend Tim for his metaphorical
explanations of the problem and wish him and his fellow protestors the best of luck,
I understand that the web has always at the core, unfortunately, been all about business.
Without turning a significant enough profit, we can’t expect any company to continue a service indefinitely.
I can only assume this will hasten the creation of more blogs on commercial solutions like Typepad
and Wordpress, as well as the free to use but paid for by ad revenue sites such as Livejournal,
Blogger
and Vox to take accelerate in notice in personal and commerical sites.
Even social networking hubs like Facebook and the horrible looking but
extremely popular MySpace should receive a bump in their user base as a
result of this decision.
As a sidenote, is it possible that
Yahoo’s reported offer to purchase Facebook for $1 billon doesn’t quite
seem so ludricous after all?
[Digg this story].