Post #2716913

2026-03-21 18:23 UTC

Ze Frank's The Show was self-hosted QuickTime videos on a blog with comments and an RSS feed. A community forum, wiki, and series of interactive web pages tied it all together. Social media was a bunch of blogs linking to each other. Facebook opened to everyone in September of that year, Google bought YouTube in November, Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone in January 2007. Twitter blew up at SXSW in March and iPhone came out in June, the beginning of the end for the dominant open social web.

Replies (5)

@Viss@mastodon.social 2026-03-21 18:56

@andybaio@xoxo.zone it all seemed so great at the time. we had no idea

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@sullust@techhub.social 2026-03-21 19:29

@andybaio@xoxo.zone yeah, I’m old enough to remember when AOL added this mysterious section called “the internet” with 4 areas of unknown use: gopher, ftp, news groups, and something called the World Wide Web. The “open social web” was like a bunch of small towns. Wonderful if you were born in the right one but if not wandering the random human connections was hard and many gave up on the way. Early Twitter/Reddit made that discovery a lot easier. So what we have now is rotten and terrible, but let’s not over romanticize our past silos.

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@knutson_brain@sfba.social 2026-03-21 21:38

@andybaio@xoxo.zone Missing #YeOldeWebbe …

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@oscarfalcon@mastodon.social 2026-03-21 22:16

@andybaio@xoxo.zone I loved ZeFrank, And Rocketboom and MoBuzzTV...

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@evan@cosocial.ca 2026-03-22 03:04

@andybaio@xoxo.zone remember when Ze Frank joined Twitter and said "We should have a Color War here like at summer camp" and it burned up Twitter for like a week and a half?

Open ##2716923