The Death Of The World Birthday Web (And Other Web Services)

from the end-of-an-era? dept

Andrew Leonard over at Salon laments the death of the World Birthday Web (which I'd never heard of) which is (er... was) a service that would allow random people to send you happy birthday emails on your birthday. No, the World Birthday Web wasn't a dot com that ran out of money, but just a little side project for fun. However, it was apparently generating "more complaints than compliments" as people were using it for spam. Leonard tries to figure out what's so upsetting about the death of this small, pointless service, and the best he can come up with is that it represents part of the death of the fun, exciting "wonderment" phase of the internet, where everything was cool and new - where you'd sign up for a World Birthday Web simply because you could. While I understand a lot of what he's saying, some of it comes off as the old-timer talking about those "good old days" that weren't really that good in the first place.

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