6 websites we used to go before Facebook and YouTube

Last Updated on 2016-05-19 , 1:50 pm

When web browser could only load words and images, the Internet was a simple place: people didn’t go into blog wars or post videos to convey a message. During that time, having an Internet connection was a privilege, and so, the moment we connected to our 56k connection, we would immediately go to these pages.

www.neopets.com
Your childhood is pretty much complete with Neopets. Currently still active, everyone had an account and a few pets. We logged in daily to spin some wheel, fed our pet and sometimes, battle with other pets. Heck, we spent so much time on it that research has shown that we used to spend 117 minutes a week on it—a considerable number. And mind you, we had only 36 hours of Internet per month.

Archmage (what’s the URL?)
You see, we tried to Google for it and found this instead: www.the-reincarnation.com .Whether this is the new URL for Archmage or we simply didn’t care about URL then is irrelevant: what is relevant is that all of us had a kingdom, and all of us usually cried out loud when we logged in to see our kingdom destroyed by another kingdom. Or an army. Or an Archmage. Whatever.

www.miniclip.com
Having a class in a computer lab? It’s miniclip.com time. In it comprises flash single-player mini-games that are so addictive that once, everyone was just talking about the high score in Table Tennis: the miniclip version. It’s like your smartphone games on the computer screen.

www.friendster.com
Write me a testimonial, please? The predecessor to Facebook, Friendster introduced us to social media, and taught us that we could create a new persona online with mere mouse clicks. And no—there’s no app for it. Now, it has become some gaming website that no one cares and no one goes (or so we thought).

Geocities
Kids nowadays learn basic html codes in school, but old farts like use learnt it in Geocities. It’s the first website that allowed website designers like us to make websites, and so we all made websites and websites we did. Websites—yes, it was websites. Because we just had one website each.

Blogger
Everyone needed a blog to express themselves, and everyone had one. And everyone used blogger. While this is still active, people have slowly moved on to writing their thoughts on Facebook and uploading their images in Instragam. Who would have thought that blogs had such a short lifespan?