In Feb 2006, a thoughtful Flickr contributor named Ludwig Gatzke, uploaded a graphic. It was basically a big collection of logos of Web 2.0 companies. I thought it would be interesting to see what happened to all these various start-ups in the last few years.
So I’ve edited the graphic by fading out those start-ups that are no longer with us.
The methodology for this was simple, I typed in the URL for the company, failing that I Googled the company. If I didn’t find anything relevant on Page 1 of the Google results I marked it as dead. I also marked as dead sites that are “under improvement”, still in closed beta-signup or otherwise not immediately usable. Further, any company that redirected to another domain I marked as dead - so buy-outs/ups are faded as well (eg. Writely became Google Docs so it no longer exists as such).
There’s lots to think about in terms of what led to these companies disappearing - especially those that simply shut-down.
If any of these are alive and kicking, I’ll be happy to amend the photo, so let me know.