Tripod
GeoCities for people who read the manual.
CAUSE OF DEATH: Lycos posted "temporary outages," then updated the note the same day to say it was shutting down.
Tripod started at Williams College in 1992 as a site for students. The free web pages were an afterthought. They became the whole business. Lycos bought it in 1998 for a reported $58 million, when it had nearly one million users. By 2001 it had six million. The Washington Post recommended it over GeoCities because GeoCities sites tended to crash computers, which is the faintest praise ever printed. In 2009 new users had to pay. On March 6, 2026 Lycos posted a note about "temporary outages." Later that day the note said it was shutting down in 30 days. It ceased operations on April 24, 2026.