don't translate easily into profitable businesses. The first community sites were not Web sites at all, but Telnet-based bulletin boards. The West Coast had the Well in Sausalito, Calif., which launched in 1985 and was recently acquired by the online magazine Salon.com; New York had Echo, which began in 1990. Although both attracted an impressive roster of the digital elite, neither enjoyed mass appeal. Theglobe.com was part of the second wave of community sites, which began in 1995, when the Web became a consumer mass medium and chat replaced bulletin boards.
One of the first companies to use the term "Web community" was GeoCities, which launched in April 1995. It consisted initially of feeds from two Webcams stationed over famous Hollywood intersections along with a list of links to entertainment-related Web sites. At that time called Beverly Hills Internet, GeoCities quickly started a program to help members build homepages and encouraged the formation of "geocities." The cultures of these digital cities were supposedly inspired by the physical-world locations of the cams. (An early description of the product from a company press release read, "At the core of BHI's philosophy is the fact that 'location' on the Internet becomes easier to understand and relate to when it is rich with content and closely identified with an actual idea or location.")
The same year, Tripod launched with 12 people in a little office in founder Bo Peabody's college town of Williamstown, Mass. An exploration of Peabody's college musings on the effects of media on people and cultures (he hatched the idea for the company in 1992 with his economics professor), Tripod offered, besides free homepages, chats with political and pop culture figures, news, weather, travel and health information.
Both GeoCities and Tripod amassed significant traffic from their free homepage-building services. Both extended their revenues by starting "affiliate" programs, in which their members could link to online retailers from homepages, so both member site and community site could reap profits from sales. Investors bought in, and Goldman Sachs underwrote GeoCities' public offering in August 1998. Both Tripod and GeoCities were acquired by portals - Tripod by Lycos in February 1998, then GeoCities by Yahoo in January 1999.
Both companies now focus on improving their homepage-building tools for use by Yahoo's and Lycos' huge audiences, because successful homepage-building programs mean traffic, higher ad rates and more revenue from affiliates.
Theglobe.com was born in 1995. At first called Web Genesis, it began as a class project in Cornell's computer-science lab, with an initial investment from the founders' families. The student staff worked long hours and consumed many pizzas. The idea at first was vague - to simply aggregate an audience through whatever means possible and sell ads on top of it. The first version of Theglobe.com contained chat, bulletin boards, discussion forums, classifieds and personal ads. It featured text and photos of members - in other words, homepages.
The company seriously entered the competitive landscape when Michael Egan, former Alamo Rent-A-Car chairman, called the president of Cornell, his alma mater, looking for leads on investing in an Internet company. He had past experience making boys' dreams come true. With his help, Nantucket Nectars went from a juice bar in Nantucket harbor started by two Brown grads to a full-blown beverage company, now partly owned by Ocean Spray. After a four-hour lunch with Krizelman and Paternot, Egan offered to buy 50 percent of the company for a dizzying $20 million dollars.
Theglobe.com, which had relocated from Ithaca, N.Y., to the big city, staffed up, almost launched an IPO, pulled it during an Internet stock downswing, and finally went public. Its share price rose from $9 to $97 a share in the first day of trading and caused market makers to wonder what the hell happened. Many individual investors were shocked that they paid close to $90 for what they were expecting to buy for $9.
Over four days, the stock went down to
