Xanga is the latest casualty of the social networking wars of the mid teens.
Haven’t I been around this racetrack before? I’ve been online since 1997, over fifteen years.
1997: Before social networking and blogs. Before websites even, we had message boards. I frequented the Classmates.com boards. I frequented the Classmates.com message boards that is, until the site, which had been free to subscribers, changed to a paid subscription model. I didn’t want to pay. The internet had always been “free’. I began writing articles about “the death of the free internet.”
1999: I created my own website on the Homestead hosting service, which offered “free websites” and an easy to use content editor. My website grew to seven sections, each with hundreds of pages, including my poetry, prose, photography, and artwork, when Homestead couldn’t pay the bills and switched to a paid subscription model. I was able to pay to keep my site online, but thousands others couldn’t, and a great disturbance was felt in the force when most of the planet Homestead was destroyed by the Death Star of Profit.
2000: Yahoo used to have a vibrant clubs/groups infrastructure. I joined nearly a dozen writing groups, poetry groups, and friendship groups. When the moderator of one popular group closed it down, I resurrected my own dormant poetry group, ElectricPoetry, which, with almost 100 active members, became pretty popular.
I used Geocities for the HTML pages I created in Microsoft Frontpage. Yahoo bought Geocities. Soon Yahoo shut down the site. (Let’s see what they do with Tumblr!)
2001: I purchased my own domain, www.allthingsmike.com, and began a major redesign of my “electronic experiment in art”. I paid over $500.00 for the Macromedia Dreamweaver open source website construction software. Soon I dismantled and unsubscribed from my Homestead website. I joined webring and listed my site with multiple literature, art, and friendship rings. For a while, my website “space” cost me $60.00 a month. One of my early MikeVideo streams was so popular, I had to pay an extra $500.00 one month for excessive download times. (The internet was a lot more expensive with less space and speed in those days.)
2002: I created blogs for each of my website sections on the Blogspot service. Some blogs I let them host, and some I hosted myself.
2002: I had stored my photo collection, which eventually grew to 100 themed folders, and over 8000 high quality photos, on Webshots, first a part of Excite, and eventually purchased by American Greetings, the greeting card company. I was listed as the #7 user posting photos of the state of California. I paid $35.00 a year for a subscription until last year, when the site converted to a paid instagram style site called Smile.
2004: Tired of moderating my Poetry group, which took quite a bit of time, I shut down the ElectricPoetry group on Yahoo, but not before joining Xanga, a blog service on which people could leave comments, which hadn’t been introduced on blogspot as yet. I consolidated all my blogs into WhenWordsCollide, which has pretty much maintained the same formula of offering news and notes, photoposts, video blogs, poetry and prose, and my ever ongoing memoirs and autobiography since 2004. I paid for a “lifetime premium subscription” to Xanga
2005: I began posting my videos to YouTube. Xanga introduced a video section a while later, but never upgraded to HD, so I stopped posting videos to Xanga for the most part. I joined “blogrings” on Xanga in order to make more connections. The Featured Grownups, Socrates Cafe, and Kween of the Queens blogrings offered Xangans a chance to garner lots of subscribers, readers, and friendships in the days when “featured” content only had five entries by the real popular bloggers. My own blogring, The Internet Island, was pretty popular itself for three years.
2008: Although I never gained true “Xangalebrity” fame, I maintained a solid core group of readers and subscribers, and was well known around the Xanga site for my novel sized comments, as well as for my entries, some of which (usually the parody Xanga entries) even were able to knock The Theologian’s Cafe from Top of Top Blogs.
2010: I stopped updating my personal website AllThingsMike, although I still pay over $250.00 a year to keep it online. I created both MySpace and Facebook accounts when those sites started to overcome Xanga as social networking sites. I still posted occasional blog entries on Xanga.
2013: I make a commitment to my readers on Facebook that I will make a more concerted attempt to post more regularly. Instead of massive photoposts like on Xanga, I post one to three photos at a time. Instead of long detailed “magazine article” style entries, I post short humorous “observations” which begin to get comments. A lot of my readers/friends on FB either are still my readers/friends on Xanga, or are readers/participants from past endeavors like Classmates.com message boards, Yahoo groups, webrings, or blogrings.
Xanga announces it may perish.
I never liked what my late ex roommate used to call the “roundy round” races, where cars continually go in a circle. I preferred either drag races, a quick jaunt down the quarter mile, or road races, which took the driver through closed off city streets or along a long road course. My history of subscribing to sites, only to see them shut down, reminds me more of the roundy round races, where the sites, like the cars, and the caskets in the graphic above, race around and around until they crash or otherwise drop out of the race.
I already paid $100.00 for Xanga. I don’t know if I want to pay an additional nearly $50.00 a year, on top of paying for my own website. I’m thinking of downloading wordpress software, and perhaps just establish my own blog on my own website.
Then again, after a fifteen year internet “race” where all the sites seem to eventually die before I can finish alongside them with my massive content collection, maybe it’s time to call it a day as a social networker. I do have my FACEBOOK TIMELINE HERE, please friend me, but let me know your “Xanga username” if you have a different or real name for your FB profile. I have been more of a “presence” on FB than on Xanga for a while anyway.
The list of people I actually think of as “friends” is much too long to post. Thank you to everyone with whom I’ve made a connection over the past 9 years. I’m going to keep posting archived Xangacentric posts and Xanga history/memorial posts for the next month, no matter what happens. The most updated amount Xanga has raised on the “Relaunch” campaign is over 15 grand and they’re going for 60 grand. I’m pretty sure they’ll make it. I just don’t know whether I want to pay again since as far as I’m concerned (and I thought as far as Xanga was concerned) I was a “lifetime member” already.
The graphic is a modified version of “Racing Caskets” one of my composite images and the title card to the “Dead Bodies” essay from the old Featured Grownups group blogring on 2/06/2007.
John
We’re so sorry about the comment outage, and are working as fast as we can to resolve it – and also, to put measure into place to make sure it never happens again.
Vote for the best. 
Would you confront your best friend who talked about you behind your back ?
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