Yeah Napster, so amazing back then to find almost any song you wanted. Sure you had to wait 30 minutes to find out if it was even the right song and had to hope someone didn't cut you off at 99% but it was a great way to find music you'd never search for before. Plus all the paraody tracks like Britney Spears Oops im pregnant again or eminem type stuff.
Then there was Kazza or Morpheus, basically opened up everything, especially video files. Remember grabbing the latest star wars trailer? Remember when that trailer was probably porn renamed so some kids mum didn't find out?
Geocities sites dedicated to one obscure topic in loads of detail. Back then to make a website you had to have some skill and people were amazed back then. Now anyone can make a website with a few clicks.
Rotten.com as mentioned, whilst there was lots of the internet back then everything spread through word of mouth and rotten.com was one of them. Some great fakes, some horrible real stuff but either way it is rotten.
I miss pre 2002 internet, something about it thats gone now. Maybe it was how basic things were, daily Radar only updated their site 2 or 3 times a day compared to the over saturated must post every single thought we have now.
Actually that reminds me of Future Gamer which became daily radar and their email magazine that came in once a week. Dial up, download the email and then read it offline.
The austin powers animated desktop and others where you could interact with things.
The big thing for me was NSFW
chatropolis.com which is still going to this day and looks like it did in 1997. It used to have an adults chat room section and an under 18s where me and my friends from school would hang out. Made a lot of international friends on that site to from london to America to New Zealand. Its a shame its basically a NSFW chat site now as it was bustling with people just wanting to chat.
What about Segaweb and to a lesser extent Gamerweb? The Dreamcast launching around this time, the first console launch where websites could actually report on stuff and show us tiny videos.
So much more i could go on for hours talking about the internet. I really miss what the internet used to be like, it had this certain sense of wonder and practically no commercialism. Remember when people did link swaps for free? Now replaced with videos and google adwords?
Im glad the
way back machine exists that has saved millions of web pages and continues to do so still. Its a shame most of the images didn't get saved and not all pages work but at least its something.