Flutterby™! : 2 decades of Flutterby

Some time in February of 1998 (for some reason I didn't log the day or time of the update then), I sent an email to a server that got piped into a script and made very first entry to the Flutterby weblog.

In mid 1997 I was working at Pixar, a Steve Jobs funded company, and Gil Amelio was ousted by the Apple board and Steve stepped in as the interim CEO. You could hear phones ring sequentially down the halls as journalists tried to find Pixar people would would comment, the soap opera potential was high, and this little web site run by Dave Winer called Scripting News had the best coverage of all the latest on this transition.

Dave's company, Frontier, sold this scripting package and some software written in the scripting package, and Scripting News was a site maintained by his software. There were a few other people using that software similarly, but I'd been looking for an excuse to sling Perl so wrote something called Newwwsboy to manage my own site.

Journals had been happening on the web for a while. I was an avid reader of "The Semi- Existence of Bryon". Even in the history of what eventually became known as "weblogs" we generally go back to like a month or two after the founding of the web itself, but somehow that late 1997 early 1998 group of people who started putting reverse chronologically ordered semi-personal links and commentary on the web became a bit of a movement.

It also became a really cool community. Brad Graham and others organized get-togethers. I remember getting together for drinks with the Pyra gang (who created Blogger). Dinners were a fantastic cross-section of people, it wasn't just computer people, it was librarians, theater people, people who's primary identity was "Mom", all pulled together by the feeling that we had this really cool medium to explore.

I think we generally credit Jorn Barger, proprietor of a weblog called "Robot Wisdom", for the term. I remember Cam Barrett (of CamWorld) and I tossing around names like "microportal" and such.

Sometime around 2000 blogging started to become a thing. Blogger went big. LiveJournal got a boost. Comment systems on blogs happened. The marketing folks realized that we were hogging all the cool Google search results and started exploiting the medium for sales, the New York dilettantes played in it and we got dreck like Julie & Julia (The Julia parts of the movie were okay).

And then, of course, the web became its current dross: Search results gamed by machines to remove any sense of personality, and often value. A huge morass of people trying to thrust advertising brochures at you.

My sister once asked me "does it ever bother you that you built all of the things Facebook did, years earlier, but didn't become Facebook"? And, yeah, it kind of does, but I wasn't trying to build Facebook. I had a higher vision for humanity, one that was more about the awesome people connections that we used to build with the network.

I miss those days, and am looking forward to the next place I can chase that dream.