COLLECTED BY
Organization: Archive Team
Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.
The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.
This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the Wayback Machine, providing a path back to lost websites and work.
Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.
The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard drive crashes or server failures.
Collection: The Archive Team APP.NET Crappout
App.net, Dalton Caldwell’s ambitious experiment in social media, is dying next month. Users will have until March 14 to export their data before Caldwell and his cofounder Bryan Berg delete the site’s content. They plan to open source the site’s code on Github.
The San Francisco startup made a lot of noise when it launched in 2012 with a crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $500,000. At the time, the site promised to deliver a new type of social network — no ads, developer-focused, with users retaining ownership of their content. The only catch? It charged users an annual subscription fee to use the service.
On its one-year anniversary, App.net announced it had raised $2.5 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz. Nine months later, Caldwell and Berg said their paid subscriber numbers had plummeted, and they would be laying off all full-time staff. The site has remained in maintenance mode since mid-2014.
Today, Caldwell works as a partner at Y Combinator and is in high demand on the conference circuit.
Hindsight being 20/20, it’s easy to see where App.net went wrong. They faced Silicon Valley’s classic chicken-and-the-egg problem: They needed a lot of users to make the site interesting, but they needed the site to be interesting to get a lot of users.
“We envisioned a pool of differentiated, fast-growing third-party applications would sustain the numbers needed to make the business work,” Caldwell and Berg wrote in a postmortem on the site. “Our initial developer adoption exceeded expectations, but that initial excitement didn’t ultimately translate into a big enough pool of customers for those developers. This was a foreseeable risk, but one we felt was worth taking.”
The San Francisco startup made a lot of noise when it launched in 2012 with a crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $500,000. At the time, the site promised to deliver a new type of social network — no ads, developer-focused, with users retaining ownership of their content. The only catch? It charged users an annual subscription fee to use the service.
On its one-year anniversary, App.net announced it had raised $2.5 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz. Nine months later, Caldwell and Berg said their paid subscriber numbers had plummeted, and they would be laying off all full-time staff. The site has remained in maintenance mode since mid-2014.
Today, Caldwell works as a partner at Y Combinator and is in high demand on the conference circuit.
Hindsight being 20/20, it’s easy to see where App.net went wrong. They faced Silicon Valley’s classic chicken-and-the-egg problem: They needed a lot of users to make the site interesting, but they needed the site to be interesting to get a lot of users.
“We envisioned a pool of differentiated, fast-growing third-party applications would sustain the numbers needed to make the business work,” Caldwell and Berg wrote in a postmortem on the site. “Our initial developer adoption exceeded expectations, but that initial excitement didn’t ultimately translate into a big enough pool of customers for those developers. This was a foreseeable risk, but one we felt was worth taking.”
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