#MiniHungarianLanguageLesson: international who-is-who
Sometimes I dream about one day writing the definitive history of the early #Hungarian internet era, a project so clearly beyond my knowledge and abilities that it's never going to happen.
But what I can write about with some authority is what it looks like when a once ubiquitous social media site is shut down completely.
Because it happened and I lived through it. [unwarranted dramatic pause]
Although the very early internet years is easy: it simply didn't exist.
It wasn't until 1991 that the first .hu domain, sztaki.hu was registered for the Research Institute of Computing and Automation. In the years that followed, more and more academic institutions and universities were connected up but it was only in 1995 that the first consumer internet provider opened its phone lines to anyone who owned a (then eye-wateringly expensive) modem.
Early adoption was also helped big time by a cap on night-time phone call charges, but regardless, initially the idea of a "Hungarian internet" seemed fanciful at best.
Also in 1995 the first online-only "newspaper", iNteRNeTTo was launched by IDG Publishing. It must have felt like madness at the time, there was obviously no way to monetise it, no online payment solutions, no online advertising industry, not to mention the silly capitalisation.
Even though it was revolutionary and is now described as an immensely successful venture, in context that meant 8000 daily visitors in 1998, the year the newsroom resigned en masse and started a new portal: Index.hu.
(A pattern that was going to repeat itself in 2020, when the newsroom of Index.hu resigned en masse to found Telex.hu)
And people were connecting with each other like there was no tomorrow.
This was no doubt helped by the coolest feature of the platform: it showed the shortest friendship path to any user. The idea of six degrees of separation was very much in the air back then, and this was a mind-blowing way to finally put it to the test.
But it was also very much a platform created for fun, there were no aggressive future monetisation plans that I know of, in fact in the early years the site boasted that not only is it completely ad-free, it will stay that way in perpetuity.
As it happens, perpetuity lasted until 2005, but this didn't stop the now rebranded iWiW's rise, for several years it was the most visited website in Hungary by far.
But the infrastructure was creaking under the load and now longer being able to scale up, the owners were eventually forced to sell
The new owners (an ISP) shored up the hardware and looked for ways to get some kind of return for their investment. Development was continuous and the number of users grew rapidly (at one point there were 4 million registered users, considering Hungary's population was only 10 million, this was pretty spectacular).
But the quality of the content dropped rapidly: hoaxes, chain emails and plain old spam were overwhelming the site.
And if that wasn't bad enough, suddenly Facebook entered the scene: in 2008 they launched their service in Hungarian language, and by 2010 the writing was firmly on the wall for iWiW. Technically it was still turning a profit until 2013 but by that point hardly anyone was regularly using it, and in 2014 it was closed down for good.
@almostconverge
The thing is I remember the start of iwiw and how in te beginning at least you couldn't even sign up yourself, you needed someone already on it to invite you. That made it way cooler, of course.
(I don't consciously remember the end of it, because I switched to fb way earlier - mid 2000's - to keep in touch with my boarding school mates, and although I still had an iwiw account I almost never went there anymore)
@l_for_linguist yes, the invite system was pretty cool, it also ensured that (at least at the start) you weren't floating unconnected to anyone
which was sort of important as the main way of discovery was the friends of friends list
Peter Ellis
sleepy linguist