Bye bye Blogshares

December 3, 2003 10:11 AM

Blogshares has left the buildingNever really got into this, and not sure how much it will be missed, but that doesn't matter anyway as it's gone the way of the dodo. Too successful for it's own good it seems. I'm surprised that it hasn't been picked up by someone else yet...
posted by snowgoon (16 comments total)

I'm surprised that it hasn't been picked up by someone else yet...

I can't imagine why someone would pick it up, it all seemed setup for a laugh and in good fun. You can't really turn it into a business and once it gets going into thousands of blogs it's gotta be a nightmare to keep servers up. It became a real giant web service application and it was all for goofy made up numbers trading.

The only way a service like that could survive was if someone had a line on free hardware, hosting, and/or programming. Kinda like Audioscrobbler is some guy's senior thesis, I coudn't see any reason why someone would pay to keep that up, but it's an interesting academic application.
posted by mathowie at 10:25 AM on December 3, 2003

I used it soley for the purpose of checking out who was linking to some blogs I was tracking. It kept more thorough tabs than other websites I know of that do the same thing (e.g. NZ Bear).

Those are a quicker method then Google searches, but neither one is as complete. Is there another website that does this (hopefully better), that I'm missing?
posted by dgaicun at 1:35 PM on December 3, 2003

Technorati is the one I use see not only who's linking to weblogs that I'm tracking, but non-weblog URLs as well. It worked well for tracking who was linking and responding to Clay Shirky's most recent essay. Technorati is basically a decentralized referrer system, more so than Google: it's an up-to-date reflection of who's linking to something, with the surrounding text highlighted.
posted by sillygwailo at 2:02 PM on December 3, 2003

Can someone explain what BlogShares was?
posted by McBain at 2:33 PM on December 3, 2003

Blogshares was a fantasy stock trading game using blogs as companies to buy and sell stock in.

It was just for fun and it was fun. I liked playing the game and am pretty severely pissed off that they took my money and have now folded up shop. I'm considering demanding my money back (sure, its only $10 but multiply that by ten thousand people and there's some real money at stake).

What bothers me the most is that there was no warning, no nothing. Just gone. Very, very lame.
posted by fenriq at 2:35 PM on December 3, 2003

It was fun, briefly, particularly when some weird random numbers-fart made my site The Most Valuable In The Universe briefly, as indeed it should be. I lost interest pretty quickly though, not entirely because my valuation eventually settled down to the cranky, profane sub-Alister status my semicoherent scribblings so richly deserve.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:25 PM on December 3, 2003

I enjoyed it from a social aspect - seeing how people behaved with virtual wealth. The problem is that in general you couldnt do anything with your money other than buy more shares. So yeah it quickly became pointless.

I made lots of "money" early then gave it all away as random gifts. At least the goodwill i got from that was something tangible. The smartest ones though were the ones that sold all their holdings to others for real cash.
posted by vacapinta at 3:40 PM on December 3, 2003

The other main drawback of the game was that it was incredibly slow sometimes. Think a few minutes between pages, probably just a sign of how badly overtaxed the servers were.
posted by fenriq at 3:53 PM on December 3, 2003

For a brief period of time, I owned all the MeFi stock. The fact that someone was able to take it all away without my permission soured me on the game. Of course, I never would have been able to own it all if someone had not stolen all the stock from a bunch of other people who never would have sold it either, before selling it all himself (to fellow MeFite MattPfeff, who graciously bought the available stock and gifted it to me cause he was fabulously wealthy, and because I told him I was the real Kaycee Nicole, and I really was dying this time).

It was fun, and then it was not.
posted by thirteen at 3:53 PM on December 3, 2003

I weep for the loss of my pretend net worth.
posted by Xkot at 3:54 PM on December 3, 2003

It was way too easy to get CRAZY RICH (I started out with $1K and had something like $80 million a month or two later), and then it was just a huge pain to manage all that money when all the expensive stocks were sold out and it was too tedious to trade cheap stocks when you've got so much money to invest.

So I got bored with it after a while.

It was neat to find people who were linking to me that I didn't know about, though.

And it was really awesome when my blog's value skyrocketed just because movabletype.org was spidered while I was on the "recently updated" list.

BlogShares was fun for a while, I didn't really expect it to stick around long. RIP.
posted by katieinshoes at 9:32 PM on December 3, 2003

People actually paid real money to buy others' virtual holdings? What the...? It's not like this was some MMORPG where maybe you can maybe get new equipment or a new character that assists you in getting further in the game.
posted by Big Fat Tycoon at 5:02 AM on December 4, 2003

Briefly. If I want anything, I want you to remember that word.

And snuggles. That one too.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:08 AM on December 4, 2003

And toboggan porn.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:09 AM on December 4, 2003

D'oh!

$200 - ouch!
posted by Fantt at 9:12 AM on December 4, 2003

Silly Rabbit! You can't make money off the internet.

Blogshares was a thinly veiled popularity contest where the fun petered out compared to the vast majority of online games.
posted by john at 2:09 PM on December 4, 2003