Remembering the Tech We Lost With a Virtual Graveyard
A virtual graveyard created by Burak Ozdemir serves as a nostalgic reminder of the technology that has come and gone over the years. The site features hand-written obituaries for various platforms, applications, and devices, highlighting both well-known and obscure entries. It reflects on the rapid evolution of technology and the fleeting nature of digital services.
- ▪The virtual graveyard includes obituaries for instant messengers, social networks, and web hosts.
- ▪Notable entries include ICQ, GeoCities, and Google+, alongside lesser-known services like Songza.
- ▪Some technologies, like Pebble devices, have made a comeback, while others, like Microsoft's Tay, serve as cautionary tales.
Hackaday files mainly under tech. We currently carry 243 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hackaday |
| Canonical URL | https://hackaday.com/2026/05/19/remembering-the-tech-we-lost-with-a-virtual-graveyard/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 11:00:45 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T11:04:57.554Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T11:04:57.554Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | qR1qGK1oY-pb |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Remembering The Tech We Lost With A Virtual Graveyard No comments by: Maya Posch May 19, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy Although 1999 might still feel like yesterday for some of us, in the world of technology the intervening years are practically an eternity. New websites, applications and devices pop up all the time, only to die off just as fast again for a variety of reasons. Amidst such chaos it’s always good to take a breather and reflect on all that we have lost, such as on the virtual graveyard that [Burak Ozdemir] created with hand-written obituaries and only the classiest of 90s-era web design. Remembered are everything from instant messengers and social networks to web hosts and devices.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hackaday.
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