Tripod.com ( ) is a web hosting service owned by Lycos. Originally targeting its services to students and young adults, it was one of the few sites that tried to build an online community during the 1990s. As such, Tripod becomes part of the first wave of user-generated content.
Video Tripod.com
Services
Tripod offers free and paid web hosting services, including 20 megabytes of storage space and the ability to run Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts in Perl. In addition to basic hosting, Tripod also offers a blogging tool, photo album manager, and Trellix site builder for WYSIWYG page editing. The Tripod service to pay includes additional disk space, shopping cart, domain name, web and POP/IMAP email.
Maps Tripod.com
History
Tripod originated in 1992 with two Williams College classmates, Bo Peabody and Brett Hershey, along with Dick Sabot, a professor of economics at school. The company is headquartered in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with Peabody as CEO. Although it will eventually focus on the Internet, Tripod also publishes magazines, Tools for Life, which are distributed with textbooks, and offer discount cards to students.
Launch website
The domain name Tripod.com was created on September 29, 1994, and the site was officially launched in 1995 after operating in a "sneak preview mode" during a period. Billed as "Web sites and services paying for and by students", it offers suggestions on how to deal with practical issues that may be of concern to young people when they first stay away from home. It is planned to charge a minimal fee and make money primarily on commissions from partners who will sell products on the site. Other services available include the feature rà © Ã… © sumÃÆ' © writing and simple home page builder.
Although the feature was an early reflection, Tripod soon became known as a place where people can create free web pages, competing with the likes of Yahoo! GeoCities and Angelfire. Criticizing AOL, the leader in this space, for the "walled garden" approach, Peabody explains the company's goal: "Our idea is to build communities through user-generated and user-based content." A reviewer at The Washington Post recommends Tripod over GeoCities to give users easier URLs to remember, and because GeoCities sites have a tendency to damage computers.
Investment and purchases
After receiving an initial investment of US $ 4 million in venture capital, led by New Enterprises Associates, in May 1997 Tripod took an additional investment of US $ 10 million. By this time the company has grown to 40 employees and hopes to achieve profitability in the first quarter of 1998. The second investor group, including Interpublic, who paid US $ 2.5 million for a stake in Tripod is estimated at 10 percent, implying a US $ 25 million valuation for the company whole. Apparently, Tripod will be sold in February 1998 to Lycos for 58 million US dollars reported.
Lycos also end up having a former competitor Tripod, Angelfire, taken as part of the WhoWhere acquisition. Both properties are run simultaneously, with Tripod continuing to focus on college-age audiences while Angelfire tends to attract high school users. In early 2001, Tripod reached 6 million registered users (up from nearly 1 million at the time of acquisition) and growing at around 250,000 new sites per month. However, generating a fixed profit is difficult, with analysts arguing that they need better user profiles so that the site can produce the results expected by the advertiser. They also have the challenge of not alienating users while trying to make money. At the end of the year, Tripod and Angelfire also introduced account options that allow users to pay to keep their sites ad-free. GeoCities, now acquired by Yahoo !, will follow shortly thereafter.
Domain name
The website is generally a subdomain of tripod.com. However, users can pay a monthly fee and have a domain name. Payments in this way also allow for other benefits, such as more disk space for sites that allow site owners to put more information into it, and personalized email accounts, for example. , yourname@yoursite.com.
Rumor Shutdown
On January 18, 2009, the TechCrunch blog mistakenly reported that Lycos will close its Tripod service on February 15, 2009. In fact, the February closure applies only to Lycos Europe and only users of affected services. Late in the afternoon after the initial TechCrunch article, Lycos posted an entry on the Lycos Buzz blog that convinced readers that Lycos AS and the Tripod service were not dead. TechCrunch then corrects the errors in the original article.
See also
- Comparison of free web hosting services
References
External links
- Official website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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