The End of JenniCam : The end of WWWeb 1.0

Liza Sabater

Voyeur Web Site JenniCam to Go Dark After 7 Years

It's amazing to read that Jenni Ringley is but 27 years old. On technology years, 18 months has been considered the lenght of a generation. Three years, a lifetime. With seven years, JenniCam lived two lifetimes more than most dot-coms.

I visited JenniCam back in the days when you did not have to pay and she was in college. I don't remember seeing anything momentous. I do remember being fascinated by the idea that this woman was live, on TV and she did not care. How can someone expose themselves so rawly to the world?

Well, webcams are costly to maintain but blogs are not. JenniCam's memes are the millions of blogs, dead and alive, that people like you and me start because we have something to share with the world. Ms. Ringley wanted to share her own private human zoo. How many of us do exactly that with less bandwidth? Ms. Ringley made history by turning iBroadcasting into I (am) broadcasting .

Looking back to the net pre-JenniCam, I found this 1996 quote by Bill Gates at Roads and Crossroads of Internet History: Part 4. Birth of the Web.

"...an Internet browser is a trivial piece of software. There are at least 30 companies that have written very credible Internet browsers, so that's nothing... "

JenniCam and the millions of people going to her site for the last 7 years proved how important browsers were. But as anything else, all things must pass. Scott Rosenberg was right, it does feel like 1994.