About Looks Back

Looks Back is an encyclopedia of digital projects that died. The messengers, social networks, players, search engines and platforms that once mattered and then disappeared.

Most of what the internet knows about dead products is folklore: half-remembered numbers, wrong dates, myths repeated until they became facts. We rebuild each story from primary sources: who founded it, who bought it and for how much, how big it actually got, and what finally killed it.

What makes this different

• Structured data, not just prose. Ownership chains, dated metrics, and causes of death are database fields you can compare across hundreds of projects, not sentences buried in an article.
• Honest numbers. Registered accounts, monthly active users and concurrent users are three different things. Each figure is labeled with its type, its date and how much we trust it.
• Everything sourced and archived. Every claim links to a source, and every source gets an archived copy, because links rot. See sources & methodology.

Why

Software history disappears fast. Company blogs get deleted, press releases vanish, and the shutdown notice itself often dies with the product. Somebody should keep the obituaries. That is what this site is.

Found an error? Every page shows when it was last verified. Corrections with sources are always welcome at hello@looksback.com.