Open Diary

Invented the comment, in 1998

Shut down
19902026

Open Diary went online in October 1998 and did something nobody had done: it let readers leave comments on someone else's diary entry. It also introduced friends-only privacy. Both are now so fundamental that it is hard to see them as inventions. It hosted more than five million diaries and went offline in 2014.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 1998
  2. 20 October 1998 Launch
    Open Diary goes online

    An online diary community, before the word blog existed.

  3. November 1998 Feature
    Readers can comment on entries

    The first time anyone could reply underneath someone else's diary post.

  4. 1999
  5. 1999 Feature
    Friends-only privacy

    Entries can be limited to people the writer has marked as friends.

  6. 2008
  7. October 2008 Peak
    561,000 diaries from 77 countries

    More than five million diaries hosted over the site's life.

  8. 2014
  9. 7 February 2014 Shutdown
    Open Diary goes offline

    After fifteen years.

  10. 2018
  11. 26 January 2018 Revival
    A relaunch

    It runs for a while longer. The domain no longer resolves.

The site through time

Browse opendiary.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2014 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Bruce Ableson and Susan Ableson 1998–2014 Founded Known on the site as DiaryMaster and DiaryMistress

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts ▲ 561,000 October 2008 Reported Live diaries on the site, from 77 countries

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Went offline on 7 February 2014 after fifteen years. A relaunch followed on 26 January 2018, but opendiary.com no longer resolves.

Our analysis: Open Diary invented the mechanics that everything after it copied, and got no benefit from having been first. It stayed small, ad-supported and personal while the ideas it introduced were rebuilt at enormous scale by companies that arrived years later.

History [edit]

Before it had a name

Bruce and Susan Ableson put Open Diary online on 20 October 1998, under the site names DiaryMaster and DiaryMistress. The word blog did not exist yet. What existed were personal home pages and online journals, each on its own, read by whoever found them.

Shortly after launch, Open Diary added something new: readers could post comments on someone else's entry. That single feature turned a set of separate diaries into a conversation, and it is the direct ancestor of the comment box under every article and post on the internet today. Bruce Ableson described the site as "the first web site that brought online diary writers together into a community", which is a fair claim.

It followed that with a second idea now taken for granted: entries could be public, or visible only to people the writer had marked as friends. Whole categories of writing became possible that would not have been posted publicly.

Five million diaries

By October 2008 the site held more than 561,000 diaries, from 77 countries and every continent, and over its life it hosted more than five million. It also had, from the beginning, a Favourites page aggregating the latest posts from the diaries you followed, which is a feed by another name and predates the feeds everyone knows by years.

None of this made it large. Open Diary stayed a modest, ad-supported community while LiveJournal, Blogger, MySpace and Facebook rebuilt the same ideas with money behind them.

Offline

Open Diary went offline on 7 February 2014, after fifteen years. Bruce Ableson relaunched it on 26 January 2018 for the community that remained. That version has since gone too, and the domain no longer resolves.

The comment box outlived the site that invented it by a wide margin, and almost nobody knows where it came from.

Similar projects

App.net Users paid for it, and it still was not enough 2012–2017 Vox Closed at 3:20 in the afternoon, and its name sold on 2006–2010 Windows Live Spaces 30 million blogs, and Microsoft expected 1% to move 2004–2011 Pownce Eighteen months, and invitations sold on eBay 2007–2008 Typepad Where the BBC and Time blogged, deleted after 22 years 2003–2025 Posterous Blogging by sending an email, bought and switched off 2008–2013

Sources [edit]

  1. The Open Diary takes off ZDNet 1 January 2000 [archived]
  2. Open Diary as it stood around the 2014 closure Internet Archive Wayback Machine 1 March 2014 [archived]

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).