Recently a great 6 page story ran in The New Yorker talking about the history of online communities, and how they’ve evolved into the social networking (ie “me media”) we now use today. Below is a brief excerpt related to theglobe.com, for the full story click on the link below.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/15/060515fa_fact_cassidy?currentPage=6

By John Cassidy

Online communities have existed since the dawn of the Internet era, and so has the desire to make them profitable. After Netscape went public, and surfing the Web became easy, a number of companies emerged to help people build Web pages, where they could post pictures and text. One of the first was theglobe.com, which two Cornell undergraduates, Stephen Paternot and Todd Krizelman, started in their dorm room in 1994. Within a year, theglobe.com had roughly two hundred and fifty thousand registered users, and it was generating about fourteen million page views a month. Using the slogan “A Whole New Life Awaits You,” the site advertised on MTV and on the sides of buses. In contrast to other home-page companies, such as GeoCities, theglobe.com encouraged its users to send messages to one another. “Our philosophy was more about people interacting with other people,” Paternot wrote in his 2001 memoir, “A Very Public Offering.” “Very quickly, everyone started using the term community. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Everyone became community.”

On November 13, 1998, theglobe-.com issued three million shares through the investment bank Bear Stearns, at a price of nine dollars each. By the end of the first day of trading, the stock price had jumped to $63.50. On paper, at least, Paternot and Krizelman were worth more than sixty million dollars each. Less than two years later, theglobe.com’s stock was trading at two dollars, and Paternot stepped down as co-chief executive.