In early 1999, Yahoo was fully in the throes of its late-'90s Internet business utopianism. We were all going to Internet heaven and someone else was going to pay for the lift ticket on the celestial ski lift. Using its own inflated stock price during the market's Internet hysteria, Yahoo funded some of its biggest acquisitions, including the GeoCities deal -- which cost the company a staggering $2.87 billion in stock to buy 3.5 million free, personal home pages. The tremendous popularity of Yahoo's free services fueled demand for banner ads on the site, driving up the company's stock price and in turn funding more acquisitions.

WebRing was just an afterthought in the GeoCities deal. All the grand plans to use WebRing's technology to restructure GeoCities were soon forgotten. Killeen, still back in Oregon with the old Starseed engineering team, now found himself an employee of Yahoo, and: "Yahoo had other priorities."

With the plans to use WebRing's technology to improve GeoCities abandoned, Yahoo set about integrating the community into the Yahoo brand, just as it did with GeoCities.

"The management of Yahoo simply did not know, or did not care, about what they inherited," said Lowe. "I got the distinct impression of some guys in a boardroom saying, 'What the heck do we do with this thing?' and coming up with some birdbrained ideas, which then got implemented."

When the new Yahoo WebRing went live in late September of 2000, the ringmasters' furious protests began. The ringmasters used Yahoo's own WebRing system to link up the protest sites and spread the word. It was one of those delicious Internet ironies: a community of anti-Yahoo sentiment, attacking what Yahoo had done to WebRing, hosted by Yahoo's own WebRing.

The essential gripe of the ringmasters was that they had not been consulted about the changes to the system, changes that they felt had marginalized them. "The ringmaster had effectively been turned into just another member," said Huggins. To Yahoo's credit, the new version of WebRing made it easier for webmasters who were "HTML clueless" to easily build rings. But simplicity came at a high cost.

Following the Yahoo directory style, Yahoo WebRing would now try to drive users through central pages. The new navigation bar on every page of each ring made the Yahoo WebRing home page the "hub" rather than the ringmaster's own home page. Yahoo tried to bring centralization to a system that was essentially distributed.

Since Yahoo couldn't require member sites to carry ads, the company did the next best thing, and strove to force users through Yahoo-owned directory pages. "They couldn't put ads all over these sites. Yahoo had to have a way to get you to visit their pages more often. They completely deemphasized the role of the ringmaster, when they changed it from home to hub," says Huggins.

It was a no-win situation for Yahoo. WebRing had been purchased by GeoCities in order to acquire a technology that Yahoo ended up having no use for after it bought GeoCities. Now Yahoo was in the position of trying to pry money out of an amorphous community that just wanted to be left alone.

The beefs that ringmasters had with the new system were only amplified by Yahoo's inability to deal effectively with the community. When ringmasters wrote to complain, they received form letters in response.

"I think that most users will agree that Yahoo's customer service has always been the most frustrating part," says Andrea Stalnecker. "It was all but impossible to get personal assistance to problems or to share feedback about the system. Unfortunately, they just didn't have the staffing to accommodate the number of support messages they received, so they hoped the form letters would suffice. Instead, it looked as if Yahoo was too busy to care about the users, which I always hoped wasn't actually the case."

Some ringmasters got so fed up that they defected to WebRing alternatives. The other rings systems included CrickRock, RingSurf and the open-source version Ringlink. Ringmasters relished the alternatives, but the fragmentation could only frustrate surfers -- where once there might be one main Scottish Terrier ring, now there could be four.

In April 2001, Yahoo laid off most of WebRing's staff, committing the already marginalized system to total irrelevance inside the company. And then, in mid-October 2001, Yahoo officially gave up on the experiment, announcing that Killeen, who along with the rest of the Yahoo WebRing staff in Oregon had been laid off by Yahoo earlier in the year, would buy the system. Nicki Dugan, Yahoo spokesperson, told News.com that it "was in the best interest to sell to Tim because it's difficult for us to sell advertising inventory on pages that are hosted on other companies' Web sites or other companies' networks."

For his part, Killeen is humble about his motives in attempting to salvage the system: "I liked it still so I offered to take it off their hands essentially for them."

Yahoo offered little more. Jackson Holtz, a Yahoo spokesperson, says only: "Tim Killeen, one of the very early WebRing engineers approached Yahoo regarding purchasing WebRing. Yahoo decided it would be in the company's best fiscal interest to complete the sale. We wish Tim the best of luck with his endeavors."

The company had never given the nifty Web system much of a public showcase: "Through the entire history of this, WebRing has not appeared in any annual report or SEC filing or press release of Yahoo in any way. It's just a tiny blip in their empire," says Huggins.

Now, for an undisclosed sum, Yahoo had jettisoned an unprofitable project along with the headache of crabbing ringmasters who came with it, while WebRing had regained its independence. The ringmasters are in the process of moving their rings once again, this time to the new WebRing system.

All rings that are not transferred will be deleted, so some of the more devoted ringmasters like Stalnecker have taken to "adopting" orphaned rings -- rings whose masters have lost interest -- so that they'll make it to the other side.

Whether WebRing can make it as an independent business consisting of one engineer with a few other people working "just in their spare time" is anybody's guess.

Huggins believes that WebRing, which went from being worth the better part of a $30 million deal to becoming a Web castoff, is just a victim of weird market forces. "It was not invented to make money," he says. "Like many other things on the Net, it was invented to support community." Huggins' rings now live on alternative systems.

Killeen just hopes that with its newfound independence WebRing can return to its roots: "It's kind of like the Internet bubble. There were all these grand expectations that everyone had, and when those didn't immediately burst forth, WebRing ended up being what it started out to be, which is lots and lots of individual users and sites."

Individual users and sites -- is the Internet's future really its past? In the grander scheme of Yahoo's business strategy, WebRing was a minor stumble -- just one of many irrelevant missteps in the rush to become all things to all Net users. But symbolically, the story of WebRing might be more telling than Yahoo executives would like to contemplate. In the long run, it will be easy to keep a WebRing, or something like a WebRing, going, as long as obsessed people are willing to devote some time to the Net. The rings will never really die.

But will there always be an independent Yahoo -- a multibillion-dollar corporation employing thousands of people, devoted to the proposition that online popularity can be transmuted into enduring profits? That's a question that only the users, once known as community members but now called "customers," can answer.

This story has been corrected.

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