Somebody”s created an imaginary version of Monopoly based on blogging. It”s somewhat clever, but mostly just reminded me of the ill-fated harbinger that was Monopoly - The .com Edition.
If you don”t remember the .com Monopoly game, it was released at the height of .com mania in late 2000. I own a copy (unopened) that I picked up at The Land of Misfit Toys (aka Toy Liquidators) a couple of years ago. It”s a fabulous reminder of the days when we thought products, not profits, were what really mattered.
It”s kind of fun five years later to look at the “properties” featured in the game and ponder their post-bubble fates.
• Yahoo! - The Boardwalk of the game. Today it would play Park Place to Google”s Boardwalk, but it”s obviously hung in nicely.
• Excite@Home - The Park Place of the game. Enough said.
• eBay - Obviously still doing well. Back in 2000, the company only warranted a placement midway on the board in the Orange block, where New York Avenue would be.
• iVillage, Oxygen, E!Online, Shockwave.com, Foxsports.com, weather.com - Wow, I”d almost forgotten that there was a time when content sites mattered.
Apart from Excite@Home, there really are no huge .com flameouts in the game. No Boo.com, no WebVan (R.I.P, my dear WebVan). Of course, there”s no Google and surprisingly, there”s also no Amazon.com, which was definitely a big boy by then.
Here”s the full lineup (alphabetically - check the Wayback Machine to see a decent shot of board layout). Judge for yourself the post-bubble fates of our participants.
- About.com
- Alta Vista
- Ask Jeeves
- CBS Marketwatch
- CNET
- E!Online
- eBay
- ETrade
- Excite@Home
- Expedia.com
- Foxsports.com
- Games.com
- GeoCities
- iVIllage
- Lycos
- Monster.com
- Oxygen
- Priceline.com
- Shockwave.com
- Sportsline.com
- Weather.com
- Yahoo!
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April 21st, 2008 at 10:38 am
[...] around here, I still have my new-in-box Monopoly - The Dot Com Edition, but Yahoo Web Speak blows that away in terms of awesome Pre-Bubble 1.0 board games. And for those [...]