Facebook announces internet nostalgia app E.gg
The Geocities look is back.
- I've been covering technology and mobile for 12 years, first as a telecommunications reporter and assistant editor at ZDNet in Australia, then as CNET's West Coast head of breaking news, and now in the Thought Leadership team.
A weird new Facebook app is launching, and it's based on bringing back the internet of the '90s. E.gg is the latest creation from Facebook's experimental app team New Product Experimentation and is aimed at "recapturing that atmosphere" of the early web.
The About section of E.gg looks like an old-school Geocities web page, and even has a GIF of the old 3D animated Oogachacka dancing baby -- one of the internet's first viral hits.
"We started working on E.gg after a few of us found ourselves missing a certain raw and exploratory spirit that was so emblematic of The Early Internet," the developers wrote. "Sure, it was clumsy to use -- dangerous at times, even -- but in that awkward mess was a weird and enlivening bazaar of manically-blinking GIFs, passionate guestbook entries, personal webpages made by people who cared deeply about a niche interest of theirs and wanted simply to carve out their own digital space."
E.gg can be used for creating collages and mixed-media pages for fan sites or an about page for your own app. Once the iOS app launches, you can use it to create a "canvas" filled with GIFs, pictures and text, placing this content anywhere on the page and choosing a URL for the creation.
The waitlist is open now, and the app will be launched "on a rolling basis." You can follow E.gg over on Instagram. At this point, it has only 350 followers.
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