Precursor of social networks, the “Skyblog” site closes its doors

“You helped create one of the first social networks in the world”. In a post published on Wednesday evening, the Skyrock media team announced the sudden shutdown, on August 21, of Skyblog, its site dedicated to pages and photos on various and varied subjects.

And if this social network means nothing to you, you have to go back to the year 2002, when the CEO of Skyrock Pierre Bellanger decided to launch Skyblog.com. Attached to the Skyrock music radio, the site is intended to be a personalized web space to allow Internet users to create, as its name suggests, blogs on music groups. Objective, to bring fans together on a common discussion site.

Thus, its interface makes it possible to publish texts and photos but also to distribute links (to other skyblogs in particular) and to comment on the pages. This ease of use quickly appealed to young French-speaking audiences. On the site then flourish pages with all kinds of content: sport, music, manga, cartoons, people or politics... So many centers of interest fed by these blogs of passionate Internet users.

In 2007, it was even the consecration: Skyblog became the 17th most used site in the world. “It's the golden age of the Web, it's the golden age of blogs,” recalls the Skyrock team. A total of 27 million blogs will exist on the platform at its peak. A few years later, it will be overtaken by behemoths like Facebook, made accessible to the whole world in 2006.

"Today, skyblogs go down in history", details the rest of the press release, about the closure of the site. Indeed, to be in compliance with the legislation on personal data while retaining the essence of the platform, Skyblog must be “frozen and removed from the public”. Nostalgics have until August 21 to archive their blog or delete it.

After this date, the still existing "skyblogs" will be anonymized and transferred to the national archives. A joint collection of the site's million blogs is organized by the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) and the National Library of France (BNF). So that tomorrow, scholars and researchers “can realize what the new generation of the beginning of the 20th century was like”, imagines the team behind the site. Today, there would still be 12 million "Skyblogs" to collect.

Coincidentally, that same day, the music group Kyo relaunched its own Skyblog to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its album "Le chemin", released in 2003. And on Twitter, many Internet users are reminiscing about their blogs - slightly shameful - forgotten for a decade, screenshots in support. If we are in 2023, the French-speaking web has offered itself a nostalgic return to the past.