Friday, February 8, 2008

Gallery of Blogger’s Past

Google bought blogging service Blogger in 2003 by acquiring makers Pyra Labs (Blogger’s Evan Williams then tried to convince Google to start a blog of their own... the convincing took 15 months, Evan says). The first mention of Blogger in a Google press release came in August later that year, when the Google Toolbar integrated a “BlogThis” button, raising among one of the first Google cross-integration concerns. Today, a search for site:blogspot.com in Google indicates around 101 million of Blogger’s hosting domain are indexed. Below are some screenshots from the past of Blogger and Blogspot via the Wayback Machine* and (for the second Blogspot image) Jason Shellen.

Blogger.com 1999

On August 23rd, 1999, Evan Williams posted: “We just launched a cool new tool at Pyra. It’s called Blogger. It’s an automated weblog publishing tool.” In above design, the distinctive white-on-orange “B” isn’t seen yet. The introductory text on the page contains news and a definition of blogging.

Blogger.com 2001

The Blogger homepage in 2001 tries to be both Blogger news blog as well as service page.

Blogger.com 2004

In this redesign the homepage is simplified to get across what blogging is. Signing up is supposed to be an easy three-step process.

Blogger.com 2007

The changes to the 2004 version are minimal but visible. For instance, some alignments are adjusted, and the people icon is replaced by a posts photos icon.

Blogspot.com 2000

A simple design with heavy blue colors. Back in 2000, Evan Williams wrote the following in his blog: “So, yeah, blog*spot is up and running. It’s a free (ad-supported) hosting service for Blogger blogs. We really should have done this a long, long time ago. It was part of the original idea when we launched Blogger and has come up lots of time since. The reason we hadn’t done it, though, is because we didn’t really want to get into the hosting business. That’s a crowded market, and we can work with most hosts already. Why not just partner with someone(s)?” Evan added, “if you’re in the hosting business, email me at ev at pyra.com.”

Blogspot.com 2002

In 2002 Blogspot still had a different design than Blogger. Nowadays the domain just redirects to Blogger.com.

 

*Note that some things aren’t displaying 100% correctly with the Wayback Machine.

Gallery of Blogger’s Past by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (4)

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