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March 27, 2007

Small Whirrled

Twelve years ago, my brother Adam and I threw together a website and the beginnings of a book called Whirrled: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century. "Whirrled" sounds like "World" -- it was a pun on the fast-changing nature of the environment we found ourselves in.

The whole thing was something of a lark, an exploration of the technological and social trends surrounding the emergence of the Web that was itself web-like and open-ended. I almost got a book contract out of it, without even trying. In the end, Adam and I moved on to other things. I left the website up, but it hasn't changed since 1996.

So imagine my amusement when I read last week about a casual virtual world called Whirled, announced at the Game Developers Conference by a company called Three Rings. The guy behind it even contacted me about my Supernova conference, unaware that I'd done something with a similar name.

It was nice to have an excuse to go back and look at that old site. For all the changes since then, our wild predictions and theories retain a certain freshness. It's important not to lose that sense of wonder at what we're all experiencing and creating online.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at March 27, 2007 11:55 AM

Comments

I suppose that's the glorious nature of the archive of the web. If I recall correctly, we began whirrled before google even existed.

Posted by: adamwerbach [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 30, 2007 8:16 AM

Long before. Larry and Sergey left Stanford to form Google in 1998. We started Whirrled in 1995, around the time Amazon.com and eBay were started, and not long after Yahoo.

Posted by: Kevin Werbach [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 30, 2007 8:41 AM

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