I attended at fantastic event in Palo Alto a few weeks ago: Excite’s reunion, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the launch of Excite.com. (Fun inverse exponential tidbit: at launch, Excite’s index contained a whopping 1.5 million pages.)
It was great to reconnect with the incredible set of folks I was fortunate to be on a mission with two decades ago. Twenty years is a generation in human time, and eons in the tech industry.
One of the most interesting themes of conversation was how much has shifted in the tech landscape since then, yet how many of things we were working on at the turn of the millennium we all “knew” would be important became foundational elements of today’s ecosystem, though we couldn’t foresee the precise forms they would ultimately take.
A couple examples: Excite bought a company called Throw that was an early groups/social networking product, and we were even working on Excite Mobile back then (offered via WAP)!
Excite also had a fantastic television commercial for our launch, using Jimi’s music. No one could tell what the hell Excite was from this commercial, but it was a damn cool ad nonetheless.