It was 2002. Windows XP ruled the world, digital cameras were starting their crusade, and most of us connected to the Web through public cybercafés. That same year, Fotolog was born, a portal that served as a precursor to current services like Facebook and Instagram. Thirteen years and a few months later, Fotolog decided to close its doors, apparently due to the inevitable abandonment of its users and the impossibility of competing against today's social giants.
Filling Facebook walls with photos and bombarding Instagram accounts with a selfie at a time is relatively common these days, but the truth is there were earlier movements capable of setting the social pace on the Web. One of them was the "flogger", which I am convinced many of our readers have heard mentioned at some point. The term simply represented a large part of Fotolog users, a pioneering portal when it came to providing a small space to express oneself freely and post an image... which could certainly be anything, but the selfie format quickly prevailed among the youngest.
The Rise of Fotolog
History tells us that Fotolog was a creation of Scout Heiferman and Adam Seifer in May 2002. In just over three years, it managed to rank within the Top 20 on the Web, and according to Heiferman himself, Fotolog came to generate around 750 million pageviews per month. In 2007 its servers stored more than 200 million shared photographs. Its spectacular success in Latin America, with special emphasis on Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile, gave rise to the birth of "urban tribes" like the aforementioned flogger movement, very strong in Argentina towards 2008, which organized periodic meetings at the doors of the Abasto Shopping mall in the Federal Capital of Buenos Aires.
The Shutdown
This review of Fotolog's history as an ancestor of social networks and selfies is because its official applications have disappeared from Google Play and the App Store, while the main site remains offline (CloudFlare delivers a previous version), almost definitive signs of its permanent closure. Fotolog reported more than 30 million users, but did not indicate how many of them remained active. The closure caused annoyance among users interested in recovering stored images... while the majority expressed some relief upon learning that their digital adolescences (and the photos associated with them) were lost in the chaos of the web.
