January 21, 2026, 1:43 pm | Read time: 7 minutes
In the 90s and early 2000s, there were a number of legendary Internet companies. Altavista, Napster, ICQ, and Second Life were once extremely popular online services that hardly anyone could do without. But what has become of the greats of the early digital era?
They were the high-flyers of the online services of the 1990s or installed as standard programs on every computer. In the meantime, they have become irrelevant or have disappeared completely: Many Internet companies, as well as programs from the early days of the Internet, are now history. TECHBOOK takes a walk down memory lane.
Overview
Second Life – Predecessor of Facebook’s Metaversum
“Second Life was a revolutionary idea to move a social network into a virtual world,” said Timm Lutter from the IT association Bitkom. Users move through virtual worlds as 3D avatars. The service from the US company Linden Lab was launched in 2003. The online service was a standout phenomenon in the early 2000s. But after the initial hype, Second Life quickly fell silent.
“The idea probably came too early, however; widespread technology such as internet bandwidth and graphics was not yet advanced enough for Second Life to be attractive to many people in the long term,” says the expert. The network is still online, but the number of users has fallen dramatically over the years. While there were around one million returning users at its peak, there are said to be just under 18,000 daily users as of March 2025. Second Life is also very reminiscent of the idea of a metaverse now being promoted by Mark Zuckerberg. The future prospects of the new project seem to be echoing its predecessor—so far, Meta has only reported losses and low user engagement.
What Happened to Netscape?
Long before Firefox, Chrome, & Co, Netscape was the standard browser par excellence. “In the mid-1990s, Netscape had a market share of 80 percent,” explains Bremen historian Daniel Crueger, who researches digital history and its cultural heritage. But: “In 1995, with the market launch of Microsoft Internet Explorer, the so-called first browser war began, for which Microsoft mobilized considerable financial and human resources as well as the market power of its Windows operating system,” says the expert.
Netscape was unable to win this unequal battle: “In 2003, Netscape’s market share had fallen to less than 4 percent, while Internet Explorer had reached over 95 percent.” Acquired by AOL in the meantime, the browser was discontinued in its familiar form in 2008. However, AOL (now part of Yahoo) still markets a low-cost Internet provider under the name, through which a browser called Netscape still exists. There is also a portal of the same name.
Who Remembers RealPlayer?
The RealPlayer and the format of the same name were available for all systems and brought two advantages in the mid-1990s: They enabled significant data compression, crucial during the early days of the internet when bandwidth was limited.
It was also better suited to live video and audio broadcasts than competing formats such as QuickTime and MPEG. Ultimately, the Flash format displaced the player. A current version of the RealPlayer still exists today.
Before Google, There Was AltaVista
The search engine launched in 1995 and remained the market leader for years. “AltaVista created its search results primarily from the so-called metadata of a website, i.e., on the basis of page titles or keywords assigned by the author,” explains Lutter.
Today, the online service from the 1990s is almost forgotten. This is because the search engine with the catchy name Google was launched in 1998 and did things better. Unlike AltaVista, Google analyzes the entire text of a page. Things went steadily downhill for AltaVista until the last owner, Yahoo, shut down the search engine in 2013 after several sales.
StudiVZ was the German Facebook of 2005
Originally conceived as a student network and then expanded, StudiVZ was in the right place at the right time: “When the online service went online in the mid-2000s, the era of social media had just begun, but German-language offerings were still largely absent,” says Crueger.
StudiVZ was the first social media platform for an entire generation, and at its peak, the VZ group had around 16 million active users. “The fact that the hype was followed by a deep fall is probably due not least to the strong and financially powerful competition from Facebook”.
“While Facebook pulled away visually and technically, StudiVZ stagnated on the software side during a critical phase,” says expert Stephan Dörner. The growing number of users and internationality of Facebook then led to the orphaning of countless StudiVZ accounts. The platform was shut down on March 31, 2022.
ICQ – Chat with the Flower
The messenger was launched in 1996, and in its heyday, more than 470 million users around the world were greeted with its catchy “Uh-oh” when new chat messages arrived. This made it one of the most popular online services of the 90s. However, ICQ missed out on the burgeoning smartphone revolution and was only available for mobile use from 2010. Additional competition came in the form of various social media services.
However, it took some time before the service finally disappeared: “ICQ illustrates very well that different user cultures exist in parallel on the World Wide Web, which can be separated from each other geographically or linguistically,” explains Crueger. Although ICQ had previously disappeared from our perception, it remained strong in Russia and was “even enormously influential for the web culture there”. In 2024, however, it was finally over.
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Napster Was Defeated by Spotify
At the end of the 1990s, the online service Napster turned music file sharing into a global phenomenon, regardless of the legal situation. The music sharing service established the MP3 audio format in 1999. “Free music files on demand—with this offer, Napster became the fastest growing web community in the meantime,” says Crueger. Shortly before its end in February 2001, the service had 80 million users worldwide.
“But Napster was costing the music industry immense turnover, which is why it fought the service to the best of its ability in legal proceedings”—ultimately successfully. Following its insolvency, the brand name was sold several times and was ultimately managed by a paid music streaming service.
Now, in March 2025, the brand is changing hands again. As reported by “VentureBeat” and others, Infinite Reality is acquiring the service for a whopping 207 million US dollars. The company then plans to turn the platform into more than just a streaming service for music.
The service is to be expanded to include an interactive and immersive element by allowing artists to create their own virtual rooms. In these, fans will be able to take part in concerts, listen to music together, or even interact directly with the artists. Exclusive content and the opportunity to sell merchandise will also be available.
What Happened to Winamp?
The free, streamlined music and video player quickly became the de facto standard after its 1997 release. AOL wanted to profit from its success and bought the company in 1999, but newer, increasingly overloaded versions of Winamp brought more and more complaints to the point where users migrated en masse.
“Winamp was essentially replaced by two software solutions: iTunes and VLC Player,” says Stephan Dörner. Winamp was originally due to be discontinued in 2013, but was sold again. In 2023, a new web player actually appeared.
The German original of this article was published in March 2025.