Firefly.net - a bit of history
Firefly.net rarely gets mentioned these days, but when pheezy mentioned Pandora (which i’ve not yet tried), my mind rolled back to 1998.
Firefly was a community site created in the early days of the web by Dr. Pattie Maes from MIT MediaLab. Firefly connected you with other people who had similar taste in music + media. Although the premise seems fairly straightforward now, (see also: MySpace, Audioscrobbler, etc.), this worked surprisingly well. Firefly’s users, from what I remember of them, had a love for their community that rivalled that of users from that other primordial online community, the Well.
At the time I remember student-teaching a class at the University of Michigan’s Art & Architecture school in Interactive Media where one of my students met (and fell in love with) someone via Firefly. People in our circle of friends may have thought that this sort of compter-aided online-matchup was a bit funny and weird, but the ensuing buzz around the website was unlike that around any other I can remember, at least in our little group of techno-art-geek friends.
My understanding was that Firefly used neural networks or a similar “learning” technology to build profiles of users to look for patterns, while Pandora uses something called the Music Genome Project, “the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken.” But the result was the same. Ten years before Friendster, Audioscrobbler, and iTunes.
You may also be interested in more information on Pattie Maes + Firefly, or Wired’s Firefly.net obituary Firefly’s Dim Light Snuffed Out (they got bought by M$).
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I was trying to explain Firefly to a friend and came across this blog. I often wonder how many of us are still out there. I met several friends on there and even fell in love also.
I’ve yet to see another site like it. I found the technology was simpler and much more effective than Pandora, but it was always the community that brought me back.
I still keep in touch with a couple of friends from there, but the bulk of them have vanished into the World Wide Web. I wonder where they are…
i was also am avid user of firefly from 1996 to 1998. I lost contact with everyone I met on there when they shut it down. Met lots of good friends there and would have loved to have gotten contact info from them.
I happened across a print out from 2/26/1998 (my birthday to be exact) of some messages on there. It brought back lots of memories that caused me to do a google search about it and I came across your blog! Now I am trying to find some of those old friends by their old usernames but haven’t had any luck thus far :(