I want one. Srsly.
How goatse.cx went from shock site to webmail serviceOwner spent $10,000 to preserve "Internet generation's cultural legacy"
People from my Internet generation, those who came online in the mid-1990s, have rose-tinted memories of early Web "shock sites"—sites with unassuming URLs containing horrible pictures of awful things. As the moniker implies, stumbling onto one (or being tricked into viewing one by friends) usually resulted in a dropped jaw and maybe an overwhelming wave of revulsion, followed almost immediately by the urge to show it to someone else to watch their reaction. The great grandaddy of all shock sites is the infamous goatse.cx, which featured an unspeakably awful image which I admit setting as the wallpaper on friends' computers to more than once (BJ, if you're reading, I'm sorry, but it was hilarious every time).
The shock site has been offline for a number of years now, primarily due to a dispute with the Christmas Island Internet Administration over misuse of the .cx TLD country code, but recently the goatse.cx URL began displaying something a lot more pleasant than the original picture.
Goatse goes webmail
Ars spoke with the webmaster behind the reborn goatse.cx site, whom we'll call "Bob." Bob has asked, understandably, that we not use his name in this story—although the webmail service won't have anything to do with the shock content of the original site, the personal and professional implications of having one's name associated with "goatse.cx" could be significant.
"I bought the Goatse domain from Sedo.com," Bob told Ars when asked how he came to possess the name. It was a late-night purchase, and the desire to own the site stemmed from repeated exposure to it years earlier in university computer labs. The cost of picking up the domain from reseller Sedo.com? €8,000. "I bought it because it is a unique piece of Internet history and I had plans to develop it into something (I wasn't sure what at the time). I did regret the purchase shortly after but I figured that I could have just as easily lost the money on the stock market that year, so I just thought of it as a purchase of a piece of fine art, like a painting or a sculpture."
But what to do with a piece of fine art? A painting or sculpture might appreciate in value and give joy to the beholder, but "joy" isn't really something that one associates with shock sites. Bob hit up the SomethingAwful.com forums, asking for suggestions, and the idea that received the most support was to start a webmail service featuring "@goatse.cx" addresses.
<major snippety>
Signing up
The goatse.cx webmail service should be launching within the next couple of weeks, and the site is currently collecting e-mail addresses to be used to notify prospective goatse.cx users when the site goes live. About 12,000 people have signed up for the waiting list, so desirable e-mail aliases will likely go quickly. That there will be significant interest at launch is a foregone conclusion; if nothing else, the name guarantees it. Whether or not the service will have legs, though, is another story. The novelty of an "@goatse.cx" address is unquestioned, but its utility is a bit harder to quantify.
There's certainly tremendous cachet in the domain name among older Internet users, but the thought of having an "@goatse.cx" e-mail address might be more compelling than the reality. Aside from the occasional jokey e-mail to friends, I can't imagine an instance when I'd actually use it.
Still, Bob thinks the work is worth doing. "I think its important we hold on to some of the defining icons of that period, to remind ourselves of what the Internet could have been," he continues. "Goatse is one of those icons."
Topic: This is totally awesome: goatse.cx email addresses!