The ONElist File

So, to this point we have an interesting idea, a successful launch, and a growing Internet service. Of course, we couldn’t be the only ones doing this (Coollist doesn’t count) for long. Cue music. Enter Makelist. Da Dum!

Makelist actually started life as Findmail. Scott Hassan started Findmail about a year earlier (although I may be wrong about the date, I wasn’t there). Findmail was a service that archived mail lists. These lists were created and maintained on their own servers. Findmail would subscribe to these lists, like normal users, and archive the posts it received.

From Findmail, it’s not a difficult jump to Makelist, which provided mail list hosting services. Just like ONElist. Eventually, near the end of summer 1998, both Makelist and Findmail were morphed into eGroups. You’ll hear more about this later.

During the first year or so of Makelist/eGroups, we competed against them mainly on the basis of functionality. We had a few month head start and had a few more bells and whistles. After parity was reached, we competed more on customer support and quality of our hosted lists. And then a little later, we stopped competing altogether. But of course we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.

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