myBBC Online - more Web 2000 than Web 2.0
Wendy Redred Robin mentioned the old BBC Online service myBBC on the reboot:bbc.co.uk message board earlier this week.
Launched in 2000, this was the BBC's first attempt at providing a personalised homepage for users. Once registered a user could select which panels of information they wanted to see - for example football news, or their saved recipes, or the latest from Radio One, or their local weather. They were also able to choose a colour scheme and re-order the panels into any sequence they liked.
At the time it was seen as an important enough service from the BBC to even feature in the standard left-hand navigation of every page on the site.
Behind the scenes however it was very hard work to do. A lot of the "panels" required bespoke XML schemes to syndicate the information - agreed light-weight interchange standards like RSS and Atom were still either in their infancy or some way off. The site also never gained a huge audience - in some ways that level of personalisation was ahead of its time for the BBC's very mainstream online audience.
It was shut-down in 2003, lamented by one of the team who worked on it (who used CSS on it to set colours an astonishing 2 years before that would be acceptable coding for general sites on BBC Online), some mobile users, and not very many other people it seems according to the report in The Register.
The collective memory of the BBC seems to have erased it. In fact, late last year I wanted to talk about the myBBC service in a presentation I was giving, and I couldn't find any screen shots of the service. The Wayback machine was no help, as it was locked out of the service because myBBC was a dynamic application.
In the end the best I could manage for my presentation was to get hold of some of the design concept work from one of the BBC's senior web designers. These at least give a feel of what the service used to look like. Maybe someone reading this, either inside or outside of the BBC, still has some full screenshot pictures tucked away somewhere?
- 06 May 2006 15:54
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Madly, we won an award for this... it's in the display case in Ada Lovelace (Meeting room 1, 5th floor, broadcast centre).
In the distant future all that will remain is this metal award, it'll be like the bit with the golf club in Planet of the Apes.
For the non-BBC amongst you, yes, the BBC offices in White City do have a meeting room called "Ada Lovelace". My favourite was, of course, called "Alan Turing"