You know something is wrong when a company is better known for its aggressive tactics towards investors and media than it is for the services it provides. Overstock.com, which sells excess inventory online, went public in 2002 at $13 per share and today it trades for $12.45. But everyone is too afraid of its CEO to demand new management. AOL isn’t the only dial-up ISP still alive. Contrary to its name, NetZero hasn’t offered its services for free since 2001, when it began charging customers after a certain number of hours per month online (today only the first ten hours are free). It’s now owned by United Online, which owns other online properties including Classmates. Disney created a portal for its content, called Go.com, and once thought it was so valuable it spun it out to trade as a tracking stock. Much of the company’s content, including that of ESPN and ABC, is still hosted on the Go.com server but the portal idea was scrapped long ago, as was the tracking stock. Yes, we were also surprised to learn that Lycos is still around. It’s now owned by a Korean search firm and it still has the dog mascot but it’s not clear who uses it to find information on the web. The Excite portal not only still exists, it looks as if it still exists in exactly the same format it had ten years ago. It was acquired by Ask Jeeves, which was subsequently acquired by InterActive Corp., which has let the site languish. Evidently, the butler got laid off at some point and now it’s just Ask.com. Most web users have still never heard of this company, but they have it to thank for much of the content they consume online. Its shares are still way off its dot-com highs, but ten years later it has a market cap of $4.4 billion, something many bubble companies would only dream of. Online auctions are still happening, but our enthusiasm for them has faded since the heyday. Still, eBay trudges on. Over the years it made some smart moves – buying PayPal – and some not-so-smart ones – why Skype? – but it’s unmistakably a strong survivor ten years later. Ten years ago, Google was doing about 10 million searches per day. Today it does about 3 billion. Need we say more? Our health-care system hasn’t improved over the past decade but our ability to self-diagnose sure has. WebMD has not only survived, it has thrived as more pharmaceutical companies have turned to the web for advertising. Yes, Etoys.com survived. It went through bankruptcy and several owners over the years, but last year it logically landed in the stable hands of Amazon. During the dot-com boom, of course, it was once valued at an astronomical $8 billion. KB Toys bought most of its assets at bankruptcy auction in 2001 for $5 million before it, too, would eventually go bankrupt. The past ten years haven’t always been kind to Yahoo, but the search company is alive and well, even if it sometimes struggles to define its identity. The fashion retailer has survived, but barely. Despite the brand’s placement in Project Runway, investors have reason to worry as the recession takes its toll on consumer spending. Ten years ago, Bluefly shares traded for $105. Today they hover around $2. Online retail giant Amazon wasn’t immune to the bubble burst – its shares fell to a split-adjusted $8.07 in 2001 from a high of $107. But since then, its stock chart looks like the dream so many start-ups had at the turn of the century – a steady rise. Shares are back up to $120 and you can buy virtually anything you want from the site. Sure, it was better when the music was free. But the Feds would have none of it. Now owned by Best Buy, Napster is still big in the digital music space, but customers pay a subscription rate for access to streaming tunes. Few things epitomized the dot-com bubble quite like the sock puppet did. The timeline of the company goes something like this: launch, buy an ad during the Super Bowl for the sock puppet, liquidate. It went from IPO to bust in 268 days. The Pets.com domain is now owned by PetSmart. Note to self: Don’t launch a company if your primary customer base is late-night stoners. The company raised $250 million for a business that would deliver small-ticket items via bicycle to your home any time day or night for FREE. Not surprisingly, it lost mountains of money. It shut down in 2001 and one of its founders went on to work at Lehman Brothers (ouch). Who could have predicted that not only would the name-your-price travel site still be around ten years later, but that William Shatner would still be pitching it? E-government sure sounds boring, but what promise it had! It spent $60 million trying to create a portal for all things government. Unfortunately it was all caught on film, as it was the subject of a documentary called Startup.com. It sold off its assets in bankruptcy in 2001. Before there was Facebook, there was GeoCities. Unfortunately, Yahoo couldn’t see that. Created in 1995, GeoCities was a directory of information organized by neighborhood, city or area. Individuals, called “homesteaders” created pages for themselves and joined the communities they wanted. After GeoCities' successful IPO, Yahoo bought the company for $3.6 billion in 1999. Ten years later, Yahoo shut it down, effectively throwing its homesteaders out on the street. Sure, web radio seems trite now but back then it had a Wow Factor. Its 1998 IPO was priced at $18 and jumped to $63 on its first day. In 1999 Yahoo bought it for $5.7 billion and later discontinued some of its services. By comparison, Sirius is worth about $4 billion today. The high-tech fashion retail site blew through $188 million in less than a year before liquidating its assets for a mere $2 million. Yes, the company’s founders spent extravagant sums unnecessarily. But with an avatar salesperson creating a shopping experience using 3D and flash technology, Boo.com was just a few years ahead of its time. This one really needs no explanation. Money was so easy back then that a company that promised to emit smells over the Internet managed to raise $20 million and earn a partnership with Procter and Gamble. It closed in 2001 but some e-scent hopefuls are still operating the site today. See Flooz.com. Beenz=Flooz minus Whoopi. How did two 24-year-olds with an idea for a social networking site orchestrate an IPO that gained 606% on its first trading day? Easy, it was 1998. By 2000, the boys were forced out and by 2001, the shares had fallen by 95%. Today TheGlobe.com shares trade for $0.003 on the bulletin board but it’s merely an empty shell of a company. Sure, it sounded like a good idea: Order your vegetables, toilet paper, and ground beef online, have it delivered. But guess what? It costs too much. Webvan planned to spend $1 billion on warehouses, trucks, technology, and other infrastructure. After a high-flying IPO and a $1.2 billion acquisition of competitor HomeGrocer, Webvan ran out of money. Online grocery delivery has proven successful in local markets but on the national scale it’s still not possible. Here’s a business model for the ridiculousness of the times: Sell expensive electronics at inflated prices and offer 100% rebates. Make money on the people who never request their rebates. In early 2001, the site was the third most popular online retailer. Five months later, it was bankrupt, leaving customers with millions in unfilled rebates. With the namesake of the former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop, this site promised everything consumers would need to manage their health care online. At one point, with just $1.5 million in revenues, investors valued it at $1.3 billion. Shortly after, it was hit by shareholder lawsuits and allegations of unethical content deals. It went bankrupt in 2001 and the site now redirects to HealthCentral. What happened to Flooz.com? One word: Whoopi. Flooz wanted to become the Internet’s currency so it spent $30 million to have Whoopi Goldberg plug it in a high-profile ad campaign. In the end, people still wanted to spend dollars online and the company closed in 2001, leaving all outstanding Flooz credits worthless.