Many of us remember with some nostalgia those years when the web was full of colors, gifs, marquee texts and many other details typical of the times when the explosive growth of the Internet began.
A new Facebook project seeks to rescue part of that essence, through a platform to create collages online, with a design proposal that is faithful to the 90s web pages.
It is about e.gg, a platform created by Facebook’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) team, which is made up of a small group of developers who, under the auspices of the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg, are dedicated to creating new experiences and / or different from those marked in the main roadmap of that social network and its associated services.
What this service offers is a blank canvas, which can be used to create collages or static pages (similar to a landing page), which can be designed and edited by loading content such as texts, static images and GIFs from your app, which at the moment it is only announced for iOS.
The aesthetics presented by this proposal is very faithful to that which characterized many web pages in its time, such as those sites hosted in Geocities, usually created using Office or the first versions of Dreamweaver.
Extract of the presentation of the project, faithful to the aesthetics described
Despite appealing to nostalgia with this tribute to those small websites of yesteryear, in the presentation of e.gg its developers comment that the design presented only responds to that they found it fun to do it. In passing they clarified that the intention of this project is not to create a platform focused on those memories, as they seek to enable a space for all kinds of content and visual styles.
In any case, the guide to the pages of this era of the Internet is justified in the spirit that was behind them: the strong sense of originality and belonging that falls on its creators.
The objective of this platform is to create a space in which creative exploration can be unleashed, facilitating freedom of expression and positive interactions.
Under the principle that creativity has its own lonely reward, the content generated and shared through this platform will not have space for comments or any system for counting likes or something similar. In this way, it seeks to strengthen the creation of experimental content, following a logic opposite to the current canon of social networks.
Users of e.gg when registering will have a username that defines the URL of their profile. As a suffix, separated by a period, the name of each created canvas will be added to this address, which can be freely shared on the web, without registering on the platform or downloading an app to view it.
The elements that make up the collages created on a canvas of e.gg can also be used by other members of the platform. The dynamics are similar to that of a reblogged on Tumblr. In fact, from the internal panel of the application you can follow other users, to continue discovering new creations.
In this way, e.gg is emerging as an alternative to create presentation microsites, digital posters, postcards, lists, galleries and whatever other content is supported.
The project is not yet open to the public. Meanwhile, a registration form is available to join the waiting list to access the iOS app.
You can find some examples of the sites that can be created and more details about e.gg on their website.
