ReadWrite celebrates its 10th anniversary on Saturday, April 20, 2013. For the occasion, we're running a series of articles  looking back—and looking forward.

Ten years ago, many of ReadWrite's first readers first viewed the site on a CRT display attached to a desktop with a wired Ethernet connection, or via a clunky laptop perched across their knees near an early Wi-Fi router. The Web, then roughly a decade old, was still largely static and flat, excepting the occasional Java applet or Flash animation.

Unsurprisingly, ReadWrite's original design was itself also sort of static and flat, just like the rest of the then-nascent blogosphere. But the same way today's technology now allows our readers to pull up our posts and videos on hi-res tablets or smartphones with 4G wireless data connections, so has ReadWrite's design also evolved in line with changing Web aesthetics and the needs of our diverse audience of developers and technophiles.

What follows is a recap of how ReadWrite's design has evolved along with the Web through the years, via screenshots courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. (You can also check out a more personal tour ReadWrite founder Richard MacManus authored last year for our ninth anniversary.) Click on any of the images for a larger version.

Of course, ReadWrite's not done evolving. Check back regularly to catch the latest chapter in ReadWrite's visual design.

Year One: 2003, Part 1

Richard started his blog using a borrowed template from Dave Winer's Radio Userland, an early blogging service. Here's what a page from August 2003 looked like:

Year One: 2003, Part 2 

Richard soon followed up with a template of his own design—one that opted for a, shall we say, particular shade of institutional green. That design debuted in September 2003 and looked like this:

Year Two: 2004

By the following year, ReadWrite had added a right-hand column and a header bar that was, if anything, even greener than the previous design. Richard got top billing as producer, arranger, composer and designer of the site—fittingly, as it was still a one-man show at that point: 

Year Three: 2005

This design featured the first graphic element in the site's header—a thumbnail image of a work by conceptual artist John Baldessari, from his exhibition READ/WRITE/THINK/DREAM. Which, oddly enough, was not the inspiration behind ReadWrite's name (a story Richard tells here). The artwork suggests a rather literal interpretation of the "Write" portion—it basically consists of giant pencils.

Year Four: 2006

This design added the yin-yang symbol that would grace the site's header for the next five or so years, eliminated the left-hand column and introduced the red-and-white theme that has been a ReadWrite hallmark ever since.

Year Five: 2007

A further iteration of the previous template doubled down on the red theme and gave prominent placement to the site's sponsors in the right-hand column.

Year Six: 2008

A redesigned logo eliminated the slash between "Read" and "Write," while the design shrank down the text to a narrower left-hand column to make room for a central "Popular Posts" section.

Years Seven & Eight: 2009-2010

Mostly cosmetic changes included the introduction of share buttons in the header and a "Featured Posts" section following the first item on the page:

Year Nine: 2011

Additional minor tweaks expanded the "top story" across what had been a middle column and revised and enlarged the "featured posts" images and headlines.

Year Ten: 2012

Following the site's acquisition by Say Media, a full redesign introduced a much more visually oriented and editorially curated front page of top posts, followed by a reverse chronological listing of recent posts.

Year Eleven: 2013

Stay tuned — our next redesign is on its way.

Turns out the world hadn't quite heard the last of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist and Reddit co-founder who killed himself in January. The makers of an unreleased documentary about the fight over the open Internet, War for the Web, have just released a snippet of unedited footage from what they call "the last video interview with Aaron Swartz." It's embedded below.

We don't have any way to independently verify the filmmakers' claim to Swartz's "last" video interview (it was filmed on July 10, 2012). And near as I can tell, the portion of the interview released so far — this clip is about eight minutes long, whereas the entire thing runs "several hours," according to the film's PR rep — doesn't appear to break much new ground.

In particular, it doesn't even raise the federal prosecution of Swartz for surreptitiously downloading — the feds termed it "stealing" — four million academic articles from an academic database called JSTOR, an overzealous pursuit that some critics believe contributed to Swartz's suicide. Unsurprisingly, the interview doesn't touch on Swartz's long battle with depression, either.

But it's still an engaging eight-minute conversation with a handsome and articulate activist who now looms as large — if not larger — in death as he did in life. The best part comes at around 5:00 in the interview, where Swartz waxes philosophical on the threat that copyright maximalism, as embodied in bills like SOPA and the ongoing war against digital piracy, poses to creativity and innovation.

See for yourself.

Update, 9:31am PT: Turns out this video is an eight-minute excerpt of a much longer interview, a fact that wasn't clear from the information the filmmakers' representative initially provided us. I've updated the item throughout to make that clear.

Step into the Wayback Machine for a moment. How did we ever catch up with old friends, check our location, track professional contacts, publish our thoughts for others to read, and look at cat pictures before the Internet?

Oh, right.

(Click the image for a larger version.)

Cartoon produced by John Atkinson / Wrong Hands

Lede image via Shutterstock

Andrew Mason finally found out that running the controversial deals site Groupon was no bargain. Mason, who founded the company, was unceremoniously ousted as CEO earlier on Thursday, following a rotten earnings report on Wednesday that capped more than a year of problematic performance and clashes with the SEC at the once-hot startup.

Mason bluntly told Groupon employees in a statement he apparently made public: "I was fired today. If you're wondering why... you haven't been paying attention." (The text of that statement — notable for its honesty, self-effacing humor and a faint echo of Conan O'Brien's announcement following his defenestration from the Tonight Show  — follows below.)

Mason's departure has been the subject of speculation and outright investor hostility for some time. Groupon shares, which had fallen almost 80% since the company's $20-a-share IPO in 2011, jumped roughly 8% in after-hours trading on the news of his ousting. A couple of hours later, the stock's bounce had evened out to roughly a 4% increase, up 16 cents to $4.68.

The Groupon board named the company's executive chairman Eric Lefkofsky and vice chairman Ted Leonsis as interim co-CEOs, and said it has already started looking for a new permanent CEO. For the moment, though, that leaves Groupon in the hands of a former carpet salesman turned billionaire entrepreneur and the former vice chairman of AOL. Hard to see what could go wrong there.

How The Deal Went Sour

Founded in 2008, Groupon went public with a bang three years later in the company of other hot tech startups such as LinkedIn and Skype. Fevered trading on its first day as a public company pushed Groupon's market valuation to $16.7 billion — seemingly justifying the company's decision a year earlier to spurn a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google.

(See also: Groupon Stock Goes On Fire Sale, But What Went So Wrong?)

Groupon's underlying issues, however, predated its IPO. In a tactic reminiscent of the dot-com bubble, the company downplayed its actual reported income and instead emphasized a made-up figure called ACSOI, or "adjusted consolidated segment operating income" that excluded a few costs — inconsequential things, really. Like marketing expenses. But some stick-in-the-muds insisted on pointing out that since Groupon's deals machine actually leaned rather heavily on, y'know, marketing — those inescapable daily-deal emails didn't write themselves — the company's insistence on ACSOI was just a tad problematic. Eventually, the SEC agreed, and its pointed questions eventually forced Groupon to drop the whole thing.

There were other issues, of course. Like the way Groupon decided to spend almost 85% of all the venture capital it had raised — the princely sum of $941.7 million, in other words — not to build up its business, but to cash out founders and other early backers. Or the way it so many people kept concluding that its business model strongly resembled a Ponzi scheme.

Groupon Adapts — Or Maladapts

Over the past year, Groupon has struggled to adjust to its diminished expectations. In a tacit acknowledgement that the daily-deals space was looking a bit overfished, the company de-emphasized deals on services such as yoga sessions and spa treatments and instead expanded into offering deeply discounted offers on actual products — an even lower-margin business that contributed to the company's earnings misses in both the third and fourth quarters.

Likewise, Groupon aimed to take on the likes of Square by offering its participating merchants a new electronic payment system, another initiative that would have taken more time than Mason had to produce a real return of any kind.

Which leaves Messrs. Lefkofsky and Leonsis with a couple of awkward questions. Can they find anyone to run this ongoing mess of a company? And why would anyone want to?

Here's Mason's statement:

(This is for Groupon employees, but I'm posting it publicly since it will leak anyway)

People of Groupon,

After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you're wondering why... you haven't been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that's hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.

You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I'm getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we've shared over the last few months, and I've never seen you working together more effectively as a global company - it's time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.

For those who are concerned about me, please don't be - I love Groupon, and I'm terribly proud of what we've created. I'm OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I'll now take some time to decompress (FYI I'm looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I'll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.

If there's one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what's best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness - don't waste the opportunity!

I will miss you terribly.

Love,
Andrew

Lead image via Flickr user TechCrunch, CC 2.0

Big Data is, well, big these days. (Maybe too big for its own good.) So it should surprise exactly no one that Red Hat, itself a big open-source enterprise software and services company, wants to wear the Big Data hat, too. Which is exactly what it announced in an hour-long Webcast on Wednesday.

So, terrific. Red Hat is now a Big Data company – at least, that is, if you believe Red Hat. What does that mean, exactly? Surprisingly little.

Let's put it this way: Red Hat's big news was that it is open-sourcing its storage plug-in for Hadoop, a popular open-source software framework that supports both distributed data and distributed applications. (Simpler explanation: Hadoop makes it possible to run data-intensive applications physically near the data itself, which greatly speeds things up because it's no longer necessary to shuttle great piles of data across a network.)

As a step toward transforming Red Hat's own storage file system into a "fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system for big data environments," as the company puts it, this is doubtless noteworthy. As something concrete on which enterprise customers can, uh, hang their hat, it leaves a lot to be filled in later.

That wouldn't be a problem if Red Hat had provided other noteworthy details, such as a road map for its development of what it calls an "open hybrid cloud." It's a nifty enough idea, essentially amounting to a data environment that would help business move their applications from in-house servers to those offered by cloud providers such as Amazon's Web Services unit without having to rewrite them.

But while Ranga Rangachari, Red Hat's vice president of storage, talked up the open hybrid cloud and the "robust network" of partners Red Hat plans to work with to make it a reality, he had nothing to say about time frames or even the identities of its partners. "Just stay tuned as we come up with more definite dates and times and start – we'll absolutely make those partners available," Rangachari pleaded at the end of the event.

Maybe Red Hat is saving the details for the next roundup.

(See also Big Data: Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst Looks 20 Years Into The Future)

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Apparently it's not enough being a former Facebook marketing manager, owner of your own self consciously hip-yet-somehow-bottom-feeding media company, executive producer of the Bravo realityfest dot-bomb Silicon Valley, and social-media manners maven. Oh, right, and Mark Zuckerberg's sister.

So the notoriously shy and retiring Randi Zuckerberg, who has never traded on her better-known billionaire brother's success and influence to further her own ambitions, has decided to grace the world with what the Associated Press describes as a "memoir/lifestyle book" about her time at Facebook. Titled, naturally, Dot Complicated, which coincidentally is also what the demure Ms. Z calls her invitation-only "modern lifestyle newsletter." About which a little more in a moment.

A Good Zuckraking

What's RZ going to tell us? HarperCollins tells us she'll relate her "entrepreneurial journey" through her time at Facebook and beyond. You can probably count on her to give a whitewashed version of her parting of the ways with Facebook, which so far sounds pretty spicy. (Ms. Zuck herself has previously described herself at the time as being "a little irresponsible with my creativity" and going "a little rogue.")

You'll also doubtless be fascinated to learn that RZ'berg will also enlighten the masses on – believe it or not – "the multifaceted complications of our socially transparent world today, including issues of privacy, social identity, authenticity, crowd sourcing and the future of social change." Surely the ethics and human decency of photo sharing deserves its own chapter.

(See also Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, Please Lecture Us About 'Human Decency')

But wait, that's not all! Dot Complicated will also come as an enhanced e-book with "innovative and engaging interactive components," including a "platform for crowd sourced stories and social media integration" – whatever that is. Who wants to wager that Ms. Zuck will herself skillfully navigate the multifaceted complications of our socially transparent world by steering entirely clear of any controversies involving privacy, social identity, authenticity, crowd sourcing and the future of social change?

The divine Ms. Z had this to say for herself in the HarperCollins press release:

Technology has changed virtually every part of our lives, resulting in a modern, digital society that feels a lot like the wild, wild west. I am thrilled to be working with HarperCollins to share some of my own crazy experiences on the front lines of social media, and to inspire people of all ages to embrace technology, as well as the new set of social norms that come along with it.

As for what to expect from the "lifestyle" parts of the book, you can't do better than to sample Z's Dot Complicated newsletter and blog. (Invites to the newsletter are apparently pretty easy to come by, as I had no trouble acquiring one – though you never know when the velvet rope will go up.) The blog, for instance, currently features:

• Helpful business tips such as "Today, tech companies need to go to crazy extremes to stay 'hip' and recruit top talent" (from a post about tech-firm Harlem Shake videos that completely coincidentally leads off with two clips from the textbook-rental startup Chegg where ArrZee's husband works)
• Reviews of "ridiculous dating apps," including one that purports to rate your bedroom performance via smartphone motion/sound sensors and a timer
• Shout-outs to RandiZ's famous friends

But even a talent as unassuming as Randi Zuckerberg can't be confined to one book. She'll also publish a children's picture book simultaneously with Dot Complicated, about which she and HarperCollins had virtually nothing else to say. If you needed a new reason to fear for the next generation, you're apparently in luck.

Both books are due out in the fall. At least you have plenty of time to brace yourself.

Photo via Flickr user nrkbeta.no under CC 2.0 license.