Pyra Labs Launched Blogspot on August 23, 1999

Pyra Labs launched a program called “Blogspot” in 1999 that would let people run their own blogs. The program was bought by Google in 2003, and changed to Blogger in 2006.What is most interesting about this tidbit will be that I don’t mention it in the Podcast. It was brought to my attention after the weekend recordings were made. Nonetheless, it is what brought us to a Social Network world of today and needed to be talked about.

Foundation of Pray Labs

Pyra Labs Chart History

Type of business	Subsidiary
Founded	January 1, 1999; 23 years ago
Headquarters	San Francisco, CA ,  United States
Owner	Google
Products	Blogger
URL	pyra.com
Current status	Offline, February 17th, 2003

Pyra was co-founded by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. The company's first product, also named "Pyra", was a web application which would combine a project manager, contact manager, and to-do list. Their coder Jack Dorsey altered an ftp program to work on a webpage, enabling online users to upload to a webpage web-log. In 1999, while still in beta, the rudiments of Pyra were repurposed into an in-house tool which became Blogger. The service was made available to the public in August 1999. Much of this coding was done by Paul Bausch and Matthew Haughey.

Initially, Blogger was completely free of charge and there was no revenue model. In January 2001, Pyra asked Blogger users for donations to buy a new server. When the company's seed money dried up around the same time, the employees continued without pay for weeks or, in some cases, months; but this could not last, and eventually Williams faced a mass walk-out by everyone including co-founder Hourihan. Williams ran the company virtually alone until he was able to secure an investment by Trellix after its founder Dan Bricklin became aware of Pyra's situation. Eventually advertising-supported Blogspot and Blogger Pro emerged.

In 2002, Blogger was completely re-written in order to license it to other companies, the first of which was Globo.com of Brazil.

On 17th, February, 2003, Pyra was acquired by Google.