sphone.newmail.ru was the site of the "SPhone Telephone Directory" program, which distributed telephone databases for Nizhny Novgorod and the surrounding region. As the home page reported, the program contained databases of apartments and organizations — "more than 350,000 subscribers" — a pager database for Nizhny Novgorod, telephone codes for the regional and district centers of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, as well as databases for the telephones of Dzerzhinsk, Arzamas, Zavolzhye and Pavlovo[1]. The site lived on the free hosting service newmail.ru; the notice at the bottom of the page — "Copyright © SPhone 1998-2002" — places the work on the directory in the late 1990s[2]. The earliest snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated 25 May 2002[1], the latest — 10 August 2010[4].

What the program could do

SPhone's main distinction from a printed directory was search by partial data. As the home page put it, this was "a telephone directory with a large number of search options," and gave as an example: "you can search for a phone number if you remember only the third and fifth digits, or an apartment, knowing only that its number is greater than 24"[1]. Besides searching the ready-made databases, the program, according to the description on the same page, allowed users to "create and edit databases in address-book mode"[1]. A separate section of the site, "Creating databases," was devoted to building one's own databases[1].

What the site looked like

In 2002 the menu on the left was split into two blocks. The first, "SPhone," led to the pages "About the program," "History," "Creating databases," "Download," "Sending SMS messages" and "Universal calculator." The second, "Other programs," listed other works by the same author: ColViewer, AutorunConstructor, AntShell, Crusher, Tamagochi, Politics2. A separate item, outside the software theme, was the page "Paintings by Ivan Vorozheikin"[1].

By October 2003 the page title had come to name the city directly — "SPhone Telephone Directory - Nizhny Novgorod" — and the menu had grown. The earlier sections were joined by "News," "Software list," "For authors," "Hardware prices," "Prices for mobile and cordless phones" and "Links"; the item about sending SMS was shortened to "Send SMS," while "Paintings by Ivan Vorozheikin" stayed in place[2]. Neither a postal address nor a contact phone number was given on the home page in any of the surviving snapshots[1][2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site was listed in the directory of the nn.ru portal with the description "SPhone Telephone Directory. Nizhny Novgorod, Dzerzhinsk, Arzamas, Zavolzhye, Pavlovo," and in the surviving summaries of the Counter.nn.ru rating it corresponds to a score of 477 — details of the methodology and caveats about the figures are set out in our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. The site does not appear in the published results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004[5]. For the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s, this combination was typical: a directory program with local databases, a page on free hosting, and a line in a portal's catalog.

How it closed

Between 2003 and 2007 the site ceased to exist as a directory, but the address remained occupied. In the snapshot from 16 September 2007, the address opens onto a generated pseudo-scientific text, "Caesura as Stress," with an admission at the end: "The article was created based on materials from the site http://vesna.yandex.ru"; alongside it is a registration form for mailboxes in the domains pochta.ru, front.ru, hotbox.ru, land.ru, pochtamt.ru and rbcmail.ru[3]. The same text also appears in the last snapshot, from 10 August 2010, except that instead of the mail form, links to "Mail," "Jokes," "Photo links," "Jobs" and a mention of the QIP.ru hosting support service appeared at the bottom[4]. In other words, the vacated page on free hosting was taken over by an automatic placeholder unrelated to the telephone directory. In our data the domain is marked as non-existent; no snapshots after August 2010 have survived in the web archive[4].

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2010 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)