For theglobe.com, Another Turn for the Worse

When it comes time to write about the star-crossed romance of Wall Street and the Internet, the story of theglobe.com could fill a book.

Unfortunately for the company, the epilogue is fast approaching.

theglobe.com, once famous for making the largest percentage gain by any stock on its first day of trading following an initial public offering , is scheduled to shut down its flagship Web site at 9 a.m. EDT Wednesday.

The company, which earlier this month said it was cutting 60 jobs, or nearly half its staff, isn't completely disappearing -- yet. It will continue to operate its game-related sites with a scaled-back staff, the company says, while "aggressively seeking business combination or asset sale opportunities" for the sites, including Happy Puppy and Kids Domain.

Ball of Confusion theglobe.com shares approaching zero

The stock, which once floated high atop a frothy Nasdaq at a price of $97 a share, now trades over-the-counter on the pink sheets. It last changed hands at 7 cents a share, a decline of 99.9% or so. A wise guy might theorize that the whole darn company could be bought for about $97 on eBay.

Past and Prologue

The funny thing is that people saw this untimely end coming three years ago, even before the company went public. The very first story that TheStreet.com wrote about theglobe.com, a story published two months before the landmark IPO, was rife with skepticism. For example, take this quote from online community maven Howard Rheingold. "The Internet business is a business of fads," Rheingold told TheStreet.com. "Community is the latest. No one knows if there really is a business there. It is not old enough for anyone to know."

Incredulity continued on Nov. 13, 1998, the occasion of theglobe.com's first-day-of-trading rocket launch. "These prices are insane. We're in Crazy Eddie land," said portfolio manager Robert Mohn.

And yet theglobe.com soldiered on, even as its stock drifted slowly, slowly downward. Of course there was money to be made. After all, Yahoo! (YHOO Quote - Cramer on YHOO - Stock Picks) announced only two months later than it was buying GeoCities, which hosted free Web pages just like theglobe.com, for $3.56 billion in stock. That's $3.56 billion! No wonder at the time people thought theglobe.com and fellow community site xoom.com were up for grabs.

Yahoo! wasn't a dumb company. If GeoCities was valued at more than a third world country's economy, theglobe.com had to be worth some fraction of that.

Doorman Building

Unfortunately, we learned later, it was a very small fraction. Xoom.com got merged into NBC Internet, only recently folded back into parent company General Electric (GE Quote - Cramer on GE - Stock Picks) after an ill-advised experiment in independence for NBC's Internet properties -- in retrospect, something along the lines of letting an 8-year-old move into his own apartment. And theglobe.com? Well, we know about theglobe.com. It got delisted from the Nasdaq in April.

Somewhere between the IPO and the delisting, theglobe.com suffered from the usual cliches -- the firings, the belt-tightening, the departure of the founders, and the new team that came in vowing to turn things around and find that elusive path to profitability.

But now, like so many other Web sites, theglobe.com appears to be disappearing without a trace, without a proper funeral, mourned by few people other than ex-employees looking around for their next job, either regretting or remembering fondly the late nights they spent at the office in their attempt to change the world.

A quick search of Usenet newsgroups for theglobe.com eulogists found little. One member warned that his nude photos of Phoebe Cates were about to go offline. Another announced that he'd already moved his gay erotic fiction to Lycos's Angelfire site.

In a goodbye email, theglobe.com thanked its members "for your patronage and for the incredible support over the years."

Thank you guys, too. On behalf of Phoebe Cates fans everywhere, I'm sure we'll all miss you.