Tripod.com

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

**Tripod**
URL	http://www.tripod.com/
Commercial?	Mixed
Type of site	Free web hosting service
Registration	Yes
Owner	Lycos
Created by	Brett Hershey, Bo Peabody and Dick Sabot

Tripod.com is a webhosting service owned by Lycos. It offers a variety of free and paid webhosting services, including 20 megabytes of web space and the ability to run Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts in Perl. In addition to basic hosting, Tripod also offers a blogging tool, a photo album and manager, and the Trellix SiteBuilder for WYSIWYG page editing.

Tripod.com was founded in 1992 by three members of the Williams College community (hence, Tripod): Brett Hershey, Bo Peabody and Dick Sabot and was headquartered in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its initial target audience was college students transitioning to the real world. The site was originally intended to be an information and help site, but staff programmers added interactive features, including an HTML résumé builder and a simple homepage builder. Over time, the homepage builder became the dominant feature of the site and Tripod's content shifted from a focus on young adults to content focused on webpage creation. In 1998, the privately held, venture backed company was bought out by Lycos and its staff was transitioned to the Lycos headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts.

In addition to its free service, Tripod also offers a variety of for-pay services including additional disk space, a shopping cart, domain names, web and POP/IMAP email, and other features. Tripod uses a product created by Dan Bricklin called Trellix sitebuilder for website creation which was bought by Interland and is now owned by web.com.

Shortly after being acquired by Lycos, Tripod was put in charge of Angelfire.com, a competing homepage building site which had been picked up by Lycos as part of their acquisition of WhoWhere. Over time, the two sites have gradually merged to run the same software and have similar feature sets and pricing plans. Where Tripod is targeted at a college-age audience and older, Angelfire skews somewhat younger. However, people of all ages use both properties. Tripod also subsequently "acquired" Lycos's HtmlGear service which provides guestbooks, polls, and other website add-ons.