E.gg Is A Tribute To The Exploratory Spirit Of The Early Internet

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E.gg is the latest app developed by the Facebook NPE team. It is a new experimental platform that celebrates the early days of the Internet.

Welcome to E.gg, “an experimental new platform for weird and wonderful expressions of who you are and what you love.”

Under the banner “Free your Creativity,” this new app from Facebook’s NPE team is a nostalgic call to bring back “the raw and exploratory spirit that was so emblematic of The Early Internet.”

Announced by Jason Toff – Director of Product Management at Facebook – on Twitter, the experimental app was then confirmed by a Facebook spokesperson: “This is a small, early experiment by the NPE Team. It’s available to people who want to help us test it via the waitlist.”

New! Introducing https://t.co/q199YM7REf, an experimental new platform for weird and wonderful expressions of who you are and what you love pic.twitter.com/kQldJeXB6h
— Jason Toff (@jasontoff) July 28, 2020

E.gg is not a video app. It is not a new TikTok competitor. In fact, it is like nothing else on the web today.

On E.gg, you create canvases — free-form mixed media collages/pages that let you express anything from your favorite films/albums/novels to a collage of succulent pics to, say, an about page for an app. It lets you bring together content such as images, GIFs, and text that can be freely positioned and sized within canvases.

Toff explained: “E.gg lets you create and share ‘canvases’—free form, collage-y pages with whatever you want on them. E.gg was inspired by the raw and exploratory spirit of the early Interwebz. We stopped short of auto-playing MIDIs (for now), but the feeling should be familiar.”

Canvasses are created within the E.gg app but they can be viewed and shared across the web via personalized e.gg URLs, with no logins or downloads required. Despite it being a Facebook app, there are no likes or comments possible on canvasses. Toff explained that such metrics were seen as limitations to creative exploration.

The about page talks about the early days of the web as an inspiration for E.gg: “We started working on E.gg after a few of us found ourselves missing a certain raw and exploratory spirit that was so emblematic of ‘The Early Internet.’ Sure, it was clumsy to use—dangerous at times, even—but in that awkward mess was a weird and enlivening bazaar of manically-blinking GIFs, passionate guestbook entries and personal webpages made by people who cared deeply about a niche interest of theirs and wanted simply to carve out their own digital space.”

The guiding principles behind E.gg are: