It's the year 2000. The dot-com bubble has just burst with a loud bang when two smart young entrepreneurs decide to act countercyclically and invest in a promising Internet domain with fresh venture capital from the Valley: 11freunde.de.
No, nonsense aside. In May 2000, Reinaldo Coddou and I had just launched the first issue of our football culture magazine “11Freunde” and we absolutely needed a homepage to direct our hopefully numerous subscribers to us. So the colleague designed an attractive green soccer field with a simulated line-up, under the numbers of which were the numerous offers from our prosperous specialist publisher. Of course, this also included our hotline, which was open 24 hours a day and was actually Reinaldo's private number, on which subscribers, wide awake, would call, even at night, to announce changes to the shipping address.
At some point we wanted to get into the tough news business and copied the homepage of our partner magazine “Intro”. We defaced our beautifully designed logo with a large “11” and a small “Friends”, a weighting that many years later made Jean-Marie Pfaff praise: “I think the “11” is simply a great magazine!” In those years The long-legendary readers' forum was also created, in which a colorful group of birds of paradise, eccentrics, know-it-alls, troublemakers and humor bombs gathered within a few months - and that long before Twitter existed. The editorial team saw this group as a kind of annoying web host, quickly developed a life of its own and impressed with special humor such as the “Rewriting of Player Names” competition (example: “I can't paint Mom”. Solution: “Malik Fathi”). The rise of Facebook ensured that the energetic bickering about articles and authors shifted to Zuckerberg's platform. Regrettable.
Now the phase began in which we believed that we could keep up with the rapid pace of the digital zeitgeist through various revisions of the site, so-called soft launches and half-hearted revisions. With the success that our site soon appeared like an advertising paper from the seventies and had loading times like a Roman galley in “Asterix in Corsica”. A special revolution was slowly making its way to this end. Dirk Gieselmann invented the live ticker, more precisely the groundbreaking idea of not only reporting goals, fouls and pack formations in the real-time accompaniment of the game, but also taking excursions into literature, pop music, eroticism and politics. This meta level was so well received that today hardly any live ticker can do without a funny note - a terrible legacy from Dirk Gieselmann, who, like many others, was extensively corrupted by the readership, including as “Würg Dieselrein”. Rarely laughed so much.
While the so-called homepage used to be seen as a shop window in which readers could look at what interested them, from now on it is social media that takes over this job. Which quickly leads to 11Freunde also being on Facebook, Twitter, Youp... er, YouTube and other social media and also, well, recording some surprising successes. For example, the so-called “theme breakfast”, where two uncoiffed and often carelessly dressed young editors chat about the expected topics of the football day on a sofa. A concept that is particularly popular with student users who are happy to skip one or two introductory seminars to listen to their colleagues' presentations and who especially fill up the comments column when one of the two editors unexpectedly went to the hairdresser.
But then, in the year of our Lord 2020, two decades after the first homepage, digital modernity seemed to have arrived with us. The homepage was fresh, the use was fairly intuitive and the design was at least quarter-modern. And even the loading times seemed rapid, which was particularly beneficial for the thoroughly renovated live ticker.
Four years later the next attempt - and this time the site is, we are quite sure, almost completely finished! We hope you enjoy trying it out and look forward to any comments, critical or euphoric.
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