Trilulilu: watch, listen, pass on
The “alt” Youtube that died recently
Trilulilu is pronounced as [Treeh-loo-leeh-loo]
Sick of the current web? What if we truly took a dive into an alternative autochthonous site? A site which was perhaps too ambitious at its prime.
Proclaimed as 'The Youtube of Romania', Trilulilu was quite a special in the hearts of millions of the Romanians who accessed this platform throughout its 13 years runtime.
The front page from its early days
The irony makes it that the site shared more features with Newgrounds. The whole site revolved around user-generated content (i.e music, images, videos, etc.). A difference between it and Newgrounds was that Trilulilu allowed users to write articles. Another difference was the site's focus: Trilulilu was focused on generalized content while Newgrounds was based around more nerdy topics. But wait, there's more! It even had a friends and groups features similar to Facebook's.
The UI used for the music player
The features which Trilulilu offered
(imo, the coolest features were the RSS feed and also the Guestbook present on each profile)
You get the gist of it, the whole site was a glorified centralized social network. If I learned something from 'all-on-one shampoos' is to never trust these kinds of things.
What made this social network even more appealing was how it understood its target audience. The whole site was in Romanian, it included popular shows and music that everyone knew about at the time, so content-wise it was pretty good ( A division of the national television of Romania made a channel on it, it's the equivalent of ABC making a channel on Youtube).
The announcement talks about how 'TVR cultural makes its own channel on Trilulilu'
The blog advertising a new feature
Not to mention, posting photos on Facebook that appeal to an older generation.
It's not Facebook but Yahoo Messenger, something that Romanians often used back in the day
One of the things that piqued my interest was just how much the site has changed throughout the years, losing many of its features in order to adapt with the modern internet.
You can clearly notice the UI differences,the loss of green truly makes it look emptier.
Downfall
Back in the day, Trilulilu was mostly used for listening to music which prompted the founders to make something new. They created Zonga which gained some popularity. The app was mostly advertised on Trilulilu. Unfortunately the site went down a few years back, predicting what could be the grim future of Trilulilu.
So what happened to this Romanian behemoth? Some speculate that ever since the Romanian Youtube arrived, Trilulilu has lots most of its userbase. Yet, it still survived until its archive vanished as the site has been sold in 2020 and is currently being turned into a kids platform. Furthermore, its former users posted angry comments on the site's Facebook page about losing videos and songs, I can share the sentiment. If by any chance a former Trilulilu user is currently reading this article, you can always check this for archived songs.
A lesson to be learned from this is that you shouldn't rely on such platforms to archive your important memories. Anyone can pull the plug albeit not in such a manner if you do know the person who hosts said site. In most cases you WILL NOT know the person or people who host behemoths like Youtube and such. In conclusion, please keep your data safe. If things seem too good to be true, then they really are like that. Otherwise, explore and discover the old web through other people or archive.org .
