WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS WEBSITE (VOZO.COM)

Does anyone know about this website? I can't be the only one, but this is really an odd fucking thing I found. While I was searching on an old 90's-2000s websites page around 4 years ago, I found a random website grouping hosted by a probably defunct website hosting company/some other stuff called Frogsmart. Its name is Vozo.com, it's apparently from 2000 and uses regular http which makes it an "unsafe connection". This all feels like an ARG but this site is confirmedly old and there are NO posts talking about it on any corner of the internet I could find. I definitely wasn't the first to find this, but I will most likely be the first one to talk about this website publicly, and trust me, there is a LOT to talk about here and a lot of weird history. If anyone has any more info on this website/company please contact me using my e-mail or Discord as I really want to get to the bottom of this.

I'll start by talking about the little I know about the company behind this, Frogsmart. And it is LITTLE, very little. About Frogsmart, all I know is that it already existed or was founded between 2002 and 2003 and might even still be up as the Frogmart website says Copyright 2024. Its founder is an ambitious and creative man named David Zelin. Not much is known about him, just that he studied engineering at Tufts University in Greater Boston and created 3 websites after this: One called "Zorp", in 2008 an almost exact clone of Vozo named "Zoby" and in 2012, "Domains for Sale", although he seems to be most proud of Vozo and Frogsmart.

Frogsmart resides in Boston, Massachusetts and can be described as an Innovator/Web hosting company, it's all pretty unconventional and I still don't fully understand how it works, but he and his pretty small staff of (can't confirm) less than 20 people offer problem solutions for a fee, although it is not considered, at least by them, to be "specialist" help. In the problem solving section, David prides himself in his "thinking outside the box" and considers himself a kind of savant, as well as implying his strong involvement with this side of the company, with all problems probably passing through him first. In the same page, he states that he doesn't consider himself a "people-person" and says that not all problems can be solved with their level of resources. The page for submitting your problems is still up, although I have no idea where it goes or if the company is even up still, but I might try later on and update you all on it.

Now, I'll talk about the main page of the website, which just makes me more confused. The frog/insect theme of the website seems to come from an excerpt of a sci-fi novel called "Time Enough for Love", wherein the author says that humans are jack of all trades and that specialization is for insects, which the founder of Frogsmart seemed to really resonate with. He made the frog Vozo's and, by extension, Frogsmart's symbol because, in his own words, "A frog really doesn't care what finely honed skills an insect has. He catches them using what he has at hand: legs and tongue. Frogsmart.com works like this. We draw from what we know about different specialities to come up with ways your business can adapt.". I can't actually state that this is really the case as the section where this is from was created in 2007, as opposed to the site itself which was created in 2000, but the insect and frog themes are very much present in the site's visual identity.

Vozo seems to be an aggregator of websites hosted by Frogsmart as well as other random websites related to its many subjects. It honestly feels more like a personal website than a business one, and that is pretty damn awesome to me and gives it so much personality. There are sections on Pokemon and even one where David himself sells Magic: The Gathering cards under a specialized FROGSMART e-mail address, although most of the links are dead and some are even up for sale on his last project Domainsforsale. There are old ads linking to (mostly) dead websites that cycle once in a while for many things, 3d Frogsmart art as well as ASCII art surprisingly and even a web button for Vozo (which I had to include in my website). Okay we need to talk about the elephant in the room 9/11 why is there a fucking 9/11 button omfg, the button links to a dead website (up for sale on Domainsforsale) called skyjacked.com which can luckily be seen in the Wayback Machine. It looks as follows: