Ancient Web: WebNeko Still Lets a Tiny Cat Chase Your Mouse

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

There is a tiny cat on WebNeko whose entire job is to chase your mouse pointer, and this is sufficient justification for the page continuing to exist.

Visit WebNeko

The page calls the current incarnation "It's Neko! (3.0)." Move the pointer and the sprite follows it around the browser window. You can add another Neko, try a cat-herding variation, or swap the default cat for contributed skins ranging from black, gray and calico cats to robots, rainbows, socks and stranger interpretations.

Nothing about this needs an account. There is no feed, progression system or engagement loop. The reward is that a little pixel animal runs toward the cursor.

More importantly for Web archaeology, the page still preserves the copy-and-paste culture that once made small browser toys spread from homepage to homepage. Its instructions show a simple JavaScript embed and explain how visitors could put Neko onto their own sites.

Then the historical sediment gets even better.

Xanga gets instructions; MySpace gets blamed

WebNeko includes specific instructions for using the cat on Xanga. It also warns that MySpace and some other services block the <script> tag, preventing users from embedding Neko there.

That tiny compatibility note preserves an entire phase of the social Web. Personal publishing was moving from independent pages toward hosted profile services, but people still expected to decorate those profiles with code, counters, music, animated cursors and little creatures that served absolutely no business purpose.

The site says the Neko concept and artwork passed through many forms of software and traces its first incarnation back to X Window System programs. WebNeko is therefore less an invention than another migration of a persistent desktop toy into the browser.

The contributed skins are part of the story too. Once a simple toy was easy to copy and modify, users did what users always do: changed the graphics, made themed versions and passed them around.

A cat can chase a mouse. That is enough.

Go bother the cat at WebNeko

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.