aka-aki

» see aka-aki.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

aka-aki had a simple, almost romantic idea. your phone would notice other aka-aki users near you over bluetooth, within about twenty meters, and tell you who they were and what you had in common. two strangers on the same street corner could find out they liked the same band. i never used it, and the honest reason is arithmetic. the whole thing needed other aka-aki users physically close to you, and in ankara around 2009 there were none.

it came out of berlin, first shown off in 2007 and running properly by 2008. it was a java app on the feature phones of the time, back before the iphone had swallowed everything. techcrunch wrote it up as the future of mobile social. more than 700,000 people registered over its life, which sounds like a lot until you spread it thin across a whole continent and realize how rarely two of them stood in the same place at the same time.

the founders shut it off on the first of july 2012, after four years. they had already tried a second act, a location game called liftloft, and that had folded the autumn before. the phrase everyone used afterward was ahead of its time, which is the polite way of saying it was right about the idea and early about the hardware. proximity social only worked once everyone had a gps smartphone in their pocket, and by then the small berlin team was already gone.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

the bluetooth trick was clever and doomed in the same breath. bluetooth scanning drained your battery and only reached across a room, so the network was only alive where it was already dense. a big city with a scene might get there. a mid-size turkish city never would. it was a chicken-and-egg problem wearing a nice interface, and no amount of design fixed the fact that you needed a crowd to make the crowd worth joining.

~ what came after ~

the idea did not die, it just waited for better parts. foursquare and its check-ins, then later the quiet background presence of every dating app, all of it is aka-aki's notion done on gps instead of bluetooth. tinder is basically the same promise, people near you, made to work because by 2012 everyone finally carried the right radio. aka-aki guessed the destination and started walking before the road existed.

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