Apture

» see apture.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Apture is the rare dead product that most of the people who used it never knew they were using. It was a script a publisher dropped into a page. You highlighted a word inside an article, a small window opened over the top of it with a definition or a clip, and you stayed where you were. Nobody ever said they used Apture, because there was nothing to sign up for and no logo to remember.

The company was formed in San Francisco in July 2007. Tristan Harris was the chief executive. Can Sar wrote the technology and Jesse Young ran the engineering side, and in March 2009 they raised 4.1 million dollars in a round led by Clearstone Venture Partners.

The pitch to publishers had a name they liked: the search leak. Every time a reader hit a word they did not recognize and opened a new tab to look it up, the publisher lost them, sometimes permanently. Apture's answer was to keep the answer inside the page. The Washington Post ran it. The Economist ran it. The Firefox extension was installed something like five hundred thousand times.

I have no memory of the name and I would be surprised if anyone outside the industry did, but I read those publications in that window and there is a decent chance I triggered the thing without registering that it was a product. That is the honest position on infrastructure like this. You do not remember using it, you remember the years when reading a news site felt slightly different, and this was one of the reasons why.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

The technical description is duller than the effect. Apture was a layer rendered above the publisher's own page, so a link no longer had to be a departure. Point at it and the destination arrived to you in a panel, whether that was an encyclopedia entry or a map or a video, and closing it put you back exactly where you had been in the paragraph.

In June 2011 it turned up in the CloudFlare app store, which put it one click away for anyone running a small site rather than just the publishers with an integration budget. Thousands of CloudFlare customers switched it on. Six months later that decision became the reason a lot of ordinary websites broke at once.

~ the funny part ~

Google bought Apture on 10 November 2011, for a figure reported at somewhere around eighteen to twenty million dollars, and said the team would work on Chrome. The scripts were switched off on 20 December. Five weeks, over a holiday period, for every publisher that had wired the thing into its templates.

CloudFlare's response has aged into one of the better small stories of that era. Three of their engineers took a conference room on 7 December, ignored everyone else for a day, and came out with a replacement called Highlight built on free search APIs from Bing and DuckDuckGo. One working day to rebuild the part users cared about, given away at no charge to the customers Google had just stranded. The blog post announcing it went up the day before Apture went dark.

~ the long tail ~

Tristan Harris went to Google with the acquisition and worked on Inbox. A few years later he wrote an internal presentation about how the industry was designing against its users' interests, left, and became the most quoted critic of attention engineering in the world, which is the role he was playing by the time The Social Dilemma came out.

There is something worth noticing in that arc, and it is not hypocrisy. Apture existed to solve the search leak, which is a polite way of saying it existed to stop you from leaving. It was a good version of that idea, genuinely useful to read with, and it was still a product whose success was measured by how well it kept you in place. The man who built it seems to have worked out what that measurement does at scale, and he had a five week shutdown and a job inside Google to think about it.

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