Audioblogger

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

~ the goodbye ~

Noah Glass had a single good idea and it was a phone number. In 2003 he built a service called Audblog around it. Registering got you a code, and after that any telephone on earth would do: you called, you talked for as long as you liked, you hung up. The recording was encoded and posted to your blog as an MP3 without you touching a computer. Evan Williams, who had built Blogger and sold it to Google that same year, did a deal to make the thing free for Blogger users, and it was rebranded Audioblogger.

The archived homepage from June 2005 still has the whole pitch on it: "Get your voice on the web: Free unlimited audio posts from any phone to your Blogger blog." It advertises a three step setup and offers a short list of audioblogs to listen to, one of them belonging to Tom Green. The small print says the service is "wholly owned and operated by Listenlab" and brought to you "in partnership with Blogger", which is the corporate shape of a one-man company sitting next to Google.

This is a 2003 product and I was on a 56k modem at home until broadband arrived around 2006, which means the phone line and the internet were the same line in my house. Audioblogger's entire appeal was that you did not need a computer to publish, and the version of that appeal I actually lived was the opposite one: making a call meant the connection went down. The idea that a telephone was the easy path to the web only makes sense if your phone and your web are not fighting over the same copper.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it turned into ~

Glass and Williams turned the voice business into Odeo in 2004, aiming it at podcast hosting rather than phone calls, and Odeo launched publicly on 10 July 2005. Apple had added podcast support to iTunes twelve days earlier, which is the kind of timing that decides a company before it has customers. By 2006 Odeo was looking for something else to be, and Glass had been pushed out of the company he had named.

The something else was Twttr, a name Glass also came up with, built out of a January 2006 Odeo brainstorm and an idea of Jack Dorsey's. It went out with the rest of Odeo's assets when Williams bought the company back from its investors later that year.

~ the day the number stopped working ~

Audioblogger was switched off on 1 November 2006. The statement was unusually direct for a shutdown notice: "Given our limited resources, we have to make tough decisions about what to focus on. And we've come to the difficult decision that Audioblogger costs us too much in time and money to continue to run." Odeo did keep hosting the audio files that existed, which put it ahead of most of the services in this archive.

TechCrunch covered it on 4 October 2006 under a headline saying Audioblogger had joined the deadpool. The post called the decision a smart move and then advised Odeo to apply the same discipline to its other distraction, Twttr. That was excellent reasoning from the evidence available in October 2006, and it would have deleted Twitter.

~ what remains ~

The category Audioblogger invented did not die with it. Gabcast and Utterz rebuilt the same loop within a couple of years, and after them came the recording apps, which did not need the phone network at all once everybody was carrying a microphone. What vanished was the specific trick of turning the dumbest available input device into a publishing tool. That trick mattered enormously in 2003 and stopped mattering the moment the phone became the computer.

Noah Glass is the part of this story that keeps being retold. He named Odeo and he named Twitter and he walked away from both with very little, and the first thing of his to be switched off was the phone number that started it.

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