Backflip

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

~ the goodbye ~

Backflip went live in the fall of 1999 selling a problem most people did not yet know they had. Your bookmarks lived inside one copy of one browser on one computer. Move to another machine and they were gone. Backflip put them on a server instead, sorted into folders you could make public, with a "Backflip this page" button that partner sites embedded next to their articles. MP3.com had one. So did Rolling Stone, and so did CBS MarketWatch. You could mail your folders to somebody. In April 2000 the company bought a competitor called MyBookmarks and kept going.

Then the money stopped. Every bookmarking company of that generation ran into the same wall, which is that storing links for people is cheap to want and impossible to charge for. Most of them closed during the bust. Backflip did not. It kept serving, quietly, for another eight years, and somewhere along the way it stopped being a company at all.

What it became is written down in its own words on a page almost nobody read. By 2008 the site was run by volunteers, and the status page said so plainly: no real income beyond what covered the hosting bill, with hardware bought out of the operators' own pockets. There is a PayPal donate button embedded in the HTML. Users did donate, and the operator thanked them by name in a status post.

~ the last two years ~

The 2008 entries read like a man losing a slow fight. Through August and September the service was hammered by what looked like denial-of-service attacks, and when the operator went to trace them he found they were not attacks at all. They were bots from search-engine-optimization firms automating Backflip to push their clients' page ranks up. He spent several weeks identifying the sources, blocked them at the firewall, and named the outfit responsible for roughly seventy percent of the traffic while pointedly refusing to link to it.

Three days before Christmas the database server suffered a fatal hardware failure. The backups were fine, but the manpower was not: the post explains that nobody could put a new server in over the holidays. That was when the donation appeal went up. New machines went into the San Francisco facility late on 26 December, the restore ran for the better part of a day, and on 5 January 2009 the site came back with parts of itself still broken.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the day it died ~

On 13 October 2009 a power outage at the hosting facility took out every Backflip server at about seven in the morning, Pacific time. Power came back. The machines were brought up remotely. The database server would not start.

The last thing ever posted to backflip.com, timestamped 7:00pm PDT that evening, says the fault is surely nothing terminal but will need someone physically present, and that there is no one available to head over to the colo facility at the moment. It points readers at the Twitter feed for updates. No update came. Ten years of one of the web's first bookmarking services ended on a sentence about staffing.

~ the long afterward ~

The domain did not go dark, which is why the shutdown date got lost for years. Every request to backflip.com kept returning a redirect, first to the login page and then, from November 2009 onward, to that frozen maintenance log. The web server went on handing out session cookies to nobody, on an Apache build that was already ancient, for four more years. A parked page finally replaced it in November 2013.

Databases outside the archive record the death as 2009 with no day attached, and the redirects made it look later than that. The status page had the date on it the whole time.

~ the problem it was built for ~

The thing Backflip was built to fix was my actual situation for about three years. Between 2002 and 2005 a lot of my internet happened in Turkish internet cafes, on a machine somebody else had used an hour earlier and would use an hour later, where Favorites was a junk drawer of other people's links. I did not solve it with a service. I retyped addresses from memory, and the ones I could not remember I lost.

I never heard the name Backflip until I went looking for what filled that gap. It was a US product with US partner logos, and it was already living on donations by the time I had a home connection worth keeping bookmarks on.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »