BarbieGirls.com

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

~ the last words ~

girls aged about six to twelve used barbiegirls.com, and that was not my crowd, not by age and not by country. i was a grown man in ankara when it launched. this is a grave for a virtual world i only know from the outside, the way you know a playground you walked past but never entered.

mattel opened barbiegirls.com on april 24 2007, and it grew absurdly fast. three million girls signed up in the first two months, and mattel took to calling it the fastest growing virtual world in history, which for a little while was probably true. inside, you made a barbie avatar and dressed her up, then chatted with other players in what the site called b chat, spending a currency called b bucks.

the strange and clever part was the hardware. mattel sold a little mp3 player shaped like a barbie doll, with plastic clothes you could swap on the physical device, and plugging it into your computer unlocked a vip membership on the site. it tied a toy on a shelf to an account on the web at a time when that crossover still felt novel, and it sold the two things as one.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

underneath the pink it was the same shape as club penguin or stardoll, a safe walled garden for kids with dress-up and heavily filtered chat. the filtering mattered, because a chat product aimed at young girls carried a level of safety scrutiny most social sites of the era never had to think about. b chat was locked down hard, canned phrases and tight limits, which was the responsible way to build it and also part of why it felt small.

the mp3 player is the piece that dates it most precisely. this was 2007, before every child had a phone, when a dedicated music gadget with a web tie-in still made sense as a product. a couple years later that whole category was gone, swallowed by the phone in everyone's pocket.

~ the day it died ~

mattel closed the international versions on april 30 2011 and shut the main site down on june 1 2011. the notice said the barbie brand was exploring new opportunities for girls both on and offline, the kind of language that means a decision was made upstairs and the site was on the wrong side of it. players were given warning and vip memberships were refunded. some of the kids made petitions to bring it back, which went the way those always go. the world just closed.

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