Beejive

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

~ the last words ~

Beejive, Inc. was founded in San Francisco in 2006 and started as a free chat client that ran in a browser. The thing it is remembered for came next. In May 2007 it shipped JiveTalk for BlackBerry, a single application that signed you in to AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger simultaneously and kept all six conversations in one list. By July 2007 the same client was running on the original iPhone as a web page, because that was the only way to put software on that phone at the time.

The iPhone version arrived on 28 September 2008, renamed BeejiveIM, and it cost $15.99. That was an absurd number on a store where most things were a dollar, and people paid it anyway, because the app solved a problem Apple had not solved yet. There was no background execution on the iPhone then. Close a chat app and you were signed out, and whoever was typing to you got nothing. Beejive parked your session on its own servers so the connection stayed up while the phone did something else, and later used push to tap you on the shoulder when a message landed.

That architecture is the whole company. Beejive was not really a chat program, it was a rented always-on computer that pretended to be one. Most of what you paid for went on keeping that computer signed in.

~ the record ~

~ the price ~

MSN was the messenger in Turkey through all of this. It was on every machine in the internet cafes and on every desktop at university, and nobody I knew was going to pay sixteen dollars for a mobile client, partly because sixteen dollars was real money and mostly because almost nobody around me had the phone it ran on. BlackBerry barely registered here and the iPhone arrived late and expensive.

So Beejive sits at an odd angle to my own memory. The network it carried was mine. The hardware and the price tag belonged to somebody else's country. The app came down to $9.99 later and shipped free, ad-supported versions alongside it.

~ the networks went first ~

A client that connects to other people's services dies when those services do, and the 2010s were brutal for all of them. Microsoft retired Windows Live Messenger for most of the world in 2013. Yahoo rebuilt its messenger from scratch in 2015 and broke every third-party connection in the process. AIM lasted until the end of 2017 but had been a formality for years before that.

The last capture of beejive.com, from 23 November 2016, is still advertising a Windows Live Messenger client for Android, more than two years after Microsoft had finished shutting that network down. A storefront selling tickets to a building that had already been demolished.

~ the last page ~

After 23 November 2016 the archive has nothing at all for three and a half years, which is what the archive shows when a domain stops resolving altogether. The next thing the crawler found, in May 2020, was an authentication error from whoever held the name by then. No announcement and no final post.

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