Biip.no

» see biip.no as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

biip was, underneath the profiles and the friend lists, a machine for sending free text messages. norwegian teenagers logged in and fired off sms to each other for nothing, and while they were there they did all the other things a social network is for. i was neither norwegian nor a teenager by the time it mattered, so it sat well outside my orbit. i found it going through the dead social networks of Europe, one small country at a time.

it grew out of an older mobile-entertainment portal that had been around since 2000, relaunched in 2005 as a proper community by Erling Loken Andersen and a couple of partners. the pitch was simple and it worked. in a country of five million people, biip pulled in more than four hundred and fifty thousand members, most of them between fifteen and nineteen. that is not a niche. that is close to every teenager in Norway passing through the same website.

the free-sms hook was the engine. as late as 2012 the site was still sending something like a million text messages a month on behalf of its users, which tells you what people actually came for. Egmont, the big nordic publisher, and the TV2 media side bought a majority of the company for seventy-six million kroner, betting that norway's teenagers were worth owning.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is that the thing keeping biip alive was also a cost. free text messages are only free to the person sending them. someone downstream is always paying the carrier. a social network that runs on giving away sms is carrying a bill that grows with its own success, and it works only while the site stays the cheapest way for a norwegian kid to reach a friend.

the moment texting itself got cheap and phones got smart, the whole reason to log in went soft. why open a laptop and sign into biip to send a message you could now thumb out on the phone already in your hand.

~ the day it died ~

there is no clean date for the end, which fits how it went. Facebook arrived and then the smartphone arrived, and the teenagers who had made biip the biggest thing in norwegian youth internet drifted onto apps that did the same jobs without a login on a laptop. the rankings show it still measurable into late 2017 and then not really anywhere after. the owners called it temporarily inactive and floated a relaunch that never came.

from where i sat it was a country-sized secret i was never let in on, a place where a tenth of a nation grew up and then quietly moved out. it left the lights on for a while, and then not even that.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »