Blendr

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

~ the obituary ~

There is no version of this where I have a Blendr memory, and neither do you. That is most of the story. The app launched into a Guardian write-up and a BBC segment in September 2011, ran for eleven years, and produced no discernible culture in any country before it closed.

The plan was clean enough on paper. Grindr had proved by 2011 that a grid of nearby faces sorted by distance was a product people opened forty times a day, and Joel Simkhai owned that idea outright. Blendr was the same mechanic pointed at everybody else, announced at SXSW in March 2011 under the codename Project Amicus and released to the App Store on 8 September that year.

Simkhai was careful in interviews to say it was not for hookups. It was for meeting people who shared your interests, finding out whether a club was worth walking to, asking a stranger nearby what a restaurant was actually like. Which is a fine description of a product, and also a description of a product with no urgency in it, so nobody had a reason to open it twice.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

It shipped a year before Tinder and lost to it completely. Tinder's answer to the same problem was the swipe, which turned an open-ended grid into a game with a clear action and a clear reward. Blendr just gave you a list of people who happened to be near you and left the hard part, the part where you say something first, entirely to you.

By October 2012 Badoo was running the backend and Blendr was effectively a skin on somebody else's network. That is where the 200 million accounts figure the App Store listing carried in 2022 came from. Registered accounts on a shared network is a number that means almost nothing, and the fact that it was the best number available after eleven years tells you the rest.

~ the day it died ~

The notice went up in October 2022 on a page called service-blocked. Activity ceased in all territories on 31 October, user data was to be deleted by 30 November, and the website would go offline on 7 December. No sale and no farewell post from the founder, who had already sold Grindr to a Chinese gaming company in 2016 and moved on.

~ what got buried with it ~

Blendr is worth a grave because it is the clearest test anyone ran of a question the industry had been assuming the answer to: does proximity by itself make a social product. Grindr worked because it served a group for whom finding each other nearby was the whole difficulty. Take that condition away and the same interface has nothing left holding it up. Loopt and Brightkite each learned that separately in the same window.

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