Blink

~ the obituary ~

Dagbladet built a social network before newspapers understood that was a thing they were allowed to do. Blink went live on 1 February 2002 out of DB Medialab, the paper's development shop, and it was not a comment section bolted underneath the articles. It was a whole community with profiles and interest groups, plus an internal mail system the members called b-post.

It grew to 300,000 registered users in a country of about 4.5 million people. The group count is the number that stands out: more than 44,000 of them, running from fan clubs through to political argument. On 29 March 2004 the site added Blink Tidende, an interactive community paper written by the members themselves, which is a newspaper handing its readers a newspaper to run inside it.

Norwegian is the reason this one never reached me, and language is a harder wall than a border. Blink's entire value was in reading what other people had written that afternoon. A Turkish seventeen-year-old on a 56k modem in 2002 could load the page fine and understand nothing on it. The Nordic community web of that decade was a closed room to anybody outside the languages, Blink here and Sweden's LunarStorm next door.

~ the case file ~

~ the defection ~

Fredrik Kristiansen joined DB Medialab as a developer in 2000 and wrote Blink. In 2006 he left Dagbladet, and that same year he started Nettby together with VG Multimedia, the digital arm of Verdens Gang, which is Dagbladet's direct competitor on every newsstand in Norway.

Nettby launched on 14 September 2006 and crossed 980,000 profiles by January 2009, more than three times anything Blink had reached. The man who built the newspaper's community had gone and built the rival newspaper's community, and the second one was bigger.

~ the lawsuit ~

In 2008 Dagbladet sued Kristiansen for 609 million kroner, alleging that Nettby had been built on source code lifted out of Blink. He countersued the same year for defamation. On 20 August 2010 the whole thing settled before it reached a courtroom, with Nettby Community AS paying DB Medialab 24 million kroner.

The claims against Kristiansen personally and against VG Multimedia were dropped as part of the deal, and the settlement text recorded that there was no basis for saying any part of Nettby had been built on copied Blink code. So Dagbladet walked away with 24 million kroner and a written acknowledgment that its code had never been stolen.

~ the last four thousand ~

Nettby took the first bite from 2006 onward and Facebook finished the job, crossing into the Norwegian mainstream from 2008. By January 2011 Blink was down to roughly 4,000 members and Dagbladet decided there was nothing there worth keeping the servers on for. It closed on 31 March 2011.

Nettby had closed on 19 December 2010, about fifteen weeks earlier. VG paid 24 million kroner in August 2010 over a community it shut down four months later, and the community it had allegedly been copied from lasted one more quarter than that.

Blink Tidende had been publishing for almost seven years when the lights went out.

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