BlinkList

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

~ the last words ~

BlinkList launched in June 2005, in the eighteen-month window when a new social bookmarking service appeared roughly every other week and each one had to explain what it did that del.icio.us did not. BlinkList had an unusually good answer. If you highlighted text on a page before you bookmarked it, the description field filled itself in with what you had highlighted. TechCrunch profiled it that July and said no competitor was doing that.

The rest of the feature list was the AJAX-era showcase. You could put stars on bookmarks and on tags, which meant you could rank your own archive rather than only accumulate it, and the tag field autocompleted as you typed. There was a send-by-email option at the moment of saving, built before anybody had settled on what a share button was supposed to look like.

The part that mattered most in hindsight was the quietest. BlinkList kept its own copy of the page you saved. A bookmark is a pointer and pointers rot, which anyone who has opened a 2005 bookmark folder already knows. Furl was doing the same thing in the same years and for the same reason, and both of them understood something about link decay that the market did not reward either of them for.

It was made by MindValley, a Kuala Lumpur internet company founded by Vishen Lakhiani and Michael Reining, which is a lineage almost nobody remembers now because MindValley went on to become a very large online education business and does not talk much about its bookmarking years.

~ the record ~

~ the second-tier problem ~

BlinkList got to somewhere around 450,000 registered accounts and a PageRank of 7 with roughly 173,000 inbound links, which in 2007 made it a visible site by any measure. It was still second tier, and second tier in social bookmarking was a bad place to be, because the whole value of the thing was other people. A tag page with four links on it is worse than no tag page. del.icio.us had the density and everybody else was competing on features against a network effect.

The usual exit for that position was an acquisition by a portal that wanted a checkbox, which is what happened to Furl and eventually to del.icio.us itself. BlinkList took a different route and changed hands privately, ending up with Gonzo Arzuaga, an Argentine entrepreneur running a small portfolio of sites.

~ the email ~

On 4 May 2012 Arzuaga sent subscribers a note about Startups.com, a daily deals site he had been running for exactly one year. "We didn't achieve the ambitious goals we set for ourselves when we launched only 1 year ago," it said, and then: "We're really sorry we couldn't make it work for you. But hey, life goes on." Further down was the line that is the actual death certificate here. "We're selling Blinklist.com, and shutting down other sites as well."

So BlinkList closed as a footnote in somebody else's shutdown email, seven years after launch, mentioned in a subordinate clause. The domain went up for sale with its PageRank and its backlink count in the listing, because by 2012 that was the only asset left worth describing. blinklist.com resolves today and serves a general-interest blog that has nothing to do with any of this.

~ where I was ~

University in Turkey, on TTNet broadband by then, and firmly on the reading side of all of this. The bookmarking wars were an English-web habit and I was not in them. What I had instead was a browser favorites folder nested about four levels deep and the forums, donanimhaber and frmtr, where the way you saved something useful was to reply to the thread so you could find it again later. That worked about as well as you would expect, and it also never shut down in an email.

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