Blip.pl

» see blip.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2007 the messenger sitting open on every Polish desktop was Gadu-Gadu. On mine it was MSN, and that single difference is most of the reason Blip could not have been built where i was. Blip was a microblog with a pipe running into the country's own instant messenger, and Turkey never had a country's own instant messenger.

Marcin Jagodziński and Zbigniew Sobiecki started it in Warsaw in May 2007. Gadu-Gadu S.A. bought it on 11 June, roughly a month after launch, which is fast enough that it reads more like hiring two people than buying a company. The product was short public posts, 160 characters, with a hash mark for tags and a pair of angle brackets for addressing somebody. One bracket made it public and directed. Two made it private.

It never got large by the standards anybody uses now. In June 2009 the service drew 329,000 visitors. By December 2010 it held a bit over 80,000 registered accounts, and the Megapanel figure for September 2012 was close to 150,000 unique users. What it had instead of scale was density. Polish journalists and politicians were on it, arguing in public, in Polish, at a size where you could plausibly read most of what was said in a day.

Then the ownership chain caught up with it. Gadu-Gadu became GG Network, GG Network ended up inside Allegro, and Allegro also owned Wykop, which had a microblog of its own. On 1 July 2013 Blip posted that it would close on 31 August. The reasoning offered was that developing two similar services was not optimal, which is the most honest kind of corporate sentence: nothing was wrong with Blip except that somebody upstairs owned two of it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the gateway ~

The thing worth carrying out of this grave is how people actually reached it. In May 2009 about 45 percent of traffic came through the website itself. The rest arrived through instant messenger clients, mostly Gadu-Gadu, and through applications users had written against the API on their own. Under half of a social network's activity happening on the social network is not a failure mode, it is a design.

Gadu-Gadu at that point was a national utility rather than a product choice. Blip bolted a public timeline onto the side of it, so posting did not require opening a new tab or forming a new habit. That is also exactly why it could not travel. A microblog fused to a national messenger dies in whatever country the messenger dies in, and it cannot be exported to a country where the messenger is somebody else's.

~ the merge notice ~

The shutdown came with a migration button rather than a delete button, which was more than most services of that era offered. You logged in and clicked a link, and your account plus your whole posting history moved across to Wykop's microblog. Anything not moved by the deadline was deleted. The service then overran its own announced date by two days and finally stopped on 2 September 2013, which is a small thing and is also the detail everyone who was there repeats.

The address is still registered. Today blip.pl answers with a bare page whose entire text is Strona w trakcie budowy, which translates as site under construction, plus an invitation to come back soon. In between it spent a stretch as a discount-code site belonging to an unrelated company, so that notice is at least the third thing the domain has been, and the microblog is the only one of them anybody remembers.

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