Bloggy

» see bloggy.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Jaiku was Finnish and it was good. Google bought it in October 2007 and then did nothing with it, registration closed, and the people on it started looking around. In September 2008 a Swedish programmer named Jonas Lejon launched Bloggy, which deliberately resembled Jaiku so that anyone arriving from it would already know where everything was. Short posts and a following model, with hooks out to your blog and to SMS, so the thing worked on a phone that could not run an app.

The attention was immediate and briefly serious. Schibsted, the Norwegian media group that owns half the Nordic classified and news web, came around asking about buying it. Internetworld put Lejon ninth on its Entrepreneurs of the Year list for 2009 on the strength of the service. Nationalencyklopedin, the Swedish national encyclopedia, gave Bloggy an entry, which is not a thing that happens to most microblogs.

None of that held. Twitter took a few years to matter in Sweden and when it did, it took the audience Bloggy was serving, because that audience wanted to be where the rest of the internet already was. The service stayed up through the decline and then went quiet in 2015. Nobody wrote a shutdown notice worth archiving, so the date is a year and not a day.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The pattern here is national rather than Swedish. Every country with a decent developer scene produced one of these between 2007 and 2010, a local microblog aimed at the people who had just been orphaned by an acquisition or who never got on the American thing in the first place. In Turkey the hole got filled by FriendFeed instead, which for a couple of years ran so heavily Turkish that it stopped feeling like an American product at all. FriendFeed went out in April 2015. Bloggy went out the same year, for the same reason, without the two having anything else in common.

~ the numbers it left ~

12,625,120 posts and 90,000 accounts. Those figures come from the shutdown and they are unusually precise for a service this size, which suggests somebody sat down and counted before turning it off rather than just letting the bill lapse. Seven years of Swedish people talking to each other in short form, and the total fits in one line.

bloggy.se still answers today. What loads is a parking page with an obfuscated contact address on it, and if you unscramble the little JavaScript puzzle guarding the email, it resolves to [email protected]. Triop is Lejon's own security company. Eleven years after he switched the service off, the founder is still the one paying for the domain.

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