Chime.in

» see chime.in as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Late 2011 was the season when a new social network launched roughly every other week and each one had a theory about what was wrong with the last one. Chime.in's theory was that following people is the mistake. You should follow subjects, and the people would sort themselves out underneath. It ran for under two years and then deleted everyone.

The company behind it was UberMedia, which most people knew for a different reason. UberMedia owned UberTwitter, the way an enormous number of people read Twitter on a BlackBerry, and in february 2011 Twitter suspended it and made it rename itself UberSocial. So this was a company that had just been taught, very publicly, what it costs to build your business on somebody else's network. Chime.in was the answer to that lesson: our own network, on our own terms.

Bill Gross created it and the public beta opened on 18 october 2011. A post was called a chime and could run to five thousand characters, which put it between a status update and a blog entry on purpose. Your feed was a chimeline assembled from the topics you had subscribed to. Comments were threaded and voted on in the manner of Reddit. Anyone could start a community about anything, and the part nobody else was doing was the money: sell advertising against your community and Chime.in would split the proceeds with you.

It was PHP and MySQL underneath, which in 2011 already read as a company being sensible about how much of its own infrastructure it wanted to invent. None of the numbers were ever published, which is usually its own answer.

On 3 september 2013 UberMedia posted that the site was undergoing renovations and that all user accounts would automatically be deleted as of 12 september. Nine days. The same statement explained that the company had pivoted away from user generated content while it focused on a new mobile ad network, which is a sentence that tells you exactly what happened without admitting anything. I have no memory of this site and I do not think many people outside of a few American tech blogs do either, which for a network that promised to pay its writers is a bleak final score.

~ the case file ~

~ what it tried to be ~

The line under the logo was Connect Around Your Interests, which is the entire thesis in four words. The topic-first idea keeps coming back because it keeps almost working. Nobody is interested in everything a friend says, and everybody has one subject they would read strangers about all day. Reddit had already proven the second half. What Chime.in wanted was the first half too, a personal identity attached to the topic feed, so you got a profile and a following as well as a subject.

The problem with topic-first is that it has no cold start. A social graph imported from your address book fills a feed on day one with people who are already yours. A topic feed on day one is an empty room with a label on the door, and you have to hire or beg the first hundred posts into existence. The advertising revenue share was the attempt to buy past that, which was a reasonable bet and about eight years early.

~ how it actually ended ~

Renovations is the word that makes this grave worth writing. Every part of the announcement was technically true and none of it was honest. The site was not being renovated, it was being switched off. Accounts were not being reset, they were being deleted. And nine days is not notice, it is the length of a vacation.

UberMedia did fine afterward. It became a mobile location data company and was bought by Near on 28 april 2021 for an undisclosed sum. The lesson it had learned in 2011 about not building on somebody else's platform got quietly reversed, because the ad network it pivoted into ran on data from applications on other people's phones. The only thing that did not survive was the network where members were supposed to get paid.

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