Cinch.fm

» see cinch.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i heard about cinch was after it was already dead. reading through archive team's wiki around 2019 looking at the small dead audio services of the 2009 to 2013 window. cinch was one of six or seven products that had tried to be the twitter of voice. from ankara on ttnet the phone-in podcasting category never landed. turkish audio content lived inside forum threads with attached mp3 uploads on donanimhaber and frmtr, or on internet radio streams from the state broadcaster. dialing a us number to post a voice clip to twitter was not a workflow that anybody around me had.

cinch launched in october 2009 as a product of cinchcast, the parent company behind blogtalkradio, which had been running as a browser-based call-in radio host since 2006. alan levy was the ceo. the cinch pitch was designed for mobile-first audio blogging in the pre-smartphone era, when the iphone existed but was not yet the dominant phone shape. the mechanic was elegant. dial a cinch phone number, record up to fifteen minutes, hang up. the audio was automatically posted as a public url to your cinch profile with an rss feed, plus a twitter or facebook update carrying the link.

through 2010 and 2011 cinch shared the mobile-audio bracket with audioboo out of london and ipadio and tweetmic. blogtalkradio ran the marketing and the pdf 2009 launch positioned it as instant podcasting. the pitch was strong. attach a photo, add a caption, drop it into your twitter timeline as a voice note. the technology worked. what was missing was the network effect. voice never scaled as a social-media medium in the way that text and photos did through the same window.

~ the dossier ~

~ what really happened ~

on 18 july 2012 blogtalkradio announced cinch would be shut down. the reason given was straightforward. cinchcast did not have the engineering and product resources to keep both cinch and blogtalkradio moving, and the parent property was where the revenue was. the shutdown date was set for 20 august 2012. robert scoble wrote the closing note as a broader piece about depending on services you do not control. user files remained online through a two-month grace window and were deleted on 20 october 2012.

~ what it foreshadowed ~

cinch died a decade too early to catch the voice wave that eventually did land. audio-social came back around 2020 with clubhouse and twitter spaces, and the audio-first content format lifted into a real category through anchor.fm and later spotify's podcasting stack. the cinch idea of one-tap audio posting to your social graph turned out to be correct on paper, wrong on timing. mobile bandwidth in 2010 could not carry it and the phone-in mechanic died once smartphones normalized the record button on the home screen.

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