circaVie

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

~ the obit ~

AOL spent 2007 launching things. More than a dozen small content sites went out that year, each aimed at one narrow interest, all of them hoping to catch whatever Web 2.0 was supposed to be. circaVie was the timeline one. Its own pitch was a place to celebrate your life chronologically, through an interactive timeline, which is a sentence that could only have been written in 2007.

The tool itself was simple and quite good at its job. You added events, each one taking a date and a caption and optionally a photo or a link, and the site rendered them as a horizontal Flash object you could scroll through. The real feature was the embed: you could take that timeline and drop it into a blog post or a page of your own, which is why the examples on the front page were never only personal. Alongside somebody's look back at the 1980s and a collection of pencil portraits, there was a Center for American Progress timeline and one about the Beatles. People used it for history as readily as for autobiography.

Logging in was done with AIM or with OpenID, which in 2007 was AOL signaling that it was now a modern web company. The whole thing ran under the People Connection group, the division that handled the AIM community, and the branding still carried a BETA tag next to the logo the day it died.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the notice ~

It went up on AOL's People Connection Blog on 3 December 2008 at 11:45 in the morning, headlined "Circavie Will Be Shut Down Permanently". It opened with "Dear Circavie user", named 15 January 2009 as the hard date, and was signed by the Circavie Team.

The comment thread underneath is the part worth reading. Within hours somebody had asked the only question that mattered to the people who had actually adopted the thing: after the 15th we obviously cannot update our timelines, but will the ones already embedded on our own sites still work? Those embeds were Flash objects served from circavie.com, so the answer was no and everybody could already see it. Replies kept arriving for another week.

~ the purge it belonged to ~

circaVie was not singled out. AOL had announced in July 2008 that it was killing Xdrive and AOL Pictures to cut costs and concentrate on advertising, with BlueString going the same way, and the executions landed across that winter. AOL Hometown had already gone in October and AOL Journals in November. By early January 2009 the executive whose product portfolio all of this had been was out of the company himself.

None of this touched me. In 2008 I was on a TTNet line in Turkey and AOL was a company I read about rather than software I had ever run. What is visible from this distance is the speed: the same outfit that spent 2007 opening a dozen small sites spent 2008 closing nearly all of them.

~ the date everybody has wrong ~

Archive Team's page on circaVie carries one line under Vital Signs: dead as of May 4, 2013. That has stood as the recorded death for over a decade and it is wrong by more than four years.

The capture record settles it. The homepage was serving normally on 3 January 2009 at 3,535 bytes. By 1 February it was answering 301, and the address that 301 pointed at was the People Connection Blog post announcing the shutdown. So the site did exactly what it said it would do on 15 January, and then spent the next several years quietly forwarding anyone who arrived to the notice explaining why there was nothing there. May 2013 is simply when somebody got around to checking and found a redirect still working, which is the oldest mistake in this field: a dead site that still answers looks alive to anything that only reads status codes.

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