Cliqset

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

~ the obit ~

In 2010 I was finishing up at university in Ankara on a TTNet line, and the social web I actually touched was Facebook and MSN. Cliqset belonged to a different argument entirely, one being had in English on a handful of blogs about whether your posts should live on somebody else's server at all. It was a Jacksonville, Florida company founded by Darren Bounds and Charlie Cauthen, and its product was a river.

You connected your accounts and Cliqset pulled everything in. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Buzz, and about eighty other services at the peak of its connector list. The stream it built was readable in one place, and you could post out from Cliqset back into those same networks, so it worked in both directions rather than only as a mirror. FriendFeed had proven people wanted this; FriendFeed had also been bought by Facebook in 2009 and left to rot, which is precisely why a competitor looked like a reasonable thing to start.

What made Cliqset worth remembering is that it did not treat the aggregation as the whole product. Bounds put the company's weight behind open protocols at a moment when almost nobody was shipping them. Cliqset ran PubSubHubbub in production for real-time delivery and implemented Salmon so that a comment left on a copy of your post somewhere else would swim back upstream to the original. Those are the plumbing pieces the federated social web was assembled from years later, and Cliqset was running them while they were still drafts.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the standards bet ~

Bounds sat in the W3C Federated Social Web Incubator Group, which is where the people arguing about this stuff actually met. Cliqset shipped a desktop client and an app for Boxee, the living-room media box, which tells you how seriously the team took the idea that your stream should follow you off the website. There was a Firefox add-on too. Cliqset 2.0 in June 2010 added deeper Twitter integration and curation tools, five months before the end.

The bet was that interoperability would be the feature that mattered, that users would eventually refuse to have their output locked inside one company. It was correct as an analysis and useless as a business. The people who care about protocol openness are a small and technically fluent population, and they were already the only people using Cliqset.

~ the cracks ~

The product had a traffic problem it never solved. Aggregators have an awkward shape: once the service works perfectly, you have no reason to visit it, because the whole point was that everything came to you. Cliqset's own write-ups in 2010 kept pointing at FriendFeed's collapsing numbers as an opening, but a vacuum is only an opportunity if the category still has demand, and the actual answer turned out to be that most people were happy for Facebook to be the aggregator.

Google and Yahoo both held acquisition conversations with the company. Neither closed. By late 2010 the money and the patience ran out together, and the founders chose to shut it down rather than let it decay in public. Bounds surfaced again in May 2011 with a stealth startup called Glow, aimed at personal publishing, which is the same instinct wearing different clothes.

~ what got buried with it ~

cliqset.com does not resolve at all now. No parking page, no squatter, no redirect into somebody's SEO farm. The DNS simply does not answer, which for a 2010 domain is close to the cleanest possible exit.

The ideas kept walking without it. PubSubHubbub became WebSub and went into the W3C recommendation track. Salmon's design problem, how a reply finds its way home across servers, is the problem ActivityPub solves today, and every Mastodon instance is doing a version of what Cliqset shipped in 2009 to about nobody. Being early enough is indistinguishable from being wrong, right up until somebody else is late enough to be right.

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