Consumating

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

~ the goodbye ~

The phrase dating site did not mean much in Turkey in 2005. People met through msn, inside contact lists that already existed and grew sideways when somebody passed an address along. Nobody i knew filled in a profile for the purpose. The whole American argument about whether online dating was embarrassing was an argument happening in a room i could see into and had no reason to enter.

Consumating was for people inside that room who found the room embarrassing. It came out of a zine called Uber, where Ben Brown and Adam Mathes had run a personals section since 2002 for readers who wanted the joke more than the date. In March 2005 it became its own site on its own domain, built in Austin. By May it was adding close to a thousand people a day.

The pitch was that it was a dating site for people who would never admit to being on one. It read as a joke that worked, which is the hardest kind to keep running for three years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

There was no form. You described yourself in tags and other members added tags to you, so the words you had been given stood in public next to the words you had chosen. Popular ones rendered larger, so a profile looked like a small weather map of how you were seen. Instead of searching you clicked a tag and then stacked another one on top of it, narrowing the room a word at a time.

Every week or so a new question went up, and it was the kind of question a person could be funny about rather than the kind a personality test asks. Members voted answers up or down, and whoever won the week collected credits. That voting loop was the part that kept people opening the site on days when they were not looking for anybody. 2005 was the year tags were going to reorganize everything, and this was the only place that pointed them at people.

~ the sale ~

CNET bought Consumating in late December 2005 for an undisclosed price and relaunched it in June 2006. Traffic held that year and fell away through 2007. Ben Brown announced he was leaving CNET on 3 April 2007, and before he went he pushed to get the code released, which is how a project called Clonesumating ended up on Google Code that March.

~ the day it died ~

On 8 February 2008 CNET said the site would close on 15 March. The stated position was that no buyer had turned up and the company was no longer interested in maintaining it. Members were offered their profile data as a comma-separated file, which is an accurate description of what a tag-based identity turns into once the site that hosted it is gone.

Small groups went off to rebuild it from the open-sourced code and a few hundred people found each other again on a refugee site. The founder spent years afterward running into strangers who wanted to tell him about the best time of their life. That is a better result than most acquisitions produce and it did not keep the servers on for one extra day.

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