CubeDuel

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

~ the last words ~

The name needs a cubicle to make sense, and the cubicle reached me through American television rather than through any office I have sat in. A room of identical fabric-walled boxes, a person in each one, a shared understanding that your colleagues are both your closest daily relationships and a group you did not choose. CubeDuel took that and made it a scoreboard.

The mechanic was one screen. Two faces, both pulled live out of your LinkedIn connections, filtered down to people who had overlapped with you at an employer, and one question: which of these two would you rather work with. You clicked. Another pair appeared. Your votes were anonymous and got aggregated into rankings by company and by profession. You could look up where you had landed yourself. The homepage promised it in six words that are the best thing the site produced: two coworkers enter, one coworker leaves.

Adam Doppelt built it with Tony Wright. Doppelt had co-founded Urbanspoon and, before that, Strangeberry, which TiVo bought. Wright had just stepped down as founder and CEO of RescueTime. These were not people making their first thing, and CubeDuel was still obviously a weekend's idea taken further than a weekend's idea usually goes.

~ the record ~

~ the forty-eight hours ~

It went up on 13 January 2011 and the coverage started the same day. TechCrunch framed it as Hot or Not meeting LinkedIn and told readers their darker side would enjoy it, which was accurate and also did a lot of the marketing. By the end of the first day more than fifty thousand votes had been cast. The next morning it was on ABC News and the rest of the American tech press, mostly with a paragraph about whether this was a terrible thing to do to your coworkers.

Then it stopped working. The site had passed LinkedIn's daily API ceiling, which exists to keep any one application from hammering the member graph, and once it hit the limit it could no longer fetch the faces that were the entire product.

~ what LinkedIn actually did ~

The headline everywhere was that LinkedIn had shut CubeDuel down, and LinkedIn spent the following day saying it had not. The company's position was that the application had run into a documented platform limit designed to protect members, not a decision by anybody. It then raised CubeDuel's ceiling fivefold and the site came back on 24 January, eleven days after launch, with the founders reporting that the voters' favorite coworkers worked at Facebook.

By then the two-day window had closed. A product whose appeal is novelty gets one pass through the news cycle, and CubeDuel spent its pass returning a server error. What came back online in late January was a working site that nobody was talking about anymore.

~ the redirect ~

It stayed up far longer than the attention did. The homepage sent logged-out visitors to a login page for another twenty-one months, and the archive has that login page answering normally, at just over two kilobytes, as late as 22 October 2012. One week later, on 29 October, the same URL answers with a 301 pointing at igra.com, and the root follows it the next day. Every capture after that is a redirect, and in 2025 the domain came back as a search-engine content farm publishing articles about window treatments.

Nobody posted a farewell. There was nothing to take with you either, because the only thing CubeDuel ever held about you was how your colleagues had voted.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »