DailyBooth

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

~ the goodbye ~

dailybooth opened in february 2009 with a single rule. one selfie per day, with a caption. you could comment on other people's selfies, follow accounts, build a feed of faces. the site launched out of y combinator's s09 batch under jon wheatley and ryan amos. by august of the same year it had reportedly crossed three million unique monthly visitors with a thirty-five-percent month-over-month growth rate. that pace was faster than most contemporary social products in the same window.

the user base was largely teenage and english-speaking. the site became one of the early laboratories for what would later be called selfie culture, since the basic gesture (a daily front-facing portrait posted into a public feed of friends doing the same) was a year and a half ahead of instagram, which launched in october 2010. instagram had filters and a square crop. dailybooth had a faces-only feed and a follow-and-comment loop that worked the same way at a smaller scale.

by the time dailybooth peaked, i was twenty-five and finishing engineering school. selfies were not part of my online vocabulary in 2009 and 2010. msn messenger was still where i talked to friends, and the social photo layer in turkey lived inside facebook by then, where you tagged each other in albums of nights out rather than building a feed of solo daily portraits. dailybooth was a us teenage product on a cultural beat i did not have. i learned the site's name several years after it had already been deleted.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

dailybooth's product premise was almost a bet against the future. in 2009 the assumption inside silicon valley was that "people taking pictures of themselves every day" was a small category, mostly teenagers with a fashion-adjacent skew. dailybooth raised real money at a moderate valuation on that bet, and it grew. then instagram launched in october 2010 with the same underlying gesture rebuilt around mobile-first capture and filters. instagram was acquired by facebook in april 2012 for a billion dollars. dailybooth was acquired by airbnb the same april for the founding team's seats, with the site itself folded in as part of the wind-down. the two products had been pointing at the same future, and the timing of who shipped which version onto smartphones decided which one became cultural infrastructure.

~ what got buried with it ~

the december 2012 deletion wiped roughly three years of public selfie posts plus their comment threads. the site had not been operationally important for the year leading up to the shutdown, since the airbnb deal had effectively pointed the founders' attention elsewhere from april onwards. but the archive was a real time capsule. late-bush and early-obama era teenagers documenting themselves daily on bedroom mirrors and school hallways, with mostly point-and-shoot cameras or laptop webcams, since the front-facing iphone camera did not arrive until the iphone 4 in june 2010. that visual layer of late-2000s us youth culture is now mostly gone from public archives. it sits in screenshots scattered across personal hard drives, and that's about it.

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