Dipdive

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

~ the obituary ~

Almost everyone who was online in February 2008 saw the "Yes We Can" video. Barack Obama's New Hampshire concession speech cut against a black and white room full of musicians and actors singing the lines back at him, and it went everywhere in about four days. Almost nobody who saw it could tell you where it was published, and it was published on a social network owned by the man who made it.

Dipdive opened in beta on 1 October 2007 as will.i.am's own site, run through Dipdive LLC, and it was more ambitious than a fan page. You could upload your own pictures and video, keep a blog, build playlists, skin your profile, message people privately, record straight off a webcam and subscribe to channels. There was a mobile app, which in early 2008 meant a BlackBerry app, done as a deal with RIM and announced in March that year. The full public launch came a year after the beta, on 15 October 2008.

The video landed in the middle of the beta. It went up on 2 February 2008 and took roughly three million hits inside a week, then passed four million on Dipdive itself. Across the rest of the web, by 23 February, it had been watched more than twenty-six million times. That gap is the entire product in one line: the thing was born on Dipdive and lived on YouTube, and the site that hosted it first got about fifteen percent of the traffic its own biggest asset generated.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

For most of 2008 Dipdive had something that money genuinely cannot buy, which is a reason to exist that a stranger can explain in one sentence. It was the place the Obama video came from. Traffic followed and a mobile deal followed, and the site went on adding the things a social network was expected to have by then, including sign-in through Facebook and Twitter and a front page of curated channels.

The problem was underneath all of that. Whatever brings people to a site the first time has to be different from whatever brings them back, and Dipdive only ever had the first one. The video pulled an audience through the door for a political moment, and when the moment closed in November there was nothing behind it asking them to return on a Tuesday. Everything Dipdive offered, MySpace was already offering to a hundred million accounts that were sitting there.

~ the quiet years ~

From 2009 onward it just kept running. The archive shows it growing sub-brands over that stretch, with separate marks sitting in the image directory for a politics section and for a Rock the Vote tie-in, and it kept carrying will.i.am's own releases alongside a rotating set of artist channels. The captured pages from 2010 look like a working site with real members posting real things, which it was. It simply was not growing, and by then the argument for a celebrity-owned destination had already been settled against it by Facebook.

Nobody wrote a farewell post. At some point in 2013 the site stopped and the domain started pointing at will.i.am's own homepage, which is where dipdive.com still goes today. That redirect is worth naming because it is not the usual shape. It is not a squatter and it is not a parked lapsed name. It is the founder still holding the address and quietly sending it to whatever he is doing now.

~ what really happened ~

The reason is on the record and it is unusually direct. Asked by Fortune what had happened to it, will.i.am said he did not want to do it anymore and that he had something else he was doing. He also said Dipdive was not a failure, on the grounds that the code could be used again for something later.

Most product deaths get dressed up. There is a post about focusing on the core experience, or a line about serving users better through a different surface, and the actual sentence underneath is almost never printed. This one was: the person paying for it got bored. For a site funded out of one man's own interest rather than out of a board's patience, that is not even a bad reason. It is just the true one, and it is the only interesting thing Dipdive did after 2008.

~ what it became ~

The video outlived the site by more than a decade and it did it somewhere else entirely. "Yes We Can" is now a piece of political history that gets taught and re-cut, and the copies that survive are YouTube copies. Dipdive is a line in its footnotes, and in most retellings it is not even that.

What actually got buried is smaller and more ordinary: five or six years of profiles and uploads by people who joined a site because a song brought them there and stayed because it was theirs for a while. None of that moved anywhere. There was no export, because there was no announcement.

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