Duepuntozero

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

~ the eulogy ~

Amedeo D. was a clothing store in Milan with a chat room on its website, which was a normal thing for a store to have in 2003. Martino Di Filippo, sixteen years old and teaching himself to program, rewrote the chat so people could post photographs into it. The store took the feature back out. So he put up a parallel site called Amedeo D. Duepuntozero with his friend Andrea Turati, kept the photo posting, and when the store's lawyers objected he shortened the name to Duepuntozero and kept going.

What he had built by accident was a photo-centered social network with a public comment thread on every image and a rating called a fave, and a follow relationship that did not have to be mutual. Profiles started with one photo and eventually allowed twenty-four. The homepage ranked users by popularity. There was no private messaging at all. Everything that happened on Duepuntozero happened in public, in front of the ranking.

Between June 2006 and February 2009 it took more than 66 million visits and served 1.6 billion page views. It got to roughly half a million registered users and the ninth position among the most visited websites in Italy, with Milan alone accounting for more than a quarter of the membership. In 2004 Facebook was still restricted to American universities. The Italian teenagers who wanted a place to post their photographs and be ranked for them had one, and it was written by a classmate.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

Duepuntozero was regional in a way that reads strangely now. Its center of gravity sat in Lombardy and, inside Lombardy, in Milan, concentrated among high school and university students who mostly knew each other or knew someone who did. The popularity ranking on the front page worked because the population it ranked was small enough to be real.

That shape is the reason it never became a story outside Italy. By the time anyone was writing retrospectives about the sites that anticipated Instagram, the site had been gone for over a decade and had left almost nothing behind to point at. The Italian press only went back to it properly in 2022.

~ the day it died ~

In 2009 Di Filippo did the thing every founder of a hobby project that got big is told to do. He brought in professional partners, a group with an events background, to turn Duepuntozero into an actual company. As part of that the site was rewritten from scratch.

Somebody at the new company then deleted all of the existing copies of the rewritten site. Not a database, not a partial loss, every copy. Di Filippo looked at the amount of work it would take to reconstruct what he had just finished building, and he did not do it. A social network with half a million users ended because of a file operation.

~ what replaced it ~

Most dead social networks lose to a bigger one. Duepuntozero was in the middle of professionalizing when it went, at a moment when Facebook's Italian growth was still about a year from being overwhelming, so the usual explanation does not apply cleanly. It was killed by its own upgrade.

The features it had in 2004 are the ones everybody has now. Public likes on photographs, an asymmetric follow, a feed in chronological order, a visible popularity ranking. Being early is worth nothing without the copy you can still restore from, and that is the entire lesson available here.

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