eBuddy
» see ebuddy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the obit ~
this part actually touched my life, though not directly. ebuddy solved a small problem in a specific way. you signed in from any browser without installing a client. the login screen accepted a windows live id or a yahoo credential and put you on your regular contact list within a few seconds. that was the pitch.
the setup mattered in a turkish internet cafe around 2004 to 2007. you sat at whatever machine was free and msn was usually already installed. if the client was busted or the cafe had gotten stingy on installs, ebuddy in a browser was the fallback. i cant swear i used it more than a few times, but the option was there and you knew about it.
paulo taylor launched the company in amsterdam on 9 september 2003 as everywheremsn.com with two co-founders, jan-joost rueb and onno bakker. the name said the whole thing, get msn everywhere on any browser. once the launch got attention the team added yahoo messenger, aim, icq, google talk, and eventually facebook chat. the aggregator killed the boring reason for having separate accounts in the first place.
~ the rap sheet ~
| Born | 9 September 2003 as EverywhereMSN.com in Amsterdam |
|---|---|
| Made by | Paulo Taylor with Jan-Joost Rueb and Onno Bakker |
| Peak (XMS) | 17 billion messages a month across 30M+ unique users |
| Format | browser-based multi-protocol IM aggregator, then XMS mobile from March 2011 |
| Killed | 4 December 2013 in a Booking.com acqui-hire |
| Lifespan | about 10 years 3 months |
| Killed by | smartphone-native messengers on one side, then the acqui-hire on the other |
~ the pivot ~
the web-messenger business had a ceiling. mobile broke every assumption underneath it. by 2010 the phone in your pocket ran whatsapp or bbm. the incentive to log into an in-browser aggregator on a shared computer disappeared. ebuddy launched xms in march 2011 as a mobile-native replacement.
xms hit real scale for a while. at its peak the platform processed seventeen billion messages a month across more than thirty million unique users. it stayed a b-tier app outside the netherlands and never punched through the whatsapp lock-in in any big market. the multi-protocol angle was the one thing ebuddy had actually understood better than most, and mobile flattened that advantage into nothing.
~ what it was really for ~
booking.com bought ebuddy in an acqui-hire on 4 december 2013. the amsterdam mobile team was strong on messaging engineering and booking wanted that team. the chat product itself was wound down. the xms app kept running for a while then went quiet. the ebuddy chat website was the first thing to go.
the ten-year run left one clean idea in the record. before whatsapp settled the multi-protocol question by winning outright, someone had to prove that people would sign in and chat inside a browser at all. ebuddy proved it. once mobile solved the same problem a different way, the browser tab lost its reason to exist.
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