eCircles

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

~ the eulogy ~

in 1999 i was a teenager on a 33.6k modem in turkey, mostly downloading things and chatting. ecircles was a california company selling american families a private website to share baby photos on. those two worlds never really touched, and this grave is written from the far side of that gap.

ecircles started in 1998, founded by prescott lee and nathanael hayashi, and it was early to something that later became enormous. the pitch was a private, invite-only space where a family or a group of friends could keep photo albums and a shared calendar in one place. before facebook made all of that public and default, ecircles made it small and closed. it raised twenty-eight million dollars and reached around two and a half million users at its peak.

the money ran out before the model did. ecircles was a dot-com built on venture funding and thin revenue, and when the bubble burst that combination was fatal. classmates.com acquired the remains, and the site shut down on april 15, 2001. what it had been early to, private group sharing among people who actually knew each other, did not go away. it just had to wait most of a decade for the company that would do it at planetary scale and never quite let you close the circle again.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it saw first ~

ecircles understood the shape of social software before the audience or the bandwidth was ready for it. a closed group of real relationships, sharing photos and plans in one place, is most of what people actually wanted from the web socially. it took years and much faster connections for that to work at scale. ecircles had the idea in 1998 and a dial-up world to try running it on.

~ the long tail ~

classmates.com took the pieces and the ecircles name went dark in 2001. the concept did not. every family group chat and shared photo album since has been a version of what ecircles sold too early, and most of the people using them have never heard the name. it was one of the first to build the private, closed internet we mostly live in now, and one of the first to run out of money doing it.

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