eCRUSH

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

~ the goodbye ~

in february 1999 i was a teenager on a 33.6k modem in turkey. ecrush was built for exactly that age and none of that geography. it opened on valentine's day of that year out of chicago, made by clark benson and karen demars pillsbury, and it ran entirely on english-language email into an american high school population.

the whole product was one move. you registered, in secret, and told the site who you had a crush on. ecrush then emailed that person and said only that somebody had listed them, inviting them to come and list their own. if their list came back with your name on it, both of you got pulled into the match lounge and told. if it did not, the site kept its mouth shut and you never appeared. the copy on the 1999 homepage put it plainly: they will never know who ecrushed you.

what filled that role where i was had no server behind it. the msn era in turkey ran its confessions through nicknames, through a song lyric parked in your display name for a week hoping one specific person would read it correctly. same problem, same cowardice, no database. ecrush turned that into a matching engine and charged nobody for it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ before anyone called it social ~

by 23 april 1999, ten weeks after launch, the homepage was already claiming a hundred thousand visitors. it ran a leaderboard of the most-crushed names in the country, which on that particular day had a mix of local unknowns and howard stern near the top. the los angeles times called it a crush clearinghouse. the detroit news said it eliminated the trauma of wondering.

the dates matter more than the traffic. friendster did not exist until 2002 and myspace until 2003. ecrush had been running a mutual-interest graph, with an opt-in privacy model that is stricter than anything the social networks shipped afterward, since the second month of 1999. it added a sister site called espin in 2001, built around a spin-the-bottle mechanic on the same matching engine, and espin ended up the larger of the two at 3.8 million registered users by january 2007.

~ what hearst bought ~

hearst magazines digital media acquired the network on 31 december 2006, price never disclosed. what it was buying was an audience, not a technology: over a million monthly visitors with ninety percent of them between thirteen and nineteen, which is the demographic the company was already selling to on paper through cosmogirl and seventeen.

the plan was to bundle it. hearst was relaunching its teen magazine sites that same month and wanted advertisers to be able to buy across all of them at once. an anonymous crush site is a strange thing to hold in a media portfolio, and it sat there for four and a half years while the audience it was built for moved onto facebook and stopped needing an intermediary to find out who liked them.

~ the day it died ~

espin.com was serving a normal page on 28 july 2011. by 2 august it was a redirect. hearst deactivated the whole network on 1 august and pointed the domains at a seventeen.com landing page, and the archive captures bracket that date to the day with nothing ambiguous in between.

nothing was migrated. the matches were a live state between two accounts, not a wall of posts, so there was nothing to export and nothing anybody could have kept. every crush that had been listed and never returned went out with the servers, which is arguably the outcome the users had signed up for in the first place.

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