Ellerdale

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

~ the last words ~

Ellerdale came out of stealth on 20 November 2009 and was gone nine months later, to the day. It had been running quietly in Menlo Park since 2008, built by Jens Christensen, who had a Stanford doctorate and two prior companies behind him, and Arthur van Hoff, who had been one of the early Java engineers at Sun and had since sold three more. The company page gave all ten employees joke titles. Christensen was Minister of not-so-Secret Intelligence.

The pitch was a web intelligence platform for large real-time feeds, which in practice meant pointing a semantic indexer at everything being posted and working out what the posts were about. It read Twitter and Wikipedia and Freebase and its own crawl, and tracked over a million topics. Searching a name did not return pages with that name in them. It returned a cluster: ask it about Sarah Palin in 2009 and it handed back John McCain and the Republican Party.

In March 2010 it signed for the full Twitter firehose, which was the thing every company in that race wanted and few got. By the summer it was taking roughly 600 tweets a second and had six billion messages indexed, around seventy million arriving daily. Ron Conway was the one named angel. No funding round was ever disclosed, and its CrunchBase profile at the time listed none at all.

~ the record ~

~ the velocity number ~

The public product lived at trends.ellerdale.com and it was a leaderboard. A counter at the top gave messages per hour across the whole index. Below it sat eleven category tabs running from people and politics through to science and products, each holding a numbered ranking of whatever the live web was currently shouting about, with about ten headlines under every entry and the related entities listed beside it.

The clever part was the unit. Ellerdale measured fame in mph, meaning messages per hour. On 10 August 2010 the top of the people tab read Justin Bieber at 19,342 mph. Joe Jonas was second at 3,729, which is to say the gap between first and second place was a factor of five. Barack Obama came fifth, filed next to the White House. You could subscribe to any of it, including intersections of two topics, and the archive still holds the feed names it generated for those: Symbian and Android, Chocolate and LinkedIn.

~ the farewell nobody wrote ~

On the evening of 20 July 2010 the corporate site was replaced with 639 bytes. Its headline read that Ellerdale had left the building, and the text thanked you for using it, said they had had a great time, and signed off with the line about so long and thanks for all the fish. The words were linked to Freebase, which had been one of its data sources and which went on to die itself. The file carries a last-modified header of 21:19 Pacific that night, which means the tombstone went up before the company had published a word of its own about what had happened.

Two hours after that the blog post went up, and it is the only first-party statement that exists. It says the technology had recently been shown off at trends.ellerdale.com, that the transition meant they could no longer maintain the Ellerdale website, and that as you may have seen, it is no longer available. Then it tells API partners they will be contacted separately. It was the last thing the blog ever published, and it is still the top post in captures three years later.

Except the thing it had just pointed readers to kept working. The archive has trends.ellerdale.com serving a live page at 15:18 UTC on 20 August 2010, Apache with Phusion Passenger underneath it and a Rails session cookie attached. The next capture, 00:01 UTC the following morning, is a bare 301 to the farewell page with nothing in the body, served by lighttpd. That is 08:18 and 17:01 Pacific on the same Friday. Somebody switched off a Ruby application at the end of a working week and repointed the domain at the static box, and the proof is not the status code but the server software changing underneath it.

~ what the encyclopedia forgot ~

The other live-search companies I have written up mostly hit the same wall, which was that nobody could work out who pays for a result that is stale in four minutes. Ellerdale never reached it. It had the firehose, it was shipping features five weeks before the end, and its goodbye reads cheerful rather than cornered. That is a rare thing in this category and it is worth saying before the rest of this.

Van Hoff became Flipboard's chief technology officer, a title announced in the subheading of the press release, and the Ellerdale platform was going to become the relevancy engine in future versions of the app. Every word of that was forward-looking. Flipboard launched on 21 July 2010 without any of it, and the consumer product that people had actually used was switched off a month later.

Sixteen years on, Flipboard is still running, so the people landed somewhere that lasted. You cannot see them from outside, though. Flipboard's encyclopedia entry does not mention Ellerdale at all, and hands the credit for its topic engine to Zite, which Flipboard bought from CNN in 2014. The team came through intact and so did the firehose deal. What nobody published is a single line describing what the thing they had built actually went on to do.

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