Emojli

» see emoj.li as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

some apps are a punchline you can install, and emojli was one of them. by 2014 i was in my thirties, a computer engineer in ankara, and an emoji-only messenger dreamed up by two british youtubers was very obviously not aimed at me. it was aimed at the corner of the internet that finds a joke funnier the more literally you build it, which is a real and legitimate corner, just not mine.

tom scott and matt gray made it, and the concept was one line: a messenger where you can only send emoji. usernames were emoji too, so people rushed to claim the good ones before launch, and seventy thousand of them were spoken for before the app was even out on august 29th 2014. the gag was partly a straight-faced parody of every breathless social app launch of that moment, done well enough that it briefly looked like the real thing.

then reality set in, the way it does with a joke you have to maintain. the two of them built it in their spare time in about a month, and keeping it running was work that paid nothing back. emoji support was patchy across browsers and phones, the novelty was always going to fade, and on july 30th 2015 they closed it and said plainly it would not come back. eleven months, exactly as long as a good joke should last.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the pre-launch land grab was the funniest and most telling part. thousands of people signed up to reserve a username made of pictures, on an app they had never used, for a service whose entire feature set was a restriction. that is either proof the joke worked or proof of how easily a launch hype cycle can be spoofed by pointing it at nothing. both things were true at once.

~ the postmortem ~

there was no scandal and no buyout, just two people deciding a side project had run long enough. that is a cleaner death than most apps get. emojli was never trying to be a business, so it did not have to fail as one. it delivered the joke, took the reservations, ran for a year, and closed on its own terms while people were still smiling about it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »