Epuls.pl

» see epuls.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Polish teenagers had Epuls. That was not my country and, by the time it peaked, not quite my age either. i was finishing school and starting university in turkey in those years, on MSN like everyone around me, watching a social web that spoke Turkish or English. Epuls was the version of all that built for kids in Poland, and it never had a reason to cross the border to me.

so what follows is reconstructed from the record. Oddly for a Polish institution, Epuls was built by a Swedish studio, Pixelate Graphics, under Grzegorz Gorczyca, and it went live in 2002 aimed squarely at people under twenty. It had the furniture of an early social network, diaries you kept in public and clubs you joined, plus a little internal points currency called Pulsary that gave the whole thing a game-like pull.

It grew the way these sites did before anyone called them social media. A hundred and sixty thousand users in 2004, then up past two and a half million by 2007 and 2008, which in a country of Poland's size made it one of the places a young person simply had an account. For a stretch it was the youth internet in Poland, the place your school year lived after class.

Then it stopped moving. From 2009 it shed users fast, around seven hundred thousand of them in ten months, while the interface stayed frozen and no proper phone app ever arrived. Ownership passed to a German company that, by every Polish account of it, ignored what its users were asking for. Nasza-Klasa and then Facebook took the room. In December 2016 the end was announced, and on 1 February 2017 Epuls was switched off. i learned all of this from the outside, years after, the way you read about a neighbor's house you never once visited.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the decline ~

The failure was not mysterious. Epuls sat still while the ground moved. The web went mobile and Epuls had no app worth the name. Users asked for the interface to grow up and it did not. When people say a social network died of neglect, this is the exact shape of it, a product that kept working the way it always had while the world it served refused to stand still.

~ what got buried with it ~

What went with Epuls was a specific Polish adolescence, the diaries and clubs that a couple of million people had poured their teenage years into. Poland moved on to Nasza-Klasa and then to the same feeds as everyone else. The homegrown thing that had spoken only to them, in their language and for their age, closed with a date and a notice, and the accounts went wherever deleted accounts go.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »