Everloop

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

~ the obituary ~

Everloop belongs to a whole product category that exists because of one American law. COPPA set rules for what a service may collect from a user under thirteen, and a small industry grew up in the space that rule defined, selling parents a supervised enclosure. Turkey had no equivalent statute shaping products this way, so the category never really formed there. what Turkish middle schoolers had instead was Habbo Otel, and I was too old for that by a comfortable margin.

So this is a grave I am reading rather than remembering. In 2011 I was twenty-seven and working as an engineer. The intended user was eight.

The company started in 2010 as a girls-only site called Girl Ambition and relaunched in february 2011 as Everloop, with the gender restriction dropped. Hilary DeCesare ran it, and the pitch was the one every company in this space made: a real social network, with the parts that frighten parents removed and monitored.

Money arrived. A seed round of 3.1 million dollars closed in 2011, backed by angel groups and by individuals with Apple and Overture on their resumes. Content partners came along too, with Mattel putting Monster High in and National Geographic bringing Animal Jam. In 2011 it added a COPPA-compliant texting product called EverText, and in 2012 a mobile app called Goobit.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was for ~

It is worth being fair about the design, because it was not lazy. Everloop had parent authentication at signup and live moderation, plus filtering that watched for bullying patterns in what kids posted. Groups were the organizing unit rather than an open feed. All of it was aimed at a genuine problem, which is that in 2011 an eleven year old with a Facebook account had lied about their birth year and was now sitting in an adult product with adult strangers in it.

The trouble is that the customer and the user were two different people with opposite requirements. The parent was buying supervision. The kid was looking for somewhere unsupervised. A company in this position can satisfy exactly one of them, and the one holding the credit card is not the one who has to want to open the app tomorrow.

~ the funny part ~

Everloop was pitching a walled garden for tweens across 2011 and 2012, which is precisely the window when tweens were leaving walled gardens altogether. Instagram was becoming the answer and then Snapchat, and neither of them was safe by any definition a parent would recognize. that was the appeal. A thirteen year old's status symbol was access to the same product adults used, not a smaller one with their mother's approval attached to it.

So the market research was accurate and the conclusion was still wrong. Parents did want this. Parents were not the ones who had to log in.

~ what replaced it ~

Everloop went dark in 2014 and took EverText and Goobit with it. There was no acquisition and no wind-down statement worth quoting, which is the ordinary ending for a company of this size. It joined a fairly crowded plot: imbee, Togetherville and a long line of others that all made the same wager about the same age group in the same handful of years.

The idea did not die though, it just moved into other people's products. Everything Everloop was selling as a whole business is now a settings panel. Supervised accounts and parent-linked profiles, sitting inside the platforms that actually won. The safe version of the internet for children ended up being a checkbox inside the unsafe one, which is roughly what should have been predicted from the start.

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