EveryTrail

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

~ the eulogy ~

EveryTrail came out of GlobalMotion Media in Palo Alto in 2006, founded by Joost Schreve, and it did one thing that nothing else did well at the time. You walked or rode or drove with a GPS logger running, uploaded the track, and the site matched your photographs to the points on it by timestamp. The result was a trip: a line on a map with pictures hanging off it at the places you took them, published for anybody to follow.

This predates the smartphone doing it for you. In 2006 that workflow meant a separate GPS unit plus a clock you had set correctly on both devices, which selected for a particular kind of person and produced a community of them. Hikers and mountain bikers built guided tours out of it, and the company later sold EveryTrail Pro to tourism boards and museums who wanted a self-guided audio walk without commissioning an app.

GlobalMotion raised a $1 million Series A from the Band of Angels and a set of private investors, announced at the end of December 2009. Thirteen months later, on 3 February 2011, TripAdvisor bought the company. The terms were never disclosed.

~ the dossier ~

~ five years of nothing ~

TripAdvisor said the acquisition was about expanding its mobile offering, and then very little happened. The EveryTrail Twitter account went silent for over a year and a half. Links on the homepage stopped going anywhere. Users looking for support were told on TripAdvisor's own forum that nobody there could answer questions about it.

For a service whose entire value was the data its members had already uploaded, five years of neglect is a particular kind of damage. Every year that passed added tracks to a database nobody was maintaining and nobody had committed to keeping.

~ the day the domain moved ~

AllTrails announced on 18 August 2016 that it had acquired EveryTrail from TripAdvisor, putting the combined community above five million hikers and trail runners. The promise in the announcement was clean: sign in to AllTrails with your EveryTrail credentials and your trips would be imported within twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

The archive shows how fast the site itself went. everytrail.com was serving a normal page at 14:47 on 17 August. By that evening it was answering with a 301, and from 18 August onward every capture is a permanent redirect to alltrails.com. There was no read-only period and no export window at the end, because the export tooling had been the thing users complained about for years already.

The migration did not go the way the press release described. People wrote up losing entire accounts, seventy trips at a time, photographs and descriptions included. Some of it came back and some of it did not, and there was no longer an EveryTrail to complain to.

~ what the category taught ~

The location-sharing services of that era mostly died by being bought, and EveryTrail died worse than most because its content took real effort to make. A checkin is a tap. A twelve-kilometer track with forty geotagged photographs and a written description of where the water is takes a day outdoors and an evening at a desk.

None of this reached me. I was in Ankara doing engineering work in those years and the recreational GPS category was an American and Western European hobby with hardware costs attached. What I recognize in it is the same problem I would meet later from the other side: a dataset that only exists because thousands of people volunteered it, sitting on a server that belongs to whoever bought the company last.

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