Faves.com
» see faves.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the eulogy ~
faves lived in the same category as delicious and ma.gnolia. by 2006-2008 when it was active i was on delicious for anything i actually wanted to bookmark. that was where the developer crowd i read had ended up. faves was aimed more at a lifestyle audience: your friends' favorite pages rather than a taxonomy of every technical link you had ever found. i never made an account.
blue dot inc was founded in 2004 in san francisco by mohit srivastava and sumit sen. the bluedot.us site launched in june 2006. the pitch was a browser button that let you tag any page with a single click and push it to a friend graph. no folksonomy tags and no public firehose. it was built to be simple in a way delicious was not. the interest was there for a while and the site pulled some early press.
in october 2007 they renamed to faves.com because bluedot.us was hard to say out loud and people kept typing bluedot.com by mistake. the rename came with a full rebuild of the frontend. the browser button stayed. the friend-graph model stayed. what did not arrive was a revenue model that worked at the scale of a small social bookmark service.
~ the dossier ~
| Born | June 2006, launched as Blue Dot by Mohit Srivastava and Sumit Sen |
|---|---|
| Peak | 2007-2008 social-bookmarking wave alongside Delicious and Ma.gnolia |
| Killed | July 2011 (asset sale and domain resale) |
| Lifespan | 5 years |
| Made by | Blue Dot Inc, founded 2004 |
| Killed by | unable to monetize through advertising, staff laid off in Fall 2008 |
~ how it actually ended ~
in fall 2008 the company laid off all its full-time employees. the site kept running on maintenance mode for another two and a half years. in june 2011 the software plus the database plus the email list got sold to socialadr, a small seo shop. in july 2011 the faves.com domain itself was sold separately to cut media. by january 2012 the service had migrated to fave.net and later to maxiconnect.com. the faves.com url started redirecting to a social couponing pitch.
~ what got buried with it ~
the social bookmarking category itself did not survive the arrival of facebook's news feed and twitter's link sharing. delicious got sold twice and hollowed out. ma.gnolia lost its database in a 2009 disk crash. faves ran out of runway and got sold in pieces. by 2012 the whole category was effectively gone as a standalone product. the surviving pieces were absorbed into pocket and instapaper as read-it-later services rather than share-with-friends.
srivastava went on to other startups. sen did the same. the browser-button model was correct and eventually became the default way social platforms handled link sharing. the standalone product just did not have a business under it.
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other bookmarking: Readlists, Ma.gnolia, Times File, Trunk.ly
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