Favoor

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

~ the obituary ~

Favoor was in German. Not German as a translation layer bolted onto an English product, German as the only thing on the page, with an English toggle up in the corner for anyone who needed it. Cem Bozok and Murat Polat put it online in 2005 and kept it up for ten years. Most of the bookmarking sites that got written about in English did not last that long.

The product was a personal start page with a bookmark manager behind it. You saved links into folders and read your RSS feeds on the same screen, and all of it lived on a server instead of in a browser profile that a reinstall could wipe. The meta description barely moved across the whole decade: Schütze deine Links vor dem Verlust. Protect your links from being lost. In 2005 that was a real argument.

The footer is the part worth looking at. Under the copyright line sit two links, one to Türkische.com and one to a Turkish-German dictionary, run by the same people. That is an artifact of Germany in the 2000s rather than Turkey in the 2000s, and the gap is real. I was on TTNet, keeping links in Internet Explorer's Favorites folder like everybody around me, and nothing about that situation called for a hosted start page in a second language. Favoor was built for people living between two of them.

By the time it sold, the site had over 160,000 registered accounts. Nobody wrote a funding announcement about that number. It represents ten years of upkeep by two people, and it was enough to make the site worth buying.

~ the case file ~

~ the two languages ~

There is a tag in the page source no modern site would bother to write: <meta name="Language" content="de,at,ch,nl,be,en,tr,fr,es">. The first half is countries, Germany and Austria and Switzerland and the Netherlands and Belgium. The second half is languages. Somebody sat down and guessed where the users were, and the guess tracks the places Turkish families went to work in the 1960s and 1970s.

Turkish was never in the product itself. It was one click down, in the sister site, where you went to look up a word you only half knew. That split is the texture of the whole thing: the tool was German, the people using it were not only German, and the dictionary sat in the footer where you would find it without having to ask.

~ the redirect came first ~

The Wayback record puts the handover ahead of the announcement. On 27 February 2015 favoor.com answered with its own homepage at roughly 3,470 bytes. On 3 March it answered with a 301 at 289 bytes. The press release saying start.me had bought the site went out on 10 March, by which point anyone typing the old address had been landing somewhere else for a week.

That release said the Favoor brand "will be retired with immediate effect," which was accurate in a way the wording did not quite admit.

~ what start.me got ~

Start.me is Dutch and sells the same idea: a page of your own links that loads before anything else does. The company is still trading in 2026, which makes Favoor one of the uncommon bookmarking deaths where the users landed somewhere instead of nowhere.

Its German-speaking competitors did worse. Mister Wong, far bigger and far louder, was wiped out by a Google algorithm update and closed on 1 August 2013. Oneview, which had been tagging links since 1998, reached 2015 and stopped. Favoor outlived Mister Wong by nineteen months, and it left through a sale rather than a collapse.

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