Firefly Network

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

~ the eulogy ~

the word passport, in the microsoft sense, was somebody else's product name first. before it was the sign-in behind hotmail and eventually every microsoft account on earth, the passport was a credential built by a small cambridge company whose actual business was recommending records to you.

firefly went up in october 1995, run by a company then called agents inc, spun out of the mit media lab that march by engineers working under pattie maes with some harvard business school people attached. the underlying research was homr, a music recommendation service, itself descended from an email-based system called ringo. the business plan took second place in mit's 1995 student competition. the company renamed itself firefly network on 28 august 1996.

i was about a year into a dial-up line when microsoft switched the site off in august 1999, and firefly was an english-language american music community that had already given up on being a community by then. whether i was there is not the interesting part. the interesting part is that the recommendation machinery everything now runs on was sold as a consumer destination in 1995, and failed as one.

~ the dossier ~

~ how the matching worked ~

you rated records. the system compared your ratings against everyone else's, found the people whose taste tracked yours most closely, and told you what those people liked that you had not heard yet. that is collaborative filtering, and in 1995 it was a research technique with a name almost nobody outside a lab had occasion to say.

the site later added films and then websites on the same mechanism, and the accumulated ratings were the real asset. barnesandnoble.com ran firefly's engine behind its recommendations, and so did zdnet and myyahoo. launch.com, later bought by yahoo, was on it as well. the company was doing to other people's catalogs what amazon later did to its own, and licensing it out rather than keeping it.

~ the passport ~

all that rating produced profiles, and by 1996 profiles were what everybody was nervous about. firefly turned the nervousness into a product, taking the position that a profile belonged to the person who made it. it worked with the federal government on consumer privacy language and co-wrote the open profiling standard with netscape and verisign, which went to the w3c and came out the other side as p3p.

the consumer-facing shape of that was the firefly passport. the site's own copy in december 1998 calls it your trusted personal profile, giving you access to personalized content and services at sites using firefly's software, with complete control over what sits inside it. microsoft signed the acquisition on 9 april 1998 and did not disclose the price. esther dyson was a shareholder. the announcement is almost entirely about privacy standards and barely mentions music at all.

~ the long tail ~

the site kept running for sixteen months after the sale and got quieter with every redesign. wikipedia's own gallery captions track it well enough: the 1996 homepage is a tilted bullseye in bright colors and the 1998 one is nothing but the passport. by the last working capture, in april 1999, there is no community visible on the front page whatsoever, only an explanation of a credential.

microsoft switched it off in august 1999 and kept the team, which went on to build the first versions of microsoft passport. the name survived into windows live id and then into the microsoft account. the recommendation work went nowhere inside the company and had to be reinvented from scratch by other people over the following decade, which is the part that reads worst in hindsight. they bought a recommendation engine and shipped a login.

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