FitFinder

» see thefitfinder.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

By the spring of 2010 I was at the far end of my own university years and out of the demographic entirely. FitFinder happened that same spring in British university libraries, to people several years younger than me, and the whole thing was over in thirty-five days.

Rich Martell was reading computer science at University College London. The site started as a joke he had with his rugby friends, who texted each other when they saw somebody they liked on campus, and on 23 April 2010 he turned the text messages into a public feed.

You posted a location and a description with no account and no name attached, and it appeared on something called the FitFeed for anyone to read. Martell described it as anonymous microblogging with a location on it, which is accurate and completely bloodless as a description of a wall of undergraduates rating strangers in a library.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Two thousand people were on it within hours and it had to be pulled offline to stay standing. It came back and did close to twenty thousand visitors over the first weekend. By the time it closed it claimed more than 250,000 users and over five million page views on a network covering fifty-two UK universities.

The coverage list reads like a league table, from Oxford and Cambridge down through most of the red bricks. That tells you how it spread. There was no advertising budget and no app. It traveled along the social wiring students already had, and in 2010 that wiring was Facebook.

~ the slide ~

The content was the problem from the first week. Anonymous posting about identifiable people in identifiable places produces exactly what anybody could have predicted, and the London School of Economics emailed its entire student body a warning inside seven days.

JANET, the network connecting British universities, blocked the site after complaints. The block generated its own complaints and was reversed. UCL then fined Martell 300 pounds, the maximum its own rules allowed, for refusing to take the site down and for bringing the university into disrepute. He told the student press he thought UCL acted because other universities were complaining to UCL, which is a specific and believable account of how institutional pressure actually moves.

He worried publicly that his degree was at risk, and a UCL spokesman said there was no question of results being withheld. On 28 May 2010 the site came down anyway. A petition to bring it back collected more than 3,700 signatures and changed nothing.

~ what got buried with it ~

Martell came back in January 2011 with Floxx, which took the same location-based idea and tried to build a product out of it rather than a joke. It did not catch. In 2026 floxx.com is a broker's for-sale template and thefitfinder.co.uk answers with a Cloudflare error, which is what a domain looks like when somebody is still paying for it and nothing is behind it.

The thirty-five days are the number worth keeping. FitFinder reached a quarter of a million people on one mechanic that every anonymous campus product since has rebuilt: post about somebody in a place, and let everyone read it with no name attached. What killed it was not the mechanic and not the hosting bill. It was a disciplinary letter from the founder's own university.

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