Flavors.me

» see flavors.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Flavors.me gave you one page. You picked a template, dropped in a background image large enough to fill a monitor, typed your name over it, and then connected the accounts you already had. It would talk to around fifteen services at launch, among them Flickr and Twitter, plus any RSS feed you could point it at, and your page updated itself from then on. The basic version was free. Twenty dollars a year got you your own domain on top of it, which was the real product, because the point of the whole exercise was handing somebody a short address instead of five.

I never had one of these, but I had the local version of the same urge. On the Turkish hardware forums in the middle of the 2000s, donanimhaber and frmtr, your identity was your signature block, and mine was my machine listed out line by line, down to the graphics card I had saved up for. You updated it when you upgraded something. That is exactly what Flavors.me was selling a few years later, a tidy place to state who you are in public, except assembled by a designer and pulling its contents in automatically instead of being retyped by hand every time something changed.

It came out of HiiDef, a small New York operation started by the former Vimeo executive Jonathan Marcus with his brother David, and it launched on 23 February 2010 after three months of private beta. The timing put it directly alongside About.me, which appeared the same year with nearly the same idea and a far better exit. Flavors.me was the prettier of the two and the more design-led. It shipped in Flash, which looked wonderful and worked badly, and by May 2010 the team had thrown the Flash out and rebuilt the typography on web fonts.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The audience was never general. Flavors.me got taken up by photographers and designers, people whose work was already sitting on four other platforms and who needed one address to put on a business card. It was a portfolio for people who did not want to build a portfolio, and for a few years the look of it was everywhere in that world: one full bleed photograph with thin type sitting on top of it.

~ the MOO years ~

MOO.com acquired it on 20 September 2012. The logic was not hard to follow, since MOO prints business cards and Flavors.me was in effect a business card that lived on the web, so the cross sell wrote itself. The announcement went up on the Flavors.me blog under a friendly headline about MOO saying hello.

Then five years of very little. The service kept running and kept being maintained in the lightest sense, and MOO's actual business continued to be printing. On 15 February 2017 the notice went up, citing a change in strategic direction and a move of resources to other digital projects. Every free account would close on 31 March. The Hacker News thread that day is five comments long. By then the category had been hollowed out anyway and the people who needed a single link had moved on.

~ the link in bio problem ~

What Flavors.me solved is a problem that never went away. You are on several platforms, none of which will let you point at the others, and you need one address that gathers them. Linktree launched in 2016 and did a flatter and far more successful version of the same job, carried there by Instagram allowing exactly one clickable link in a profile.

flavors.me does not resolve today. It is not parked and not redirected to MOO, it is simply gone from DNS, which takes with it every custom domain that was ever pointed at it. Nine years on, the business card still has an address printed on it that goes nowhere.

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