Flektor

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

~ the goodbye ~

Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin ran Naughty Dog and made Crash Bandicoot, and Sony bought the studio in 2001. Six years later the same two people were running a company that made slideshows for MySpace profiles.

Flektor.com opened on 2 April 2007 out of an office in Culver City. You uploaded photos and video or pulled them in from Photobucket and YouTube, and the browser handed you a timeline with about a hundred effects and transitions on it. The finished object was called a flek, and it embedded into anything that accepted a widget, which in 2007 meant MySpace before anything else. Over forty thousand people were using it inside the first month.

Seven weeks after the public launch, News Corp bought the company. The deal closed on 29 May 2007 at a reported figure above twenty million dollars, and it was announced in the same breath as Photobucket, which cost around three hundred million. Fox Interactive Media now owned MySpace and both of the services people used to fill it. The founders left.

The strangest line on Flektor's record came later. In the fall of 2008 it built the official website for the United States presidential debates, hosted at MyDebates, after having run the polling for the MySpace and MTV candidate dialogues the year before. A company founded to put animated wipes on your holiday pictures ended up as the front door to a presidential debate.

None of this reached me. MySpace never took hold in Turkey, where the social network everybody was on between 2005 and 2009 was hi5, and I was not on that one either. A product whose entire distribution channel was the MySpace profile embed had nothing to embed into on this side of the map.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was actually good at ~

Video editing in a browser in 2007 was not a normal thing to attempt. There was no HTML5 video element in general use and no canvas worth compositing on, so the whole thing ran inside the Flash player against a server doing the encoding. Flektor's technical staff came out of a studio that had shipped PlayStation titles, which is an odd background for web work and exactly the right one for squeezing real time effects out of a runtime that was never meant to give them.

The competition was Slide and RockYou, both of which were widget factories rather than editors. Flektor was closer to a small production tool wearing a widget's clothes. That is probably why Fox wanted it, and also why Fox never found a use for it.

~ the cost cut ~

In the second week of January 2009, Fox Interactive Media told its staff that Flektor and SpringWidgets were both closing. Twenty five jobs went, ten in Culver City and fifteen at the SpringWidgets office in Atlanta. The stated reason was cost control, with a line added about a strategic decision on how best to integrate the Flektor technology into MySpace.

Nothing was integrated. MySpace was already losing to Facebook by then and would be sold in 2011 for thirty five million dollars, against the five hundred and eighty News Corp had paid to get it. Flektor cost twenty million and was switched off to save ten salaries in a division that was about to lose almost everything anyway.

~ what got buried with it ~

The flek does not exist anywhere now. Every embed pointed back at flektor.com, so each profile page carrying one went blank the moment the servers stopped, and MySpace deleted most of those profiles later regardless. Whatever people made with those hundred effects went out in two waves and left nothing behind to find.

There is a general point in here about where a creative tool keeps the work. Flektor held the file on its own servers and put the player on someone else's page, so the finished thing belonged to neither the person who made it nor the site showing it. When the middle vanished, both ends were left holding a dead rectangle.

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