Flipgrid (Flip)

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

~ the obit ~

the sentence that matters is in the help center article, under a question about what happens to your videos. no data from flip will be migrated into teams. all videos and all user data across all systems of flip will be fully deleted within thirty days of flip's sunset on october 1, 2024. that is the ending, written down in advance, in a product whose entire purpose was to hold recordings of children talking about what they had learned.

flipgrid came out of the lt media lab at the university of minnesota and shipped in january 2014, first under the name vidku. a teacher posted a topic. students answered it by recording short videos of themselves, and the answers arrived as a grid of thumbnails with faces in them. it sold on a subscription, one price per teacher for any number of students, which is the only pricing model that has ever worked in a school.

microsoft bought it in june 2018, at which point twenty million students in more than 180 countries were using it. the purchase came with a gesture that is rare enough to record: microsoft made the product free for teachers and refunded the ones already paying. for four years it was the thing american classrooms reached for when the assignment was speaking rather than writing, and two studies published in 2020 found that it did measurably raise engagement in remote and hybrid teaching, which was the year everybody needed that to be true.

i have never taught a class and i was out of school long before any of this was possible, so nothing here is mine. what pulled me to it is the deletion. most of the products on this site died and left something behind, a wayback capture or a file on somebody's drive. this one had an owner who wrote down the date the recordings would be destroyed, and then destroyed them on schedule.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it became ~

the rename came on 27 june 2022, announced at the iste conference during an event microsoft called flipfest. flipgrid became flip, the domain moved to flip.com, and the word that had been a slightly odd compound noun for eight years became a verb nobody was using. renaming a product that teachers recommend to each other by name is a decision with a cost, and the cost was collected two years later when the thing being retired had two names and half the people who used it knew only the old one.

the feature list at the end was larger than the one at the start. rosters synced from google classroom, which is worth noticing because google classroom is a competitor's product. there was automatic transcription with closed captioning, stickers and sticky notes laid on top of the video, augmented reality filters, guest speaker accounts, and a library of ready-made topics from nasa and the bbc. it had turned into a real platform, which is usually the point at which a platform survives.

~ the deletion clause ~

in june 2024 microsoft announced that flip was going into teams for education. the timetable was published at once and it ran fast. on 1 july the apps came out of the stores and flip.com went read-only, so nothing new could be created. through 30 september you could log in and download what you had made. on 1 october the site stopped existing.

what moved into teams was a subset. video assignments and video messages made the trip. comments and the augmented reality features did not, and neither did a single file. the faq is explicit that no data would be migrated, which meant every teacher with four years of student work had a three-month window to save it by hand, one video at a time, in the middle of a school summer. teams for education is a fine place to send video to a class. it is not the same object, and the ten years of recordings that made flipgrid worth buying were not part of what was inherited.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »