Four11

» see four11.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

By the time i would have had any use for Four11, the name was already off the door. i got a modem line in 1998, and the acquisition had closed the previous october. The thing that survived it was sitting right there in front of me looking like it had always belonged to Yahoo.

Four11 Corporation was founded in Menlo Park in 1994 by Michael Santullo and Larry Drebes. The name is the number americans dialed for directory assistance, which tells you the entire product in three digits. It was a searchable white pages of email addresses, with phone and postal listings bolted on later. You added yourself to it. Searching was free.

That sounds trivial now and it was not trivial then. In 1994 there was no general way to find a person's email address. You asked a mutual acquaintance, or you guessed at a format, or you did not reach them. Several companies were trying to be the phone book for this, and Four11 got bigger at it than most, which is why Yahoo eventually came calling.

RocketMail arrived in 1996, built in the same building, treated internally as a feature of the directory rather than a business. By the autumn of 1997 it had passed 750,000 registered users and was in a real fight with Hotmail for first place in free webmail. The sideline had gotten larger than the thing it was a sideline to.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The directory worked on a bargain that would be unthinkable to offer now: you typed your own name, your email and where you lived into a public box on a website, on purpose, so that people could find you. Nobody thought of that as a privacy question in 1995. The internet was small enough that being findable was the whole point of being on it.

Four11 sold against that reasoning to portals and to anyone who needed lookup as a feature, and it also sold net-phone tools nobody remembers. The white pages was the asset. When Yahoo bought the company, that directory is the thing the press release led with.

~ the day it died ~

Yahoo announced the definitive agreement on 8 october 1997 and completed the acquisition on the twentieth, for about 92 million dollars in stock, a figure some outlets rounded to 94. Yahoo Mail went live on the RocketMail engine almost immediately, and the Four11 white pages became Yahoo People Search.

At the end of that same year Microsoft bought Hotmail for something in the region of 400 million dollars, and that is the number the era remembers. Four11 had built the same category of product and a directory besides, and went for less than a quarter of it, ten weeks earlier. Being first to be acquired is not the same as being first.

~ the long tail ~

Yahoo Mail became one of the most-used pieces of software on earth for roughly the next fifteen years, and the code underneath the first few years of it came out of a company that thought it was in the directory business. The rocketmail.com domain hung around as an address suffix, closed to new signups, then reopened on 19 june 2008, then closed again in april 2013.

The directory half aged worse. Yahoo People Search kept running for years as a quiet utility page, gradually stripped of everything that made it useful, until the assumption it was built on had inverted completely and nobody wanted a public list of their own contact details anymore. The mail engine outlived the business plan by two decades. The business plan did not make it out of the nineties.

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