Frappr

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

~ the obit ~

before phones had gps, social mapping meant a map you filled in by hand. frappr was exactly that. you made a map for your group, and everyone dropped a pin where they lived. the map became a little census of who was reading or listening. it was a widget people embedded on blogs and myspace pages. i was not on myspace, and neither was most of turkey.

kun gao built it in 2005 while in grad school, on top of the brand-new google maps api. that api was the whole trick. google had just opened maps to outside developers, and frappr was one of the first toys made from it, a mashup before the word had settled. platial, a portland social-mapping startup backed by kleiner perkins, bought frappr on the first of october 2007.

then the category died. google maps kept absorbing everything a mapping startup could offer, and there was no room left underneath it. on the twenty-seventh of february 2010 platial announced it was closing frappr within days, and platial itself went to the deadpool the same year. kun gao landed fine and went on to co-found crunchyroll. the maps, with all their hand-dropped pins, went dark.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the mashup moment ~

2005 was the year the mashup was born. google published the maps api, and within months the web filled with maps of things google never intended, from housing prices to band tour dates. frappr was the friendly end of that wave, the version your aunt's book club could use. for about two years, a frappr map was a normal thing to find at the bottom of a website.

~ the long tail ~

nothing replaced frappr exactly, because the need it served got swallowed by the phone. once every device knew where it was, you did not build a map by asking people to type their city into a widget. the pin dropped itself. social mapping as a genre, the deliberate hand-built kind, quietly ended around the time frappr did.

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