FriendBinder

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

~ the last words ~

FriendBinder closed on 26 October 2013, seventeen days after its author said it would. It was built and run by one person, Richard Cunningham, out of the British Midlands, and the problem it solved was the one everybody had around 2008: your friends were scattered across services that did not talk to each other, so keeping up with them meant opening five tabs and reading five timelines.

Its answer was to read all of those timelines for you. FriendBinder pulled your contacts' activity from Facebook and Twitter, then Flickr and YouTube, then anything that published a feed, and laid the result out as one stream you could reply into. The selling point in its own words was that your friends did not even need to join. It read the networks they were already on.

The honest scale of it is in the farewell post. A few thousand signups, and of those only a small number who actually came back. That is a product almost nobody used anywhere, which makes the question of whether it reached Turkey beside the point. What it did have was credibility with the people who watched this category: the official Flickr blog praised the Flickr integration, and The Next Web covered it more than once. Both quotes sat on the homepage until the day it came down.

Cunningham's own diagnosis was about timing rather than execution. "This market is no longer an upcoming segment, but rather a established area where many sophisticated tools compete, making it hard for us to gain traction." He wrote that in 2013, six years after starting. The typo is his, and it reads like someone writing the thing at 23:22 and posting it.

~ the record ~

~ what it promised about the data ~

The shutdown notice included a line that most dead social products never bothered with: "All collected data will destroyed including authentication data/keys and any cached personal data." A service whose entire function was holding OAuth tokens for other people's accounts said out loud that it was deleting them on the way out.

Six years of reading your friends' Facebook and Flickr feeds through someone else's server is a lot of trust to have extended to a side project. The exit was the part where that trust got settled, and he settled it in one sentence.

~ the page that missed the memo ~

By 5 November 2013 the login page was serving "Sorry, FriendBinder is now closed." The signup page was not. On 22 November, four weeks after the site had died, a crawler caught signup.php still displaying an older notice from an earlier phase: "Signup is now Closed. Thank you for your interested in FriendBinder, we have now closed the site to new signups. Existing accounts will continue to function."

Signups had been shut off before the service was. Nobody went back to update the page that said so, so for a few weeks the dead site was promising new arrivals that their accounts would keep working.

~ the blog is still up ~

friendbinder.com answers today with a tombstone of 4,353 bytes. It is a longer and kinder version of the 2013 notice, thanking the people who used the service and naming the coverage it got, and its Last-Modified header reads 19 December 2019, so it was rewritten six years after the closure by someone who still had the keys. blog.friendbinder.com is also still there, with the shutdown post at the top and a three-year gap underneath it: the entry before the goodbye is from 17 September 2010 and argues about what the new Twitter interface meant for third-party clients. HTTPS on that host fails with a TLS error, and plain HTTP serves the whole thing.

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