Fropper

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

~ the goodbye ~

Fropper launched in april 2003 out of india, and for a few years it was the closest thing the country had to a homegrown social network. It came from People Group, the same mumbai outfit that ran shaadi.com, so it arrived with real money behind it and a founder, Anupam Mittal, who understood how indians online wanted to meet each other. Before orkut took over the campuses and long before facebook, fropper was where a certain slice of urban india kept its profile.

The peak was modest by later standards. Around the 2006 redesign it counted about 1.5 million members, which in the india of dial-up and shared cybercafes was a genuine crowd. It ran the usual shape of the era: profiles, photos, interest communities and a dating angle that People Group knew how to monetize. For a while it held its own against the incoming american networks.

It did not hold for long. Orkut had india in its grip by the mid-2000s, and then facebook took everyone who was left. By january 2015 People Group had folded fropper into a dating app called Thrill, and the standalone site was quietly wound down after that. Premium members got their fees back on a pro-rata basis, and every account and every photo was deleted once the notice period ran out.

Fropper's world was india, and india in 2003 was not a place i had any reason to be online. I was a teenager in turkey on a 33.6k modem, and the networks that reached me were the ones that reached everyone, not the regional ones. I read about fropper the way i read about most of these, after the fact, tracing where a piece of somebody else's internet went.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

Fropper sat in the same slot for india that friendster and hi5 filled elsewhere, an early general-purpose social network that people used to find friends and dates before the category consolidated. Its advantage was that it was local, run by people who knew the market. Its problem was that being local stopped mattering once the global networks arrived with better tools and everyone your friends already used.

~ how it actually ended ~

The end was administrative rather than dramatic. Thrill absorbed the brand in early 2015, and the site itself did not survive the merger in any real form. The farewell note People Group left was gracious about it, thanking the community for making the thing grow. Then the servers were cleared and fropper became a domain that still resolves but no longer means anything.

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