Futubra

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

~ the obit ~

By 2012 the microblog question already had an answer in turkish and the answer was twitter. A russian-only competitor from a russian portal company was never going to turn up on a screen in ankara, and it did not. i am reading about Futubra now the way you read about a shop that opened and closed on a street in a country you have not visited.

Mail.Ru Group put it into beta on 16 january 2012. Posts were capped at two hundred characters and could carry a photo or a video, with hashtags in the text and an RSS feed on the way out. About twenty people built it. Seventeen thousand accounts were opened on the first day, which for a company that already held the country's largest email service is a polite number rather than a good one.

It reached eighty thousand registered users by 11 june 2012 and then it sat there. Mail.Ru announced the closure on 20 december 2012 and named the reason without decorating it: the audience was not growing in any sustainable way. Eleven months from beta to obituary, in a year when the same company was shipping products that are still running.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pivot ~

In the summer of 2012 the team changed what the product was. Text-only posts were banned outright and every entry now required a picture or a video attached to it. The service started describing itself as a forum with images rather than as a microblog. This is a specific kind of decision, taken when the graph is flat and the room concludes that the format is wrong rather than the demand. The graph stayed flat.

~ why it did not take ~

Futubra shipped in russian only and was never wired into anything else Mail.Ru owned, which is a strange thing for a company holding the email accounts and the messenger of a whole country to leave undone. The audience it wanted already had somewhere to post. Twitter worked perfectly well in russian and VK held the social graph, so a third feed had to be better rather than merely local, and it was not.

The interesting part is not that Mail.Ru failed here, since Mail.Ru went on to own most of the russian internet under a different name. It is how completely a large company can build a social product and be finished with it inside one calendar year. What survives is an encyclopedia entry and a handful of news items from the week it closed.

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