GetBack.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

GetBack.com went up in 2007 out of Los Angeles, built by the executives behind Shout! Factory, the reissue label, working with people who had come from IFILM and MTV Networks. The target was adults between 35 and 55, and the subject was American pop culture from roughly 1968 to 1990, organized around whatever year you happened to be seventeen.

The structure was a social network wrapped around a licensed archive. Profiles and messaging sat on one side; on the other was a timeline for each year loaded with news and trivia, plus artist pages carrying biographies and then-and-now galleries. The licensing was the expensive part. Coverage at launch described samples of something like 750,000 songs and a deal with Hulu that brought in older television.

I was twenty-three and in Ankara, which misses that target on both axes, and the nostalgia on sale was for network television I had never seen. The premise does not port either. GetBack assumed a generation that had all watched the same handful of networks and could be shown a year and recognize it; Turkey's version of that shared memory ran through a single state broadcaster until 1990, so the shape exists but none of the contents match.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the bill underneath ~

A licensed catalog is a fixed cost that does not care how many people show up. Shout! Factory's whole business was knowing how to clear rights to old material cheaply, which is the one advantage GetBack started with, and it still had to find enough boomers willing to build a profile page to cover it.

~ the tweet that promised march ~

The site closed in January 2010. On 14 January the GetBack account posted that it would be back in March with a new site. That is the last substantive thing in the record. By 2012 the domain was parked, and Wikipedia's article still carries that 2012 status line today, fourteen years later, because nobody has had a reason to update it.

I checked the domain while writing this. Over https it fails to complete a connection at all, and over http it returns a redirect that times out. There is no parking page left and no broker lander, which means nobody is even trying to sell it. A domain that stopped even being worth parking is about as finished as a web product gets.

~ it was not the only one ~

The boomer social network was a real category for about three years and it emptied out fast. TeeBeeDee, for people over 40, closed in July 2009, six months before GetBack. Eons held on until June 2012, when its back-end provider walked away from the contract. Each had a version of the same bet, that a generation arriving on the social web late would want somewhere of its own rather than the place their children were already using, and they were all answered by the same thing, which was Facebook opening to everyone and the parents simply going there.

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