GirlSense

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

~ the obit ~

American teenage girls designed clothes on GirlSense, and I was a male engineering student in Ankara for most of the five years it ran. There is no version of the late 2000s where this site and I intersect. What is left is to read it properly, which turns out to be more interesting than the demographic line makes it sound.

It ran in Flash. You drew or assembled a garment using the design tools, then you opened an e-boutique, a storefront page with your own layout and logo, and put your fashions in it for other members to rate and bid on. Live auctions and chat groups shipped on 12 March 2008: fashions could be scheduled for auction, and bidders could watch the current bids before placing their own. The currency was G-cents. A Zazzle integration let a design come off the screen and arrive at a real address printed on a real object.

StarNet Interactive built it, an Israeli startup with a Delaware entity, founded and run by Cathy Glazer. The same team ran KiddoNet, and girlsense.com had served KiddoNet content for years before GirlSense appeared on it, which is why the domain's archive reaches back to 2004 for a site that only became GirlSense in 2007. StarNet raised around 2.7 million dollars, and in the spring of 2008 IAC's Consumer Applications and Portals division bought the company outright, terms undisclosed. Press at the time put GirlSense above a million unique visitors a month, next to a registered-user figure of 13 million that nobody should take at face value for a site relaunched fourteen months earlier.

IAC CAP was renamed Mindspark Interactive Network on 1 January 2009. GirlSense spent the rest of its life as a Mindspark property, in the same portfolio as Zwinky, which IAC already owned and which was aimed at exactly the same girls.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the notice ~

The homepage dropped from its steady 2,660 bytes to about 1,230 between 15 and 19 July 2012, and stayed there for the next seven years. What replaced the site was a message signed by the GirlSense Team. "Due to circumstances beyond our control, GirlSense must close," it said, then went on to a change in resources meaning they could no longer serve the community with the quality they were proud of.

Then the practical part, and this is the part that lands. Quoting the notice: GirlSense fashions, e-Boutiques and account information will no longer be accessible, and any G-cents you may have earned will no longer be applicable. Comments to an info@ address that would stop being read.

A fan blog had reported the whole thing three weeks early, on 28 June 2012, naming 18 July as the date and reproducing on-site instructions that pointed members at another service where they could save their designs before the lights went out. That post says the sponsors were backing out and advertising alone could not cover the site. "A change in resources" is the corporate phrasing for the same sentence.

~ what was actually in there ~

The archive holds 2,621 distinct boutique pages, one for each member who bothered to build a shop. That is the honest measure of the place. Registrations are free and mean nothing, whereas 2,621 people did the work of laying out a storefront and stocking it.

The feature list reads like every single 2008 idea arriving at once. There was a face maker and a logo maker. There was graffiti, and gift cards, and ID cards, and a mode called Fashion Empire. The star ratings were wired into every boutique page, so the whole thing was a popularity contest with a garment attached.

~ what happened to the domain ~

The farewell page sat on girlsense.com untouched until 2 April 2019, when the domain began redirecting to a casual-games portal, and it kept redirecting until April 2026. The host went dark sometime after that and answers nothing today. So the goodbye note stayed up for six and a half years after the site it was apologizing for, and the domain went on outliving the goodbye note by another seven.

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