GlobeXplorer

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

~ the eulogy ~

You used GlobeXplorer without ever seeing the name, and that was the design. It was a wholesaler of pictures of the ground, sitting one layer underneath the map and property sites that actually faced you, and it charged for what it served in 512 by 512 pixel blocks it called standard image units, metered like phone calls and settled like interbank transfers. If a real estate listing in 2003 showed you an aerial photo of somebody's roof, there is a decent chance the tile came out of Walnut Creek, California.

The company came out of HJW GeoSpatial, a survey firm that had run a NASA project to put ready-made orthophotography online. That project produced a searchable earth imagery website in 1998. Harrods of London, of all possible owners, had bought HJW, and it put up the money to spin the online piece out as GlobeXplorer in 1999. Rob Shanks, Michael Fisher, Chris Nicholas and Paul Smith went with it. Sun Microsystems and Oracle were partners from the start, partly because both wanted an answer to Microsoft's TerraServer demonstration.

The public site opened in September 2000. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the front of its business section headlined Now you, too, can be a Spy, and the site took nearly four million page views that day, which in 2000 was an event rather than a Tuesday. It had already announced the largest online archive of earth imagery anyone had assembled, five months before the public site even opened. AirPhotoUSA was bought in 2005. On 8 January 2007 Stewart Title's real estate information arm sold the whole company to DigitalGlobe, which had satellites but not much of a way to sell what they saw.

~ the dossier ~

~ the fold ~

Acquisitions of this shape do not produce a shutdown notice, so there is no announcement to quote and the archive has to do the work instead. globexplorer.com kept serving its own homepage, its own green styling and its own title tag reading GlobeXplorer Aerial Photos Satellite Images and Maps for almost two years after the sale went through. The last capture of that page is 28 October 2008. By 19 December 2008 the address answered with a redirect to digitalglobe.com and it never served itself again. A blank holding page turned up at the domain in 2012 and once more in 2013, and by August 2015 even that was pointing at the buyer.

DigitalGlobe was later folded into Maxar, so the imagery business that GlobeXplorer taught to sell itself online is still running two owners downstream from the name on the door.

~ what it proved first ~

Distance is the easy part of this grave, because the product was never sold to me or to anyone like me. It was sold to the people who built the sites I was looking at. But 1999 is the year I was two years into dial-up on a 33.6k modem, and the thing worth remembering about GlobeXplorer is what it assumed about strangers: that ordinary people would want to look at the roof of their own house from above, badly enough to make a business out of the wanting. Google Earth got the credit for proving that. This is where the invoice was first written.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »