Going.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

going.com only made sense if you lived in a city it had a map for, and every one of those cities was american. that put it out of my reach before anything else about it mattered. i was in ankara, going was listing thursday-night parties in new york and chicago, and there was no version of it that pointed at my street.

this part is mostly reconstructed. going was built in boston, evan schumacher ran it, and it raised a five-million-dollar round in 2007 to grow into a local events site. you typed your city and it showed you what was on that week, concerts and gallery openings, and you could rsvp. it launched in around thirty us cities, new york and miami among them. the pitch was decent for its moment: local discovery, before the phone in your pocket knew where you were standing.

aol bought going in june 2009, part of tim armstrong's push to own local content, for a figure believed to be under ten million. it sat inside aol for almost two years without turning into a hit. on may 1, 2011 aol shut the site and pushed its pieces into moviefone and patch. the events listings moved into the movie site, and going stopped existing as itself.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was early to ~

local discovery was a real idea going was simply too early to win. it wanted to be the thing you checked before you went out, in a year when checking meant sitting at a desktop, not glancing at a phone on a street corner. foursquare and the location apps that actually cracked this were a year or two behind it and carried gps in every pocket. going had the concept and none of the hardware.

~ where it ended up ~

aol spent the armstrong years trying to make local pay, and going was one of the pieces it fed into that. patch outlasted the going name but never really solved the same problem either. the boston team's events engine became a line in an acquisition history, and the cities it once mapped went on having their thursday nights without it.

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