Google Trader

» see google.com/local/trader as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Kampala got it first. In June 2009 Google turned on a set of SMS services in Uganda with MTN and the Grameen Foundation's AppLab, and one of them was a marketplace. You texted a command to a shortcode to register, texted BUY and a word to search, and the service came back with matching listings and the seller's phone number so you could call them directly. No browser was involved at any point.

That constraint was the whole design. The assumption behind almost every product Google shipped was a person at a screen with a connection, and in Uganda in 2009 that person was a small minority while a person with a phone was most of the country. Google Trader was written for the second group, which meant giving up images and the ability to browse, and keeping the one thing classifieds actually need, which is a way for two strangers to find each other and agree on a price.

I had broadband and a laptop in Ankara in 2009 and had never once been in the situation this product was built for. It is easy to be condescending about a text-message classifieds service from that position, and worth resisting, because the engineering problem here was harder than the one Google usually solved. Craigslist assumes the web. Trader assumed 160 characters and a keypad.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the sms years ~

The web version arrived in Uganda in November 2009 as a companion rather than a replacement. It added photographs and longer descriptions, and let you search for several items at once, while the SMS path kept working underneath for everyone who could not reach the site. Listings ran from crops and livestock through to used electronics and job postings, and the service stayed free and English-only for its whole life.

Ghana came on 2 December 2010, announced on Google's Africa blog, and Kenya and Nigeria followed. Thailand got one too, which is the market everybody forgets, and by the end the country picker on the site offered five flags. That is not a global rollout, and Google never pretended it was building one. This sat inside the same effort as Google SMS Tips and the health information lines, aimed at proving that useful services could run on the phones people already owned in the markets Google wanted to be in early.

~ why google walked away ~

The end came quietly in late 2013. Google stopped accepting new listings on 11 November and closed all five Trader sites on 10 December, with a short notice on each one and no blog post worth the name.

The explanation offered at the time was that the service had done its job, which meant that internet use in those markets had grown enough that Google no longer needed to bootstrap it with a classifieds board. Read less charitably, this was the same year Google was cutting everything that did not sit near search or Android, and a free SMS marketplace in five small markets was never going to survive that review. Classifieds in those countries went to OLX and later to Facebook groups, which is still where they are. Google has not tried again.

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