Hashable

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

~ the goodbye ~

Hashable was built around a verb. When you met somebody, you sent a short message through Twitter or the app itself saying #justmet and who it was, and Hashable logged the introduction on both sides, exchanged the contact details and kept a record of when and where it happened. Other tags covered the rest of the social calendar, #drinks and #lunch among them. Its own marketing put it plainly: save and remember everyone you meet.

Underneath was a scoring system called HashCred. Making introductions that stuck earned you points, and the points fed a leaderboard, initially by city with plans to break it down by industry and profession, so that in principle you could be the startup lawyer in New York with the most HashCred. Michael Yavonditte, the CEO, described the whole thing as a LinkedIn that updated in real time.

He had the standing to raise money on that. Yavonditte had been chief executive of Quigo, an ad-targeting company that sold to AOL in 2007 for a reported $340 million, and Hashable, built in New York out of the remains of an earlier product called Tracked, took in around $4 million. In March 2011 it went to South by Southwest and came back the breakout app of the festival, the thing conference attendees used on each other instead of cards.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the hard part of the pitch ~

Throwing out the business card is one of those ideas that sounds obviously correct and has defeated everyone who has tried it. The card works because it needs no account, no battery, no signal and no cooperation beyond a hand. Any replacement has to be adopted by both people in the room at the moment they meet, which means the product is useless until it is ubiquitous.

Hashable's answer was to make logging an introduction one-sided. You could record meeting someone whether or not they used it, and they would get told. That solved the cold-start problem and created a different one, which is that an app sending messages to people who never signed up has a short runway before it reads as a nuisance.

The leaderboard made it sharper still. Points for introductions turn networking into something visibly scored, and a scoreboard rewards volume rather than usefulness.

~ the day it ended ~

On 11 July 2012 TechCrunch reported that the mobile apps and Hashable.com would both shut down on 25 July. Yavonditte's explanation came as a tweet and it was unusually blunt for a founder: they simply could not make Hashable good enough, they knew they could build a world-class mobile ad system, and he was going back to his area of expertise. Not a pivot, a different company.

The apex stopped serving in September 2012. hashable.com today resolves to nothing on either scheme.

~ what outlived the hashtag ~

Everything Hashable wanted exists now and none of it looks like Hashable. Phones exchange contact details by being held near each other, calendars attach the people you met to the meeting automatically, and LinkedIn absorbed the rest without ever needing a hashtag or a points total. The idea survived. The game around it did not.

As for whether I was ever in range of this one: it was an app for people who collect introductions at American technology conferences, scored against other people in the same city doing the same thing. That crowd was in New York and Austin in 2011. Business cards in Turkey stayed cardboard for a long time after, and the first time most people here traded contact details by phone it was over Bluetooth, then WhatsApp, with nobody keeping score.

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