Highlight

» see highlig.ht as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

highlight never made it onto my phone. by 2012 i was on a symbian touch device in ankara for work and a cheap android handset at home with battery management as a daily concern, and an app that wanted continuous gps plus facebook graph access in the background was the wrong tradeoff for both devices. highlight launched in february 2012 out of paul davison's small san francisco studio, which would later be incorporated as math camp. the public pitch was that the phone could tell you when a friend or a near-friend walked into the same room as you.

the sxsw moment a month later was the peak. for the week of the festival in march 2012, every tech blog out of austin had a highlight take. robert scoble was using it on stage, npr ran a segment titled the talk of sxsw, every panel speaker checked the app between sessions. the model felt like it could be the next foursquare with a more social layer on top. valley investors gave benchmark and others a chance to put money in at a generous valuation that summer.

the post-sxsw year showed the problem. when nobody else in your network had the app installed, the ambient feed was empty. the battery cost of continuous gps and bluetooth scanning was real, and ios 6 made it worse by surfacing battery hogs in a system view that flagged highlight publicly. android support landed in november 2012 to widen the network. the daily-active number never followed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

sxsw 2012 sat in a small window where the location category looked like it might be a real consumer business. foursquare had crossed 15 million users earlier that month. brightkite had been bought and rebranded a year before. loopt was being shopped to a buyer who would close the deal as green dot later in 2012. gowalla had just been bought by facebook. the ambient layer underneath those check-in products was open territory, and highlight was the brand that owned the festival.

the demo was good in person. you stood next to davison or one of the early users, the app pinged because a face two rows back had three mutual facebook friends with you, and the social ice was broken. inside a tech conference with a high friend-graph density that worked. outside that room it was a different story. the app needed everyone you wanted to bump into to also be a daily user, and outside sxsw the network was thin.

~ the pivot trail ~

between 2013 and 2016 math camp shipped a few different apps trying to find the next product. shorts, an instagram-with-bigger-images photo app, launched in 2014. roll, a photo-organizing tool that surfaced pictures by location and tag, came in late 2014. davison gave a few interviews in early 2016 about pivoting math camp into a discovery-app studio rather than a single-product company. none of the new apps hit a network effect of their own.

on 14 july 2016 pinterest announced a team acquihire of math camp. the financial terms were not disclosed, the math camp engineers joined pinterest's discovery team, and highlight, shorts, and roll were all sunset over the following weeks. the techcrunch headline read pinterest acquires the team behind highlight and shorts, which was the cleanest read of what had happened to the products.

~ the next chapter ~

davison left pinterest within a year. in 2019 he and rohan seth started a new startup called talkshow, which pivoted to audio rooms and shipped as clubhouse in april 2020. clubhouse had its own moment in early 2021 during the second pandemic winter, hit a $4 billion valuation in a16z's spring 2021 round, and faded back to a smaller niche audience by 2023 the way highlight had faded in 2013.

the ambient-presence idea highlight bet on never became a standalone product category. apple folded a tiny version of it into find my friends and later into airdrop nearby. snapchat shipped snap map in 2017 with a heavier social layer. zenly grew large in europe before snap bought it in 2017 and shut it down in 2023. the through-line from highlight to those products is real even though the company itself was gone by mid-2016.

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