HipGeo

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

~ the obituary ~

Scott Daniel and Rich Rygg had done this before. Their company Futuretouch was bought by Yahoo in 1999 and absorbed into GeoCities, and they spent the years after that inside Yahoo watching the largest personal-publishing platform on the web get managed slowly to death. In August 2010 they started HipGeo in Los Angeles with a third founder and no outside money, and raised $500,000 the following May from Morado Venture Partners and a small group of angels that included eHarmony's former chief scientist.

The product was a rejection of the dominant idea of its moment. Foursquare had trained an entire industry to believe that location software meant pressing a button to announce where you were, which meant that your record of a trip was a list of the places you had remembered to tell an app about. HipGeo did not ask. It logged the route in the background and pinned the photos you took to the points where you took them, so what you had afterward was a journal of the actual trip rather than a highlight reel of the moments you had thought to perform.

Dates on the launch disagree and both are defensible. Wikipedia files it as January 2012, which is when the rebuilt iPhone app went out with a press release on the tenth. The site and the first version were already up in September 2011. The January release is the one that got written about: TechCrunch called it a glimpse of the future of location-aware apps, and Condé Nast Traveler named it the most promising travel technology of 2012.

~ the case file ~

~ the battery problem ~

Passive logging is a wonderful feature and an expensive one. An app that knows your route all day is an app with the GPS awake all day, and in 2012 that meant a phone that did not survive to dinner. Every company that tried this between 2010 and 2015 hit the same wall, and the wall did not move until the phones themselves grew dedicated low-power motion chips.

There was a geography to it as well. This was an iPhone product in a country where carriers subsidized iPhones heavily, aimed at people who travel. The iPhone arrived in Turkey at full import price with no subsidy worth the name, and mobile data in 2012 was metered tightly enough that leaving a location service running all day was a decision with a bill attached. Travel-logging apps were not a thing people around me argued about, because the hardware they assumed was not the hardware in anyone's pocket.

~ who actually showed up ~

The archived crawl of hipgeo.com in late 2013 is instructive about what a public profile directory becomes when nobody is minding it. Alongside real travelers posting journals, the usernames the crawler picked up include a medical clinic, a provincial funding consultancy, a criminal defense practice and a cosmetic surgery page. None of them are travelers. All of them are businesses that worked out that a site with decent search ranking will host their keywords for free.

This happens to every open directory eventually and it is not what kills them, but it is a reliable sign that the people running the thing have stopped looking. The last normal user journals in the archive are from the middle of November 2013.

~ how it broke ~

There was no farewell post and no email anyone preserved. The archive just shows the machine failing. Through the autumn of 2013 the site served normally, around five kilobytes a page. On 19 December the stylesheets and images started answering 500. By 26 December the same files were 404s. On 3 January 2014 the domain itself answered with a redirect.

~ what the domain became ~

A shutdown notice appeared at hipgeo.com/shut-down/ sometime before 20 January 2014, which is the first date the archive has it. After that the domain was handed to a WordPress install carrying a single post and the default comment that ships with every new WordPress, which means every link anyone had ever shared to a HipGeo journal now landed on a blank blog. The register that records this death files it at 1 December 2013. The archive puts the actual failure three weeks later, in the week before Christmas, which is when a small company's hosting bill tends to go unpaid.

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