Hot Potato

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

~ the obit ~

2010 was the year every New York app worth funding was a check-in app, and what separated this one was the object you checked into. Foursquare and Gowalla wanted a place. Hot Potato wanted an activity, so the check-in was a football match or an episode of something you were watching at home, and other people checked into the same thing from wherever they were.

Justin Shaffer had spent seven years building digital products for Major League Baseball before starting it, which explains the emphasis on live events, the one category where a lot of strangers reliably want to talk about the same thing at the same minute. The company went live in November 2009 out of Brooklyn with three co-founders alongside him and $1.42 million from First Round Capital and RRE Ventures, plus a long list of New York angels.

On 18 August 2010 Facebook launched Places. Two days later it confirmed it had bought Hot Potato, for a price reported at around ten million dollars, with eight employees moving over. The service was given roughly a month. Its front page in September carried one line, that Hot Potato would be winding down soon, above a feed of strangers still posting what they were drinking. All user data was deleted at the end, and nobody was carried across into Places.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ activities, not places ~

The idea was better than the market for it. A location check-in has an obvious payoff, since the bar can hand you something for it, and a mayorship is a score you can see. Checking in to "listening to your love" pays nothing and depends entirely on somebody else caring, which is a thin foundation for a network with a hundred thousand users rather than a hundred million.

Twitter already did the same job badly and at enormous scale. What Hot Potato had that Twitter did not was the structure, an actual object for the activity that other people's posts could attach to, and that structure is what Facebook bought.

~ what facebook actually bought ~

This was an acqui-hire and both sides said so plainly. The team's own note said selling was not easy after building up a base of dedicated users, and that if it was going to sell to anyone, Facebook was the natural choice. Shaffer went on to run Facebook Groups, the 2010 relaunch, and later worked on the location side.

Ten million dollars for eight engineers in 2010 was roughly the going rate in New York, and the product was closed rather than absorbed because Facebook had already shipped its own version of the location half two days earlier. Nothing about Hot Potato's code was needed. The people were.

~ the check-in years, from a distance ~

Turkey got the check-in habit through Foursquare, later and harder than the American press assumed. Istanbul was one of that app's larger cities for a while, and for a couple of years around 2011 the etiquette question of whether you announced your location to everyone you knew was a live argument here too. None of the second-tier check-in apps made that trip. Hot Potato in particular lived for ten months, in English, mostly among people who read technology blogs in New York, and the ones who did not follow that world simply never saw it exist.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »