iloveschool

» see iloveschool.co.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

iloveschool was a korean phenomenon and it stayed in korea. around 2000 and 2001 it was one of the biggest sites in the country, and i was a university-age kid in turkey who never once heard the name until i went looking for graves like this one.

it started in 1999, built by a founder named kim young-sam and a small team on almost no money. the idea was simple to the point of obvious. you typed in your school and the years you attended, and it connected you to everyone else who had done the same. in a country with near-universal schooling and a strong class-reunion culture, that turned out to be rocket fuel. five million members signed up in the first year.

by november 2000 it was past seven million, and by february 2002 it had ten million members, in a country of around forty-seven million people at the time. korea in those years had broadband running well ahead of turkey and a social internet that looked nothing like the msn-and-forums world i lived in. iloveschool belongs to that story, not mine.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the whole product was nostalgia turned into a lookup. people found middle-school friends they had not spoken to in twenty years, and the press filled up with reunion stories, some of them heartwarming and a fair number that ended marriages. for a stretch it was less a website than a national event.

~ the actual end ~

the company could not turn that moment into a business. it never solved how to make money off reconnection, and just as badly it never solved its own boardroom. management changed hands over and over, control fights consumed the years when it should have been building, and by the time cyworld arrived with a stickier model the crowd had somewhere else to be. the site limped on far longer than its relevance. around 2017 it posted a server-migration notice and then quietly went dark. in 2022 a different company revived the name as an app, which is its own kind of ending, the brand outliving the thing people actually loved.

~ what carried over ~

iloveschool is one of the clean early proofs that a social network can win an entire country in a single year and still lose it, that being first and being loved is not the same as being durable. korea's next social wave, cyworld and its minihompy, learned the lesson and monetized the sentiment that iloveschool had only discovered.

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