In.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

India had a portal war and it happened in a country I have never been to, in languages and markets I was reading about rather than living in. What is legible from outside is the shape, and the shape here is unusually clean: one company buys a very short domain, puts everything a portal can have behind it on the same day, and leads the national market in its first full month.

In.com launched in August 2008, built by Web18, the digital arm of Network18 in Mumbai. The domain is two letters, which in 2008 still said something about how serious the owner intended to be. The approach was to arrive complete rather than to grow into the category, so the news and the video and the email all opened together instead of arriving one product at a time.

It worked straight away. comScore's numbers for September 2008, published that October, put in.com second among Indian web destinations, ahead of both Indiatimes and Sify, in its first full month of operation. Rishi Khiani, then Web18's COO, said the figures ratified their belief that the Indian online space was ripe for a new service that delivered the medium smartly and yet comprehensively. That is the sentence of a company which believes it has just won something.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

The email had the strongest hold, the way email always does, because an address is the one thing you cannot casually swap out. mail.in.com offered Indian users a short national-looking address at a point when the domestic alternative was Rediffmail and everything else on offer was American.

The rest was the standard portal spread of the period, assembled mostly by buying and bundling rather than by building. That was the entire theory: put the applications under one roof, be the page the browser opens on, and sell against the attention that collects there.

~ the decline ~

The decline is legible purely in rankings. Second in the country in late 2008. Eighteenth in India on Alexa by December 2012. Nothing dramatic happened in between, which is the point. Facebook and YouTube landed properly in India in those years, and the reason to keep a home page that was also your email and also your news stopped being obvious to anyone.

This killed portals everywhere, not just this one. In.com simply had a steeper line than most, because it had started from so high up and had spent accordingly to get there.

~ what got buried with it ~

The email went first. On 4 March 2015 mail.in.com stopped, and the notice it left behind is unusually blunt about the terms. "We have Shut down our email service of mail.in.com. However you can continue to sign up for all Web18 properties. Only Users who have sent a download request on or prior to 4th March 2015 can use this link till March 10th 2015 for their data download. Please note, no new data download requests will be entertained." If you had not asked by the day it closed, there was no asking afterward.

The portal ran four more years and went offline on 20 August 2019. Nothing was migrated anywhere. Old in.com addresses either return a 404 or land you on the News18 home page as a soft 404, which is the same answer dressed better.

The domain still resolves. Ask www.in.com for anything in 2026 and an Akamai edge node answers 403 Access Denied, and the denial page prints the address it was actually trying to serve on your behalf: the entertainment section of news18.com. Eleven years of a portal, and what remains at the two-letter domain is a failure to fetch somebody else's page.

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