Infonie

» see infonie.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Infonie was created in October 1995 by Christophe Sapet, and its parent was Infogrames, the Lyon video game publisher better known for Alone in the Dark and for eventually buying the Atari name. A games company starting an online service was less strange then than it sounds now. Nobody knew yet which kind of company the internet was going to belong to, and a publisher that already pressed CD-ROMs and sold to families had as good a claim as anyone.

The French description of what it sold is a bouquet of services in a closed environment, which is the walled garden in its native habitat: content the operator had chosen, laid out the way the operator wanted it. You got at all of it through a proprietary interface called Ladybird, which carried a chat tool known as the talkie. The target was households rather than technical users. Jean-Baptiste Favory wrote the jingles in 1995, which is a detail I like more than it deserves.

It arrived early, just behind Worldnet, and for a few years it shared the French market with AOL and CompuServe, the two other companies selling the same closed proposition. In October 1998 it bought the search engine Lokace, which was the French web's own index and which went on to be passed down the same chain of owners until there was nobody left who needed it.

By 1998 I was dialing a Turkish ISP that did one thing: it gave you a connection and then stopped having opinions about where you went. The garden model never had a Turkish edition, and reading about Infonie now the striking part is the confidence. Someone did the arithmetic and concluded that families would pay to be kept inside.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ ladybird ~

The interface was the product. In a walled garden the operator's software is the only way in, so the client doubles as the storefront and as the billing relationship, wearing one coat. That makes the service very easy to describe to a first-time subscriber and completely impossible to defend once the same household discovers that a plain dial-up account plus Netscape reaches everything, including all of the things Infonie had declined to carry.

~ the handovers ~

Infonie ended up heavily in debt, and after that it belonged to whoever was buying. Belgacom took it in 2000. By June 2001 the French press was asking whether it was being passed on for a symbolic single franc. In October 2001 Belgacom sold it to Tiscali, the Italian group then assembling French internet companies at speed, and kept the Belgian operation for itself. By the account on the French Wikipedia, Tiscali kept the name and the subscribers with their email addresses, and nothing else at all.

The end was administrative. On 4 February 2002 Tiscali France announced it was collapsing its brands into one, and that LibertySurf, World Online, Infonie and Nomade.fr would disappear by the end of the first half of the year. Between them the group was claiming more than 1.1 million active subscribers. The web archive has www.infonie.fr serving a 513-byte page in June 2001 and redirecting by 27 May 2002, so the switch happened somewhere in that silence, unannounced and unrecorded.

The French Wikipedia infobox still dates Infonie's disappearance to 2001, which is the year it was sold rather than the year it stopped existing. Tiscali France itself was gone by 2005, replaced by Alice, which Iliad later bought and merged into Free. Type infonie.fr today and you land on free.fr.

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