Itsmy

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

~ the goodbye ~

In 2007 my internet came out of a wall. Itsmy was built for people whose internet came out of a phone, on a tariff that counted kilobytes, which in Turkey then was an excellent reason to keep the browser closed and wait until you got home. The mobile web of those years was something you used when there was no other option, and this was a company betting its whole existence on the opposite.

Gofresh GmbH started it in Munich in 2006. Jukka Saarelainen and Antonio Vince Staybl built a community that lived entirely inside the phone browser, and it moved fast enough that more than two hundred thousand people had registered within the first five months. You made a page and uploaded photos from the camera already in your hand, then messaged strangers on a screen the size of a matchbox.

The part worth respecting is that it was off-deck. Carriers in that era ran walled portals, and getting onto the deck meant a revenue split and a negotiation. Itsmy asked people to type an address into a phone browser instead, which almost nothing succeeded at, and it still got past two and a half million users across Europe and the United States. By early 2010 the company was reporting an average of 2.6 sessions and around thirty-five minutes a day per user, with roughly fifteen percent of them buying something inside a game.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pivot ~

That last number was the whole business, and the founders read it correctly. In August 2010 itsmy relaunched as an open mobile web gaming network, dropping most of the social network furniture. Staybl's public reasoning was that more than ninety-seven percent of everyone on the site was there to play, and the company had shipped over fifty free-to-play titles in the previous twelve months across five countries.

It was a sound read of their own data and a bad read of the calendar. The iPhone App Store had opened in 2008 and Android Market was scaling behind it, so by 2010 a game in a phone browser was competing with a game that had an icon on the home screen. Browser games on feature phones were a category with a hard ceiling and a shrinking floor.

~ how it ended ~

Gofresh announced the closure in March 2014 after several years without a profit. The site was supposed to go dark on 29 April, then data problems pushed it back, so people had until 1 May 2014 to get anything off it. For a network that had been running for eight years, that is a short goodbye.

The trademark outlived the network. Gofresh moved to television, building HbbTV games for connected sets under the itsmy.TV name and later the Couchplay brand, both still run by the same founder. Type itsmy.com into a browser now and you land on a big screen gaming company. The address survived the audience.

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