IWiW

» see iwiw.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

IWiW was Hungary-only at the language layer. The interface ran in hungarian and the audience was the hungarian web plus the hungarian diaspora, with the cultural conversation inside the friend graph rooted in hungarian television and hungarian office life. I was in turkey on MSN and on donanimhaber forums through the entire arc of this site, and the only reason i ever heard the name was the european tech-press cycle around 2011 when journalists kept comparing which regional facebook clones were still holding their countries. IWiW was the hungarian one alongside StudiVZ in germany and Tuenti in spain.

The site started on april 14, 2002 as "WiW" (Who is Who), built by a hungarian web developer named Zsolt Varady at a small shop called Virgo Systems. It was rebuilt and renamed "iwiw" on october 26, 2005 with an "international" branding angle that never really materialized outside hungary. On april 28, 2006 T-Online, the internet arm of Magyar Telekom, bought iwiw for around one billion forints, roughly 4.7 million US dollars at the time. The site was later moved under Origo Zrt, the broader Magyar Telekom digital portfolio.

Peak landed in 2010 at around 4.5 million registered accounts with somewhere near 1.5 million daily active users. In a country of roughly ten million people with maybe six to seven million internet users at the time, that meant iwiw was the dominant social network for the hungarian-language web. It was the most-visited hungarian website between 2005 and 2010. By the end of 2010 iwiw and facebook had reached parity on daily logins inside hungary. Facebook pulled ahead from there.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

What made iwiw culturally distinct from later facebook-style platforms was that registration was invitation-only. New users had to be invited by an existing member, which produced a network-effect feel that early-2000s hungarian internet users described as exclusive in a way friendster never quite had been. The interface emphasized friend-of-friend browsing through an "acquaintances of acquaintances" feature, with a java applet after 2005 that rendered your connection graph visually. The site added third-party applications in 2009 and shipped iphone and android apps in 2010.

The Magyar Telekom acquisition in 2006 changed the cultural feel of the site quickly. Hungarian press coverage from the period flagged privacy concerns around T-Online holding the membership data of two thirds of the country's internet users. A handful of competing hungarian clones launched in response, none of which reached scale. The acquisition also marked the point at which iwiw started to feel like a telecom asset rather than a small community site, which is a transition that several regional networks did not survive in their later facebook-competition years.

~ what got buried with it ~

Origo Zrt announced the shutdown on may 15, 2014 and shut the servers at midnight on june 30. The closure included a "time capsule" feature that let members download their messages and contact lists before the deletion. That feature was switched off on june 25 and became a small ritual in the hungarian-language press, with farewell posts running across index.hu, origo.hu, hvg.hu and the english-language daily news hungary outlet. According to the company's own numbers, only around ten percent of members explicitly migrated their content. The rest just went inactive in the months and years before the announcement.

Management later admitted in interviews with the hungarian tech press that they had been late to ship embedded apps and a news feed, which were the two features that the audience under thirty had migrated to facebook for. The older cohort stayed longer but eventually drifted as well. The Magyar Telekom side of the operation was unable to find a buyer when it tested the market in early 2014. The shutdown was the cleanest possible end for a regional clone that had run twelve years and outlived several of its direct peers in other european countries.

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