Jiepang

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

~ the eulogy ~

The check-in years did reach Turkey. Foursquare had a real following here, enough for a Foursquare Türkiye community that ran meetups from 2012 onward, and enough check-ins out of Istanbul that somebody eventually made a map from a year of them. So the category is one I was inside. The product is not. Jiepang existed for the simple reason that the app I could open was unreachable from where its users were sitting.

David Liu, a Californian working out of Beijing, started it on 13 May 2010. Foursquare was blocked, which left an obvious hole, and Jiepang filled it well enough to become the largest location-based service in the country. You checked in at a place and tagged what you were doing from a list of sixteen categories. Badges accumulated, and the whole thing pushed out to Sina Weibo, which in 2011 was where anything Chinese and social had to end up. By 2012 it was past three million users.

The money worked, which is the part that gets forgotten. Jiepang sold location campaigns and branded photo filters to companies like Starbucks and broke even inside two months on that business. Revenue was never the problem. The problem was that by 2013 those five million registered accounts were producing fewer than half a million monthly actives, which is the number you get when an app has been installed by everybody and is opened by almost nobody.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pivot ~

Version 5.0 shipped in July 2013 and dropped the Foursquare comparison on purpose. The pitch became who and what rather than only where, so a check-in turned into something closer to a post about your afternoon, and it wired into WeChat because by then everything in China wired into WeChat. A reasonable move. It also conceded the argument.

Once a check-in is a field on somebody else's post, the company that owns the post wins. WeChat could attach a place to a message at no cost to anyone, and no standalone app can compete with something already open on the phone. Check-in apps outside China had been dying of this since 2011. Jiepang outlasted most of them by having a wall to shelter behind.

~ the postmortem ~

There was no notice. The homepage had already thinned to a few hundred bytes of holding page by 2015, there is a stretch of server errors across March 2016 in the archives, and the app stopped working somewhere in the same window. Its encyclopedia entry records that as of 20 June 2016 neither the site nor the app was working, which is somebody checking rather than somebody announcing. That is the only date anyone has.

~ the wall ~

Foursquare survived by giving up on the check-in and selling its location data to other companies instead, which is a move Jiepang was never in a position to make. The block that made a Chinese Foursquare possible is the same block that left it with nowhere to go. A company whose entire market is one country cannot turn itself into infrastructure for the world, and by the time that mattered there was nothing left to sell but a user list that had stopped opening the app.

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