Jux

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

~ the goodbye ~

Jux went public on 24 August 2011 with fifty thousand people already signed up and waiting. Development had started that March. Ted Metcalfe ran it. The founder and lead investor was Mark Gorton, whose previous contribution to the internet was LimeWire, and the money that paid for a very beautiful blogging platform in 2011 was money the recording industry spent most of the previous decade trying to claw back.

What it did was refuse the sidebar. A Jux post filled the screen edge to edge with one image and type set large enough to read across a room, and that was the entire design argument. You edited in place, dragging and typing on the published page rather than in a form beside it. There was no Flash in it at all, which in 2011 was still a thing worth saying out loud, and posts defaulted to a Creative Commons license rather than to reserved rights.

You could publish an article, a photo, a slideshow, a video, a pulled quote, even a countdown to a date. It pulled images straight out of Flickr and Facebook, and it was built to look right on an iPad at a point when most publishing tools still treated tablets as small desktops. Through 2012 it was what people pointed at when they wanted to argue that blogs did not have to look like blogs.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funeral they called off ~

On 25 May 2013 the company said it would close on 31 August. The stated reason was not a crash or a lawsuit: growth was real but it was not large enough or fast enough to attract another round, and the people funding it had decided to stop. Users started a petition. Ninety-eight days is a long notice period, and the people who had written into the site spent it watching the clock on a platform that shipped Countdown as a post type.

~ the stranger who paid ~

Then on 17 July 2013 the blog posted that it was not closing after all. The wording matters here: a passionate member of the community had stepped in to keep Jux alive and growing. No acquisition, no new round. Somebody who used the site picked up the bill.

That arrangement held for sixteen months. Measured from the date the site was originally supposed to die, the reprieve was worth four hundred and fifty-six days, and I cannot think of many products that got a second life on those terms. Most rescues come with a logo change and a press release about synergies. This one came with a patron who seems to have simply liked the thing.

~ one button left ~

On 5 November 2014 the announcement came again and this time it held. Closure was set for 30 November, and the stated cause was that keeping the infrastructure running had become too heavy for the people generously carrying it. Twenty-five days of notice, against ninety-eight the first time.

The farewell site was up the following day. They gave it its own hostname, farewell.jux.com, and by 27 November the main domain was pushing every visitor to it. What they built there was not a goodbye letter. It was a stripped version of the application that still let you sign in, and the only item left in the navigation bar next to your account was DOWNLOAD. The last feature Jux shipped was the exit.

The asset paths name the parent even when the marketing does not. Images on the live site were served out of a directory beginning with /!lime/, after Lime Group, Gorton's company, the same corporate root as the file-sharing client that paid to build the place. The closing notice never names the supporters it thanks. It says only that the infrastructure had become too burdensome for them.

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