Kifi

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

~ the obituary ~

On 12 July 2016 the Kifi team posted that it was joining Google. The post is cheerful and short, thanks everyone for the two and a half years and works in a joke about the Spaces team having "a bit of space for us". It also contains the sentence that mattered: the Kifi service and its data would not be coming along. Users had a few weeks of normal operation, then a few more weeks during which the site existed only so you could download what you had saved.

The company behind it was FortyTwo Inc, started in Mountain View in 2012 by Eishay Smith and Dan Blumenfeld, staffed with engineers out of Google and LinkedIn. The product launched publicly on 7 February 2014. The name was an acronym for keep it, find it, and the second half is where the work went. Anything you saved got fully indexed, text and all, so a search ran through the contents of your saved pages rather than their titles. The browser extension then pushed those results into your regular Google search page, which meant the thing you half remembered reading surfaced next to the public web instead of behind a separate bookmark manager.

By 2015 it had grown a Slack integration that indexed every link a team dropped into a channel, and a deep search for Twitter that read the pages behind your tweets rather than the tweets. That is a feature set aimed at a working team, not at a person with a bookmarks folder. Google bought the people who built it. The archive of kifi.com on 5 August 2016 still shows the service running with a banner saying new registrations were closed; by the capture on 3 September the page had been stripped to a login link with nothing behind it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

Most bookmarking services are filing cabinets. You put a link in and give it a label you will never remember again, and from then on it is a URL sitting in a list. Kifi's premise was that a saved page should keep its contents, so the index held the whole document and a search for a half-recalled phrase from the middle of an article found the article.

Shared collections were called Libraries, and a team could pour its reading into one pool that everyone could search. Ten years on this is roughly what every company wiki plugin promises and still mostly fails to do.

~ the acqui-hire ~

Google Spaces had launched on 16 May 2016 as a small group sharing app, two months before the Kifi engineers were hired onto it. They arrived from a product whose entire competence was indexing and finding shared links, which on paper is a precise fit. Spaces was discontinued on 17 April 2017.

So the service was shut down to free up the staff, the staff were pointed at a product that lasted until the following spring, and the only thing that survived the whole transaction was the employment contracts. Kifi's data went to whoever bothered to export it before the form came down.

~ the funny part ~

Kifi's own marketing page listed its competitors by logo: Delicious, Diigo, Evernote, Pinboard, Pocket, Instapaper. Delicious was already being passed between owners when that page was drawn and is a grave here. Pocket outlived Kifi by nine years and then Mozilla closed it on 8 July 2025. The comparison table survives as an archived image file in a CDN directory nobody has emptied, which is a longer run than the company that drew it managed.

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