Kippt

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

~ the obit ~

i kept my links the way most people did, in the browser's bookmarks folder and in forum posts on donanimhaber, a mess that only i could read. Kippt was for the people who wanted their links to be a shared and searchable thing instead. that was a real category for a few years, a lot of companies took a run at it, and almost none of them are still here. Kippt is one of the ones that is not.

it came out of Finland in 2011, a side project by two designers, Jori Lallo and Karri Saarinen, who then took it to Y Combinator in the summer of 2012. the pitch was bookmarking done properly. you saved a link into a list, and you could hand that list to a team so other people could add to it and argue in the comments. there was a browser button and even an API for the developers who wanted to wire it into their own tools. some people called it GitHub for links, which is the kind of thing that sounded good in 2012.

the timing was good at first, if i remember right. it arrived right when Delicious, the old messy public pile of links, was being sold off and half-broken by its new owners, and everyone who lived in their bookmarks was suddenly homeless. Kippt was fast and clearly made by people who cared. for a moment that was enough.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what actually killed it ~

what killed Kippt was not failure exactly, it was attention moving. in May 2014 Coinbase bought the company, and these deals are usually about the people rather than the product. this one was no different. the founders went off to Coinbase to build other things, and Kippt was left ticking over with nobody really tending it. the shutdown notice, when it came in September 2015, said it plainly in its own tired way, the energy for keeping it going had gone down while the cost of running it had gone up. they kept the exports open until April 2016 and then switched it off.

~ what replaced it ~

here is the part that turns it from a small dead bookmarking app into something worth remembering. the two who built Kippt, Lallo and Saarinen, went on to make Linear, the issue tracker that a large slice of the software industry now plans its work inside. so the thing they are known for came after the thing that died. Kippt was the practice swing. it read, at the time, like a minor casualty of a bigger company's shopping. it reads now, still, like the place two very good designers worked out what they were doing before they did the thing everyone would remember.

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