Kiwibox

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

~ the last words ~

Kiwibox died in 2019. Not 2009, which is where you would put it if you were guessing from the name and the logo. It launched in 1999 as a place for American teenagers to publish, and it was still up and still serving a community when Vine and Google Plus were already graves themselves. Twenty years is longer than Friendster and longer than Orkut, and Kiwibox did it without ever being famous for a single day.

Three Carnegie Mellon graduates started it. Lin Dai ran it as chief executive and editor, with Michael Howard and Ivan Tumanov handling the rest. The first editors came out of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, and one of them, Sonni Abatta, went on to anchor television news in Orlando. It was a teen magazine that happened to have a login, which in 1999 was a reasonable description of most of the social web.

This was never going to reach me. In 1999 I was fifteen, on a modem in Turkey, and the American teen web was a place I could read but not enter, because the thing that made those sites work was that everyone in them already went to school together. Turkey got its own version of this later and locally.

~ the record ~

~ the second life ~

It crossed a million registered members somewhere around 2005 and then did the thing almost nobody in this category managed, which is grow up on purpose. Kiwibox 2.0 shipped in August 2008 with a mobile version. Kiwibox 3.0 followed in October 2009 and deliberately moved the target audience from teenagers to young adults, on the correct theory that the teenagers from 1999 were now twenty-five and the site could either follow them or replace them every four years forever.

The 2008 and 2009 stretch was the closest it came to a real moment. Universal Music Group signed on to distribute video, and the site was accepted into the YouTube partner program on the strength of five hundred self-produced videos. Registered members passed two million. A New York nightlife and events operation grew alongside the network and was arguably the more durable half of the business.

~ the penny stock years ~

In August 2007 Kiwibox was bought by Magnitude Information Systems, a publicly listed company, and at the end of 2009 the two merged and renamed the combined entity after the product. Kiwibox.com, Inc. traded on the bulletin board as KIWB. From there it did what small listed companies do, which is buy things with paper: the German photoblog community Pixunity in early 2011, and then Kwick, a sizable German social network, effective 1 July 2011.

This is the part of the story that has no equivalent anywhere else on this site. A teen magazine from 1999 spent the 2010s as a micro-cap holding company for European social networks, while continuing to run the original site for people who had been posting on it since middle school. It reached three million users around 2015 and shipped another redesign.

~ the address now ~

On 19 September 2019 a post went up on the Kiwibox Facebook page saying the site would go offline in the near future and that members should download their personal information as soon as possible. That was the announcement. No date, and no explanation of what had finally run out. Twenty years of writing by people who had been teenagers when they started, and the exit notice was a status update advising you to back yourself up.

kiwibox.com answers today with a WordPress install calling itself KiwiBox, Connect and Share, publishing generic articles under category headings that include Gambling and Cryptocurrency. It is an expired-domain content farm wearing the old name, and it is not connected to anything described above. The archive is gone, and the address is worth more to a stranger than the site ever was to its owners.

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