Koinup

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

~ the last words ~

Koinup Srl was registered in Brescia in March 2007 by Pierluigi Casolari and Edoardo Turelli, and the site opened to the public that September after a four-month beta. The idea was narrow and correct. People were spending hours a day inside Second Life and its competitors and taking screenshots the whole time, and there was nowhere built for those screenshots to go. Flickr would host the file and understood nothing about it. Koinup understood that the image had a world attached to it, and an avatar standing somewhere inside that world.

I played games in that era, in internet cafes in the early 2000s and on Turkish private servers after that, so the worlds themselves are not the distance here. What I never did was photograph any of it. Composing a shot inside a game and then going back in to fix the light on it is a practice, and it is a completely different one from playing. Koinup was built entirely for people who had that practice, and that is a smaller group than it sounds even among people who never log off.

By November 2008 the site claimed more than 100,000 uploaded items and around 100,000 visitors a month. Second Life and World of Warcraft sat at the top of the world list. Under them ran a long tail of platforms that have since died on their own account, Twinity and Blue Mars and Kaneva among them, down to Google's Lively at the bottom. There were bridge tools too, so a member could send a postcard out of a running client directly into their Koinup gallery. In June 2010 it shipped an iPhone app that did nothing but serve metaverse wallpapers.

~ the record ~

~ what people actually posted ~

The interesting thing about the archive is how little of it is what an outsider expects. The bulk is portraiture. Avatars posed against builds and shot at a considered angle with the interface hidden, then tagged by the sim they were standing in. The site had a whole taxonomy behind that, including its own directory pages for places and for skills.

Machinima sat alongside the stills, which in 2008 meant films made inside game engines by people with no budget and a screen recorder, a form that was about to be industrialized by other people entirely. Koinup was the gallery wall for a craft scene at the exact moment it had no institutions.

~ eleven years of the same page ~

On 8 January 2013 the company blog announced that ExitReality had acquired Koinup. ExitReality was an Australian outfit selling 3D versions of ordinary web pages, and what it wanted with an Italian screenshot community was never made public, because nothing was ever shipped.

The front page stopped changing that year. Every capture from 2013 to 2024 returns the same seven kilobytes: the same navigation, the same world list with Lively still on it years after Google switched Lively off, the same obfuscated advertising email address. What makes this different from an ordinary parked shell is that the site underneath it kept working. Member gallery URLs were still returning real pages with real images into December 2021, eight years after the last person with a plan for this place walked away from it.

~ the day the host stopped answering ~

The Internet Archive's last capture of the homepage is dated 15 October 2024 and there is nothing after it. Today koinup.com still has a DNS record pointing at an OVH address in France, and that machine does not answer on port 80 at all, not with a 404 and not with a redirect. The registration outlived the hardware, which outlived the company, which outlived the point.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »