Letternet

» see letternet.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

You filled in a form and sent it to the post office. Name, address, languages you could read, what you were interested in, what kind of person you wanted to hear from. Somewhere in Germany a database took your answers and found someone whose answers fit, and a while later an envelope came back with a stranger's postal address in it. That was the entire product. Deutsche Post started it in 1997 and called it Letternet, and at its largest it had more than 1.4 million members in over 170 countries, which made it the biggest thing of its kind anywhere.

Membership came with a magazine. The Lettermag went out quarterly to every registered member, and from August 2003 there was a second edition called Lettermag Young aimed at children and teenagers. Both were eventually killed off to pay for the website. The country profiles and cultural articles that had filled the magazine moved onto the portal instead.

The paper matching ran until 2008. In 2009 it became an ordinary web service. You registered online, searched the database yourself, then sent a contact request. When the other person accepted it the system showed each of you the other's postal address. The letter was still made of paper. Only the introduction had moved. On 16 January 2014 Deutsche Post switched it off with roughly 31,000 active members remaining. The goodbye page recommended Postcrossing to anyone who still wanted mail from strangers.

~ the record ~

~ the form you sent in ~

The selection criteria were gender, nationality, interests, language. That is a dating-site schema and a social-graph schema arriving about eight years early, run by an organization whose actual business was moving physical objects around. The German postal trade press was writing about "LetterNet für Brieffreunde" in the first half of 1998, which is roughly when the service reached the public.

I got my first dial-up connection in 1998, on a 14.4k modem, and within a couple of years everyone I knew was on MSN. So the honest position is that Letternet and I were running in opposite directions at exactly the same moment. It was scaling up a system for introducing strangers who would then wait a week for a reply, while the thing that would make that unbearable was already dialing in the next room. I had never heard the name until I looked it up.

~ sixteen years or seventeen ~

The goodbye page says "Letternet wurde nach 16 Jahren zum 16.1.2014 eingestellt", which counts back to 1998. The German Wikipedia article and its infobox both give 1997. Both can be defended: a service launched late in one year is announced in the trade press early in the next, and the operator's own farewell copy is the sort of place where somebody rounds. The grave takes 1997 at year precision and records that Deutsche Post itself said sixteen.

The stated reason is worth reading in the original because it is unusually direct for a corporate shutdown notice. Nachfrage und Kosten standen schon länger einfach nicht mehr in tragbarer Relation: demand and cost had simply not been in a bearable relation for some time. There is no pivot in it and no promise of something better coming. A post office closed a club because the club cost more than it was worth, and said so.

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