Lucky Sort

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

~ the obit ~

Lucky Sort was never a thing you could wander into. There was a signup button on the homepage, but what sat behind it was sold to people watching a brand or a market, and I never saw it running. The tagline under the logo was honest about the audience: advanced interfaces for pervasive information overload. Somebody out there had more text arriving per hour than any human could read, and would pay to be told what the shape of it was.

The product was called TopicWatch and the company's own description of it is the clearest one anybody wrote. It shifts the atom of information consumption from individual documents to aggregate patterns. In practice you pointed it at a live stream of text, and instead of a list of results you got a moving picture of which words and phrases were rising against each other over time. It could scrape websites and RSS feeds, it had API hooks for pulling other sources in, and the dashboards could be saved and handed to a client.

Noah Pepper started it in Portland in 2011 with a few friends and raised six hundred thousand dollars, which in the data visualization boom of that moment was enough to build a real product and not nearly enough to sell one. Portland had a small tight startup scene and Lucky Sort was one of the names in it. Two years in, the company had a working platform and a handful of paying customers, with no visible path to being large.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the same afternoon ~

On 13 May 2013, Pepper posted a letter where the product used to be. "Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends," it opens, and then it announces the acquisition and says several of them are moving to San Francisco to join Twitter's revenue engineering department. It ends by inviting anybody in the neighborhood who wants to talk about text mining to get in touch. Customers would be helped off the system in the coming months.

The file carries a Last-Modified of 19:21 UTC that day, which is lunchtime in Portland. There was no transition period on the public side and no wind-down page later. The marketing site went straight to the goodbye in one step, and that goodbye stayed up, unedited, until 2017, when the domain finally dropped to a hosting placeholder that reads luckysort.com is almost here.

~ the year Twitter was buying ~

This was Twitter six months before its IPO, and Lucky Sort was one purchase in a run of them. Bluefin Labs had gone in February, Spindle and Trendrr followed in August. The pattern repeated each time. A small analytics team with a product of its own went into the advertising machine, and the product was switched off within months of the ink drying.

What Twitter was assembling was the ability to tell advertisers what its own firehose meant, which it needed before it could sell against television. Several companies' worth of engineers went into that, and none of their tools survived as anything you could point at. The visible monument to Lucky Sort is a letter from a Monday afternoon that outlasted the product by four years.

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