LunarStorm

» see lunarstorm.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

LunarStorm officially opened on january 1, 2000. it was the successor to a 1996 swedish online community called stajlplejs ("style place" in swedish transliteration), built by rickard eriksson, and by 2007 it was the social network that swedish teenagers used. peak numbers were about 1.2 million members, with around seventy percent aged twelve to seventeen. it ran on the same model as every other late-nineties teen community platform of the era: user profiles, friends lists, public diary entries, a paid premium tier with bigger photo allowances.

swedish teenagers were not my demographic. when lunarstorm peaked in 2007 i was twenty-three, on a turkish university campus, using msn for chat and email for everything else, and the language of the swedish teen internet was sealed behind both age and language. lunarstorm sat in the part of internet history that someone on the other side of europe can read about now but cannot personally remember.

the company tried to defend the position. in february 2007 it bought shares in bilddagboken, the photo-blog platform that was already pulling swedish teenagers away, and by october 2007 it owned bilddagboken outright. the acquisition did not stop the decline. by 2009 the concurrent online count had dropped from about 100,000 users at peak to about 1,500. in june 2010 the owner wyatt media groups announced the shutdown, and the platform went dark on august 18, 2010.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

lunarstorm is sometimes called the first european social network, depending on how you count and which definition of social network you use. the stajlplejs lineage going back to 1996 puts it ahead of sixdegrees.com on the european side of the count. what it actually was, in terms of the user experience, was a teen-focused community with diary entries, profile pages, instant messaging on the site, and a strong photo-comment culture. the paid tier was how it survived as a business for a decade. swedish parents bought their kids the subscription the way parents elsewhere bought neopets pet upgrades.

~ the long tail ~

the swedish teenagers who used lunarstorm in 2003 are in their late thirties now, which is the age at which people start writing nostalgia threads about their first internet platform. the bilddagboken acquisition is the moment historians point to as the death sentence: lunarstorm bought its competitor instead of out-innovating, and then both sides bled out as facebook arrived. by the time the shutdown was announced, swedish teen culture had already moved over for years. the closing was a paperwork formality.

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