Meekan

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

~ the last words ~

The page title at meekan.com is still "Meekan shutting down", seven years after it stopped being news. The text underneath has not moved either: the service shut down on 30 September 2019, the decision was to shift resources towards other scheduling products, and at that point every user's calendar data would be deleted and the bots would stop answering requests or sending reminders.

Matty Mariansky built it in Tel Aviv in 2014 with Eyal and Lior Yavor, on about 900,000 dollars from Horizons Ventures. What they made was a scheduling assistant that lived inside group chat rather than in an app of its own. You typed at it in a Slack channel, in ordinary words, and it read the calendars of everyone in the room and came back with times that worked, ranked. For a certain kind of team in 2016 this felt like the future arriving sideways, through a chat window nobody had to be convinced to install.

Doodle, the Swiss scheduling company inside TX Group, bought all the shares on 30 June 2016 and brought the founders along to keep developing the product. Three years later the same owner closed it, and the reason given was an internal one: Doodle had its own bot by then.

~ the record ~

~ a bot with calendar access ~

The trick was that Meekan did not need a meeting request to begin with. It read what people were already saying to each other and came back with a time that had the conflicts taken out of it. The price of that was access, because a bot proposing slots for everyone in a channel has to hold everyone's calendar, and the shutdown notice is blunt about where that ended: all of it deleted, on a named date.

~ the notice that is still up ~

The archive shows the gravestone going up early. On 13 September 2019 the homepage was still the product, about 10.5 KB of it. By 26 September it had dropped to 7,244 bytes, which is the shutdown page, four days before the service actually stopped. Whoever did it was working ahead of the deadline.

Probing the host now is misleading in both directions. It sits behind Cloudflare and answers an automated request with a 403 challenge page, which reads as an abandoned server to anything scripted. Every index that lists the domain still lists it under the shutdown title, so what the host hands a reader is the goodbye rather than an error.

~ the lockup on the gravestone ~

The shutdown page carries a combined lockup at its head: Meekan by Doodle. The company that switched the product off is co-signed on its gravestone, and in the archived copy that image is still being loaded from the dead product's own web host.

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