Meetro

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

~ the obituary ~

meetro launched on 1 june 2005 and was gone by the end of 2007. paul bragiel's founder-postmortem on techcrunch in may 2008 confirmed the deadpool. the client sat on your windows desktop and did two things: it connected to your aim, msn, yahoo, gtalk, and icq accounts under one buddy list, and it showed you which of your contacts (and which strangers) were online at addresses physically near you. you could set your city to chicago 60614 and see the other meetro users on that block. you could also see the restaurants and bars they had been to.

i was on msn in 2005. i was 21, in engineering school at bilkent, using msn like everyone else in ankara for chat and using icq for the last of my older contacts. multi-network clients did exist. i was using trillian on my desktop by 2005. meetro's whole innovation was the location layer on top of that, and the location layer never reached turkey. the app was english-only and the density of local users outside a few us college towns and downtown chicago was too thin for the feature to matter.

google was rumored to be acquiring meetro in august 2005. bragiel neither confirmed nor denied it. the rumor turned out to have been posted by a fan on a forum thread rather than by anyone at either company. it inflated meetro's visibility for a summer, and the actual google acquisition (of dodgeball, a competing location-social product) had already happened in may 2005 anyway.

~ the case file ~

~ what it did ~

meetro was a fat desktop client, not a browser tool. you installed it on windows, entered your address, and the client kept your position updated as you moved around. profiles supported embedded media feeds and rule-based group filtering that would show you other users near you who matched criteria you set. bragiel described the group-filter idea as the first attempt at what dating apps and modern discovery feeds would later commodify.

the location model was self-reported rather than gps. this was 2005, before smartphones. the closest most users came to a location signal was typing their zip code into the profile page and letting the desktop client trust them. accuracy dropped to zero if you were using the app from a laptop at an airport. still, in the campus buildings and downtown apartments where it worked, meetro's proximity list was the first time a lot of people had seen a messenger show them who was in the same building.

~ why it failed ~

bragiel's postmortem was direct. meetro's core value depended on both users being online at the same time in the same physical place. the intersection of those two conditions was much rarer than the team had assumed. most sessions ended with the same finding: nobody nearby was online. sessions after that finding did not repeat. drop-off was too fast to build the density that would make the next session work. the team also could not raise more capital on flat growth. venture funds in 2006-2007 were not willing to bet on a desktop messenger against skype and msn.

the team pivoted to lefora, a hosted forum solution, and eventually sold it to crowdgather in summer 2010. meetro the messenger simply stopped being updated. by mid-2007 the servers were still running but the client was showing empty proximity lists in every city that was not chicago. the site went dark quietly, without a blog post or a shutdown page.

~ what came after ~

every idea meetro was early to came back. dodgeball was google's location-social experiment that shut down in 2009 and inspired foursquare. loopt launched in 2005 alongside meetro and lasted until 2012. brightkite and gowalla arrived in 2007-2008 and closed by 2012 as well. foursquare and google latitude and eventually the location layer inside every messenger from whatsapp to signal all did what meetro had tried to do from a desktop client in 2005. the concept was correct. the delivery vehicle was six years too early.

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