Meez

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

~ the obit ~

meez launched on 28 march 2006 in san francisco. sean ryan, who had been a vice president at realnetworks, started it under a company called donnerwood media to give teenagers a free 3d avatar and a place to dress it up. you logged in, you picked a face, you bought sneakers with virtual currency. you joined a chat region called a hood. nike and rocawear cut deals to put their real-world stuff inside the wardrobe. by 2010 meez had thirteen million registered accounts and three million monthly users, and time magazine had put it on a "worst websites" list in 2007 that did almost nothing to slow it down.

the death was quiet to the point of cruelty. donnerwood media took the servers offline at some point in december 2017 with no statement or warning. the domain expired in march 2018. a few youtube documentaries cropped up the next year asking what happened. nobody from donnerwood answered. the user base, by then mostly in their late twenties remembering their middle-school avatars, found out the way you usually find out a small internet company is dead: a login screen that no longer existed.

i was twenty-two when meez launched, halfway through a turkish engineering degree, on ttnet broadband and msn messenger. ninety percent of meez accounts were in the united states. the part of internet history meez belonged to was tween and american and ran on flash, none of which described my 2006 evenings in ankara. i read the obituary later the way you read about a closed mall in a country you never visited.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

meez sat inside the same cohort as club penguin and habbo and stardoll and neopets. a flash-rendered 3d avatar, a closet, a public room with other avatars in it, a tier of paid currency above the free one. the brand deals separated it from the field for a few years. you could put your meez in nike sneakers and rocawear hoodies because those companies were paying donnerwood for that placement. the nba and the nhl had branded gear too. for a sponsor in 2008, "free virtual avatar with real-brand clothes that teenagers wear on their chat screen" was a reasonable thing to spend marketing money on.

~ what really happened ~

the 2010s squeezed meez from two sides. flash died slowly across the back half of the decade and the smartphone took the after-school screen time. teenagers stopped using avatar chat sites because they had instagram. donnerwood seems to have stopped putting money in long before the lights went out. the silence at the end was the giveaway: there was no team left to write a goodbye post. the domain ran out a few months after, which is what happens when nobody pays the renewal invoice.

~ the long tail ~

meez nation has a kind of haunted afterlife on tiktok and youtube. former users post screenshots of their old avatars, name their hoods, remember the inventory items they spent their lunch money to unlock. an unofficial android client called meez nation revived a chat-only fragment of the world for the people who missed it most. the original product is gone. what remains is a few thousand teenagers, now grown, who could draw their meez outfit from memory.

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