Mekusharim

» see mekusharim.walla.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Mekusharim means connected, in the plural. It was started in Tel Aviv by Shahar Bar-David and Viki Glam, working with Gai Cohen, none of whom were engineers. They promoted parties and events for a living, which turns out to be a reasonable qualification for building a social network, and they were copying an idea they had seen abroad. The site that had done it first was Friendster, and Friendster's own pitch leaned on Stanley Milgram's small-world work from the 1970s.

The three put in roughly forty thousand shekels between them. The site went live in July 2004 with six registered accounts on it. By January 2005 there were about five thousand, and during that year the growth got fast enough that the founders started selling advertising against it and ran into the limits of what they had actually built, which was technically basic. So they went looking for outside money, and from that point the ownership history is more eventful than the product history.

The peak came in 2007. Mekusharim was the second largest social network in Israel, behind Hevre, with 240,000 unique users a month. Then in January 2008 a TIM survey reported that Facebook had gone past both Israeli networks, and that was effectively the whole rest of the story. By March 2010 Mekusharim's traffic had fallen forty percent in a single year.

Turkey went through the same decade with different names on it. Hi5 was the network everybody here was on between roughly 2005 and 2009, and I was not on it, because I was in my twenties on MSN and could not see the point of a profile page. Israel's version of that argument was settled by Facebook at almost exactly the same time ours was. The local network being good was never the variable.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the newspaper ~

The part of Mekusharim that was not a profile page was Iton Mekusharim, the Mekusharim Newspaper. Users uploaded dozens of articles to it every day and thousands of other users voted and commented on them daily. Anybody who wanted to write had a place to put it, in a country where the professional press was concentrated in a handful of very large brands.

The rest of the site was organized around communities and an events calendar, which given who founded it was not an accident, with surveys and video running alongside. There was internal mail and a chat for your friends list, and a feed of what your friends had been doing. Most of that is a description of Facebook written four years before Facebook mattered in Hebrew.

~ the cap table ~

In 2006 the party site Layla, founded by Amos Maron, bought 33 percent for 1.4 million shekels, which valued the whole company at 4.5 million. That December the mobile content company B-Contact took 65.9 percent for 3.6 million, leaving Maron with 13 percent. In August 2008 Walla Communications bought about 34 percent for 4.55 million shekels, and in March 2009 it bought another 36 percent for 4.5 million, taking it to 70 percent at a valuation of 12.5 million.

Read those numbers in order and the valuation climbs every single round. The March 2009 purchase, the one that put Walla in control at 12.5 million, happened fourteen months after Facebook had already overtaken the site it was buying.

~ the court case ~

On 10 March 2013 an Israeli court ruled that Ran Avraham had to be recognized as one of the site's founders and investors, and awarded him 200,000 shekels. The founders were jointly and severally liable for about a quarter of a million shekels in costs on top of that. The judgment landed fourteen months before the site closed, so the question of who built Mekusharim was answered in court with fourteen months left on the clock.

~ the last day ~

By the end the address was mekusharim.walla.co.il, a subdirectory inside its owner's domain, which is usually the last stage before somebody switches the lights off. Walla announced the permanent closure in April 2014, reported on 9 April by Globes and by the media blog Mizbala, and the site went down on 11 May 2014.

Ten years, two changes of control, one court case, and six users on the first day. The Hebrew Wikipedia article files it under Israeli websites that closed, next to Hevre, which it had spent its best year chasing.

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