Menshn

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

~ the obituary ~

Menshn was a Westminster product. It was launched by a sitting Member of Parliament, covered by the British political press, and argued about by roughly the same few hundred people who argue about everything else in British politics. The timing is what stays with me. Menshn had been closed for nearly four months when the Gezi protests began at the end of May 2013 and Turkish Twitter turned into the most important room in the country for a few weeks. Twitter's problem here was never that people drifted off topic.

The two founders were Louise Mensch, Conservative MP for Corby and a bestselling novelist before that, and Luke Bozier, a former Labour adviser who had defected to the Conservatives in January 2012. They went live on 20 June 2012, in the United States rather than at home, with a room devoted to American politics and the presidential election five months out. A British version was promised in time for the Olympics.

The mechanic was one idea held firmly. Every room on Menshn was a topic, posts were capped at 180 characters, and anything that wandered off the subject was removed. The pitch was talking on topic, which in mid-2012 sounded less quaint than it does now, because this was the year Twitter was still widely assumed to be a public square with a design flaw rather than a thing people would eventually leave.

It did not grow. Bozier's own number, given on the way out, was just under six thousand users since launch. Mensch resigned her Corby seat that August and moved to New York, which she said was about family and which the British press read as being about the startup. By the autumn the site was still publishing and still thin.

Then the company stopped working before the product did. Bozier resigned as a director on 17 January 2013 and did not hand back his shares. The closure was reported on 6 February.

~ the case file ~

~ the pitch ~

The argument behind Menshn was more interesting than the execution, and it has aged better than almost anything else about it. Mensch's claim was that the trouble with Twitter was incoherence: a timeline mixes everything together, so no conversation can be followed end to end. The format rewards the loudest line on any subject. A room per topic plus hard moderation was supposed to fix that.

Every criticism it took was about the same thing from the other direction. Locking a room to one subject means somebody decides what the subject is, and the people deciding were two British political operatives with strong views about British politics. The 180-character cap also drew a certain amount of mockery for being twenty characters of extra generosity over the thing it was replacing.

~ the standoff ~

Both founders held equal stakes and both went on the record about it. Bozier: "Louise and I no longer have anything resembling a working relationship, and she no longer wishes to run a company in which I own shares." Mensch: "I cannot work with Luke, and saw no prospect of investment under those circumstances." She had expected his shares back when he resigned. He kept them, which left a company split evenly between two people who were no longer speaking to each other.

The Internet Archive's last working capture of menshn.com is from 23 December 2012, about ten kilobytes of live site. Everything after that is a redirect, and there is nothing at all after 14 January. The site was effectively over six weeks before anyone announced it.

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