Mister Wong

» see mister-wong.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In September 2010 Google decided that a link from a social bookmarking site was not a recommendation, and Mister Wong lost ninety-seven percent of its search visibility inside a month. A site whose entire substance was links had been erased from the index by the company that counts links. It kept running for another three years after that, but the business had been settled by an algorithm change nobody at the company was told about in advance.

It started in the spring of 2006 inside construktiv, a media agency in Bremen, with Kai Tietjen behind it. The product was the same one del.icio.us had shown everybody: save a link with your own words on it as tags, then see who else saved it. What made Mister Wong unusual is that it won its home market. In Germany it was bigger than delicious by a distance, ranked the 67th most-visited site in the country by Alexa in April 2010, and known to 24 percent of respondents in a 2011 library survey against 14 percent for delicious.

The numbers behind it were real. Eight million bookmarks by the company's own count, with a browser toolbar and an importer built for people leaving delicious. By January 2007 it had absorbed a German competitor called taggle. It ran in six languages and made a serious run at China and Russia. In 2008 the German press was calling it a fixed part of the German internet, and by 2007 it was the most-linked page in the whole German web, a fact that reads very differently once you know what happened three years later.

There has never been a Turkish version of this story and the reason is arithmetic. Germany was large enough and rich enough to sustain a complete local copy of the American web, its own bookmarking site and its own search portal, in the same language as its own newspapers. Turkey in that window did not have that mass. What we had instead was forums, donanimhaber and frmtr and a hundred smaller ones, where the link you wanted to keep got posted into a thread and stayed there. It is the same behavior in a worse container, and it is the reason a Turkish Mister Wong was never going to exist.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the logo they had to change ~

The original mark was a drawing of a Chinese man with a pear-shaped face and an enormous grin, and the advertising slogan under it was ping pong, king kong, Mister Wong. It went unremarked in Germany for a year. Then the English-language version launched and American readers found it. A blogger named Ernie Hsiung wrote about what it looked like from the outside, and the story ran through the tech blogs and into Spiegel by July 2007.

Tietjen apologized on the company blog on 27 July 2007. A replacement logo was picked through a public competition with a user vote and a jury, and arrived that December. The episode is a small artifact of a specific moment: a German product could be built, named and marketed for a year without anybody involved thinking about how it would land in English, because until it launched in English there was no reason it ever would.

~ ninety-seven percent ~

Social bookmarking sites were built on an assumption that Google eventually withdrew. Every saved link was a public page with an outbound link on it, which meant a popular bookmarking service generated millions of them, and for a few years search engines treated that as a signal about what people found worth keeping. Spammers understood this several years before the search engines admitted it, and the tag pages filled up with garbage.

The correction, when it came in September 2010, was total rather than gradual. Mister Wong's visibility index collapsed, the search traffic that brought new members went with it, and a site that had been Germany's most-linked page became a place people arrived at only if they were already members. Nothing about the product changed that month. What changed is that the rest of the web stopped counting it.

~ twenty-five hundred euros ~

The endgame is a chain of owners with less money each time. Mister Wong was offered up for a new operator on 7 November 2011. On 9 August 2012 ekaabo GmbH of Weinheim took it over, and on 1 August 2013, after another sale, the social bookmarking functions were switched off. The buyers tried to make it a fashion platform through 2013 and gave that up by the end of 2014, leaving a famous German domain attached to nothing at all.

Mister Wong GmbH filed for insolvency on 30 August 2016. The domain portfolio was sold on 24 October 2016 to Hansehype GmbH of Winsen an der Luhe for two thousand five hundred euros, and the administrator's account is that they were the only party who answered the offer. The package took in mister-wong.de and about fifteen related domains, with the cli.gs link shortener thrown in, and what the buyer was paying for was fifteen million surviving backlinks pointing at a name Google had already stopped believing. In 2026 mister-wong.de answers, serves a German consumer advice blog, and has nothing whatsoever to do with bookmarks.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »