MojaGeneracja.pl

» see mojageneracja.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

every country that got online in the early 2000s had one messenger everyone actually used, and it was almost never the one the americans used. in Turkey it was MSN. in Poland it was Gadu-Gadu, a little chat program with a sun for a logo that half the country left running all day (close enough). MojaGeneracja was the social network the Gadu-Gadu company bolted onto that, and i only know it the way you know a neighbor country's inside joke, from the outside, secondhand.

MojaGeneracja opened in February 2007, built straight on top of the messenger everyone already had. you logged in with your Gadu-Gadu account, which meant it started the day it launched with a built-in country. it was the standard web 2.0 kit for the moment, a profile with a blog attached, and photo albums hanging off it. it grew the way those things grew when they were tied to something people already opened every morning.

the numbers got genuinely big for a country that size. unique users doubled in the first month, past a million and a half, and by December 2007 it was seeing something like 2.76 million people, with more than five million accounts registered. Lech Wałęsa, of all people, kept a blog on it. for a stretch it was one of the places young Poland lived online.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

it never had the country to itself. Nasza-klasa, the classmates network at nk.pl, already had the older and broader crowd, and then Facebook arrived and did to both of them what it did everywhere. by early 2012 MojaGeneracja's active users had fallen off a cliff, down near half a million a month from the millions it once saw. the thing that made it strong at launch, being welded to Gadu-Gadu, became its ceiling. as the messenger itself slid, the social layer strapped to it slid with it.

~ what got buried with it ~

it shut on the 5th of November 2012, no great surprise to anyone still watching. the pattern is one i recognize from a different language. a national messenger tries to become a national social network, gets outrun first by the classmates site and then by the American one, and quietly folds. Turkey ran its own version of that movie in those same years, and the crowd went the same place in the end. MojaGeneracja is just the Polish print of it, with a sun-logo login and a former president's blog sitting in the archive.

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