MOLOME

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

~ the eulogy ~

MOLOME reached me the way a lot of asia-coded apps did, which is to say barely and late. It was built in bangkok and it launched on symbian, and by 2011 i had already left symbian behind. But i want to give it its due as an engineer, because the call it made was the interesting one. Instagram launched on the iphone and stayed there for eighteen months. MOLOME looked at the phones instagram was ignoring, the nokia belle handsets and the blackberrys, and shipped filters to them instead.

Sittiphol Phanvilai, a computer-engineering graduate out of Chulalongkorn University, built it and ran it through his small bangkok company. It went up on nokia's ovi store in april 2011, then android, with iphone and blackberry versions after. Fourteen filters, a shared feed, the whole instagram shape copied faithfully. It pulled more than 1.5 million downloads out of platforms the rest of the world had already declared dead.

The problem with a photo app is that every photo is a file you have to keep somewhere forever. MOLOME needed funding to keep hosting all of it, and the funding did not come. Around november 2015 the service went dark and the filtered squares went with it.

I was a computer engineer in ankara watching the same instagram wave from the winning side of it. MOLOME is the version of that wave i can respect without having lived it, one person backing the losing platform on purpose and talking a million and a half people into following him there, right up until the bill for the storage came due.

~ the dossier ~

~ the bet on the wrong phone ~

Every other instagram clone raced to the iphone and then android. MOLOME did the opposite and went where the incumbents were not, the huge installed base of symbian and blackberry users who had good cameras and no decent photo-sharing app. For a stretch it was the closest thing those phones had to instagram, and thai press wrote it up as a point of national pride. The bet was real and the users were real. The runway was the part that ran out.

~ what got buried with it ~

When MOLOME switched off, so did every photo hosted on it. That is the part people forget about these apps: a social feed is a promise to store your memories, and the promise is only as good as the company's next funding round. Symbian was already dead by 2015 and blackberry was dying, so almost nobody noticed the app that had served them go too. It is a small grave. It still counts.

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