Names Database

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

~ the obit ~

the trade was stated up front, which is the part that has aged strangest. you typed in the email addresses of people you knew, and in exchange the site let you search for people who might be looking for you. making the world a smaller place was the slogan. what it described was a machine that assembled a social graph out of contributions from people who each only saw their own small piece of it.

gabriel weinberg built it in 2003 under a company called opobox. the mechanism was a chain letter with a database attached: your invitations went out under your name, and the recipients got a message that read like a personal note rather than a mailing. it complied with can-spam, which is a sentence that tells you exactly what kind of product it was, since nobody says that about a service people are happy to receive.

it worked absurdly well. by the march 2006 sale there were around fifty thousand paying subscribers, and more than half the user base sat outside the united states. that international half is the genuinely interesting number. an american reconnect-with-your-classmates site had accidentally gone global, because the invitation mechanism did not care what country an address book was in.

whether one of those invitations ever landed in a turkish inbox in 2004 i honestly cannot say. the shape of it is familiar from that era. the mid-2000s were thick with mail that arrived wearing a friend's name and wanted something before it would show you anything, and most of us learned to sort those by instinct long before anybody had a word for the pattern.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the trick ~

the flow was built to make one path obvious and the other invisible. you could get in by confirming your own email and referring nobody, and almost nobody discovered that, because the interface put invitation first and treated it as the step rather than an option. the friction was pointed one way on purpose.

the second half of the design was worse and quieter. addresses submitted by other people went into the database whether or not those people had ever visited the site. by 2013 users were reporting that removal requests went unanswered, and the licensing terms attached to submitted information were broad enough that there was no obvious mechanism to get anything back out. you could be in names database without ever having heard of names database.

~ the sale ~

classmates.com bought opobox in march 2006 for roughly ten million dollars in cash. classmates was owned by united online, which also owned netzero and juno, and which ran reconnect-with-your-past as an actual business with actual subscription revenue.

what the acquirer wanted was the funnel, not the product. from 2007 anyone registering from the united states or canada was redirected straight to a classmates signup page, which left names database running as a foreign-traffic feeder into a site with a bigger paywall. after 2008 nobody updated it. links broke and stayed broken, the upgrade page eventually just said to come back later, and by 2013 united online had stopped counting its accounts as active at all. the domain does not resolve today.

~ what the founder did next ~

weinberg took the money from the sale and started something else in 2008. he called it duckduckgo, and its entire proposition was that it kept no profile of you and logged nothing you searched for.

it would be cheap to call that a conversion story and there is no evidence it was one. but the two products do sit at opposite ends of the same decade, and one of them was funded by the other. the man who built one of the most efficient address-book harvesters of the mid-2000s spent the following fifteen years building the most prominent search engine that refuses to collect anything. whatever he learned in the first job, he clearly learned it thoroughly.

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