Naymz

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

~ the eulogy ~

naymz launched in january 2006 as a "professional reputation management" site. its founders were nolan bayliss with tony czupryna and tom drugan. the pitch was a public score attached to your name. you collected endorsements from people you had worked with and you got back a number called repscore. that number was visible to other professionals. you only really wanted naymz if you cared whether a stranger could verify your reputation with a single integer.

the user base grew slowly through the late 2000s, picking up 1.8 million members by october 2010. that was the visible peak. linkedin in the same window was approaching a hundred million. naymz hit the standard problem of any second-place professional network: nobody pays much attention to your second profile, and almost everyone who would have used naymz already had linkedin open in another tab. the brand drifted through the early 2010s and owner statements got rarer. by some point in december 2017 the site was off, and the people who owned it gave no farewell.

i was on naymz's launch wavelength on paper, a computer engineer online since 1998. in practice i was twenty-two when it launched and not yet looking for the kind of stranger-validation a repscore was meant to provide. by the time professional-network anxiety would have caught up with me, linkedin had won and naymz had stopped being a name i would have heard.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the repscore was the core mechanic. you logged in and invited people who knew your work to endorse you. then you watched the score move. the algorithm was opaque, which was part of the draw. a hidden formula took your real-world endorsements and gave you back a public number out of a hundred. people who like being measured liked being measured. people who did not like being measured did not sign up. that boxed naymz into a niche from day one.

~ the unraveling ~

the fundamental problem was that linkedin already existed and did not require you to care about a score. people who wanted to look hireable could just fill out their work history on linkedin and let recruiters find them. naymz layered a gamification mechanic on top of an activity most users found mildly unpleasant. you can do that for a while. you cannot do it forever, especially when the bigger network across the street keeps adding features and absorbing your potential audience.

~ what got buried with it ~

the wider category of "score the professional human" mostly died with naymz. klout tried it for the social-media side and got killed too. people seem to have decided that strangers ranking you on a public visible number is uncomfortable. naymz was an early read on that comfort threshold. the answer turned out to be: about 1.8 million people were okay with it. that was not enough to survive against a network that did not ask.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »