Nearby Live

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

~ the obit ~

Nearby never reached Turkey at a scale I would have noticed. Its users were mostly in the United States and India, and for its first three years it only ran on Windows phones, which is two separate kinds of distance stacked on top of each other.

The idea was simple enough that other people kept rebuilding it. Open the app and it shows you everyone else running it within some radius, sorted by how close they are, and you can message any of them. Brian Hamachek shipped the first version in june 2010 for Windows Mobile 6, a platform Microsoft had already announced it was replacing. He called it Who's Near Me.

A Windows Phone 7 build followed that october and a web portal in april 2011. The iPhone app did not arrive until january 2012 and Android not until early 2013. That order is unusual and it is the whole texture of the product. Almost every consumer social app of the period went iPhone first, and this one spent nearly three years on the platform with the smallest install base and the least competition for attention, which is also how it won second place in a Microsoft app contest in 2011 and got itself into BizSpark.

It claimed, repeatedly and in public, that it was not a dating app. The framing was local community and meeting the people around you. Anyone who has built a proximity product knows how that ends, and Wikipedia now records it flatly: dating was the primary use case whatever the app said about itself.

By 2010 I was twenty six and writing software for a living, and the phone in my pocket was not a Windows one. But the honest distance is not the hardware. A sorted list of strangers within walking distance needs density, and it needs all of those strangers to have installed the same thing, and neither condition existed anywhere near me.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the lawsuit over the name ~

In 2011 a venture-backed company called WhosHere decided that Who's Near Me was too close to its own name and filed. Hamachek was one developer. The dispute went public, he wrote about it on his own site under a headline about a VC-funded startup trying to take his social network, and TechCrunch ran both sides of it in june 2012.

He settled by renaming the app WNM Live, which is the initials of the name he had just been made to give up. It is a bad name and everybody involved knew it, and the product carried it for years before finally becoming Nearby. The episode is a small lesson in what a trademark claim actually costs a defendant with no legal budget. Not the case. The years of being called something nobody can say out loud.

~ what the map was for ~

Proximity apps kept arriving through that decade and kept failing in the same place. The list of nearby people is compelling exactly once, on the day you install it, and after that it is the same list. Nothing renews it except other people also installing the app, so growth is not an ambition here. It is the product functioning at all.

Nearby got further than most. Five million users by 2012 and over thirteen million by the time it closed, with five million Android installs behind it and fifty thousand reviews on the Play Store. That is a genuinely large network for something with no company behind it in the usual sense, and it is also why the ending was as bad as it was.

~ the data that got out ~

In september 2021 a breach exposed user information and the service stopped. There is no detailed public accounting of what was taken or how, which is itself part of the story. A service built entirely on where its users were standing went down without a regulator statement or a press cycle.

What Hamachek did afterward is unusual enough to write down. He published the non-private side of the network to Kaggle, the public posts and the follower graph, so the thing could at least be studied by someone. Most dead social networks take their shape into the ground with them. This one left a dataset.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »