Neogen.ro

» see neogen.ro as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Romania built its own social network and used it for a decade. Turkey did not. That is the honest distance here, and it is not the usual language or region excuse, because the two countries were running on fairly similar timelines otherwise. When the social web arrived in Turkey it went to Hi5 and then to Facebook, both foreign, and nothing local ever occupied the gap between them. Romania had Neogen sitting in that gap for years.

Neogen started in 2000, out of Târgu Mureș, a city of about 130,000 people in the middle of Transylvania and not the obvious place for a national internet company. Călin Fusu built it, first as something called Rogenerator. Over the following years he bought or built most of the rest of the Romanian social web and pointed all of it at one login: Colegi.ro for finding the people you went to school with, Noi2.ro for dating. A games site called DoiZece and the job board BestJobs came along too.

By 2007 it looked like a real company. Tiger Global Management, the American fund, took 27 percent alongside a Dutch investor for around six million euros. In February 2011 Neogen had offices in five cities across four countries, and the social network was past two million registered accounts. Revenue in 2010 had been 2.6 million euros, which for a Romanian internet business at that point was not nothing.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

It was a social network in the pre-Facebook sense, which meant it was several things stapled together. There were profiles and there was chat, and around them a set of forums and games that a lot of people treated as the actual reason to be there. The comment threads under old posts about it are full of Romanians saying they met their husband or their wife on it, which is the strongest thing anyone can say about a dead social site.

Fusu also picked up Faces.md, the largest social network in Moldova, in the same run of acquisitions that brought in Colegi.ro. That one ended stranger than Neogen did. Moldovan authorities closed Faces.md over an erotic clip somebody had posted to it, which is not a shutdown mode that comes up often.

~ the slide ~

The decline is documented almost entirely by Romanian bloggers, because nobody issued a statement about any of it. Hi5 took the users first. TPU.ro passed Neogen in March 2010 to become the most visited Romanian social network, which was less a victory for TPU than a measurement of how far Neogen had already dropped. Facebook took everything after that.

What the bloggers were angrier about was the direction the site got pushed while it was dying. Moderation went and the standards went with it. The profitable thing on the Romanian internet in 2011 was group discounts, and in early February 2012 Neogen became Zumzi, a voucher site. People logging in found no chat and no posts, only deals, and one of them wrote that the rubbish called Zumzi had moved in. Others had trouble even deleting their accounts.

The official line was the usual one about concentrating on the successful parts of the business for the benefit of the users. Twelve years of a country's social internet ended as a coupon page, and the only obituaries anybody wrote were on personal blogs.

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