Netbul

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

~ the last words ~

Under the search box on netbul.com there was a radio button that said "Sadece Türk Siteleri". Only Turkish sites. In 2000 that was not a filter, it was the entire product. The web was mostly in English and mostly hosted somewhere else, and a search that returned only pages from this country was the difference between a tool you used and a novelty you looked at once.

Netbul opened in 1999, founded by Elif Dağdeviren, and it is the one usually named when somebody says Turkey's first internet portal. The wordmark sat on a yellow block with the promise printed underneath it, "İki nokta arasındaki en kısa yol", the shortest way between two points. The shape was borrowed from Yahoo. A hand-built directory ran down the left side of the page with the categories written out in Turkish, and underneath it sat a newsroom that filed its own copy instead of reprinting a wire, which was an unusual amount of effort for a Turkish website at the time.

By November 2000 the front page also carried a chat called NetChat and a personalized news page called Benim Gazetem, along with mailing lists and an e-card service that everyone had in those years. By 2003 there was a section called NETCEP selling logos and ringtones straight to your phone. That last one tells you who owned it by then.

This is one I do not have to reconstruct from the outside. I was online here from 1998 on a modem that climbed from 14.4k to 56k over a few years, and the Turkish web in that window was small enough to have a front door. Netbul was one of the two or three addresses you typed before the habit settled onto Google, and not because it searched better. Because it was in the right language and it knew what counted as a site from here.

~ the record ~

~ what a portal meant here ~

A portal was a homepage setting. It had to be the first thing the browser loaded, which meant it had to carry the news and a search box and enough else to keep you from typing a different address. Netbul did that in Turkish while the alternative was an American directory that had heard of maybe forty sites from this country and had filed most of them wrong.

The directory being hand-built is worth sitting with, because it is the thing about the pre-Google web that is hardest to explain now. A person read the site, decided it was a travel site, and put it under Gezi ve Ulaşım. That work does not scale to a million pages and it produced better answers than anything automated could manage until crawling got good enough to stop needing it. When that happened the whole category went from useful to quaint inside about two years.

~ the ownership chain ~

Dağdeviren sold Netbul to the Uzan group. The Uzans owned Telsim, the second GSM network in the country, along with a bank and a television channel, and around 2002 a portal with a ringtone service was a reasonable thing for a mobile operator to be holding. A mobile operator running a portal that sold ringtones to its own subscribers is not a coincidence, it is the reason the portal was worth owning.

In 2004 the state took the group apart. TMSF, the deposit insurance fund, seized the assets and eventually sold Telsim to Vodafone, and Netbul crossed over inside the same transaction because it sat on the same books. A British mobile operator bought a Turkish network in 2005 and found a web portal in the box.

~ what vodafone kept ~

For a couple of years Vodafone ran it anyway. Eighteen editorial and technical people under a journalist named Ercüment Erkul produced the site and also wrote the news that went out over Vodafone Live, the SMS and WAP service, so the newsroom was paying for itself twice. The portal at that stage was still doing up to three hundred thousand clicks a day.

Then it stopped. The archive has a full front page on 23 July 2008 and a stub by 20 October, and before the month was out the address answered with an error. The news reached Turkish forums in the first week of October, where people mostly complained that Vodafone had taken something apart rather than built anything. There was no farewell page and no announcement. The first portal this country had was closed the way an operator closes a cost center, which is quietly and in a memo.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »