Nokia Memories

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

~ the eulogy ~

Nokia Memories was never a product anyone chose. It was the back end of one. Cinemagraph, the Lumia camera app that let you freeze a photo and leave one part of it moving, shipped with the Lumia 920 and could not share its own output, because a cinemagraph is an animated GIF and the places people wanted to post it would only ever render the first frame. Version 2.5 fixed that in December 2012 by not posting the file at all. The app uploaded your loop to memories.nokia.com and shared the link it got back.

So every cinemagraph that ever left a Lumia got a page on a Nokia server, with the moving image on it and a URL you could paste anywhere. That was the entire service. Nobody browsed it and nobody had an account on it, which is why the first archived capture of its homepage is a 404.

It lasted 25 months. Microsoft completed the purchase of Nokia's devices business in April 2014, and the Nokia-branded online services went into what the FAQ called a ramp-down. The notice is short enough to quote whole: all data stored at memories.nokia.com will be deleted as part of the online service ramp-down taking place on 12 January 2015. Check your previously shared cinemagraphs before then. Anything saved locally stays on your phone.

~ the dossier ~

~ what actually broke ~

That last line is also where the damage was. Your own cinemagraphs were fine, sitting in the app's saved view on the handset. What died were the copies you had given to other people. Every link shared to Twitter or pasted into an email since the end of 2012 pointed at a Nokia URL, and on 12 January 2015 all of them pointed at nothing.

~ the nokia part ~

In Turkey, Nokia was simply what a phone was. Through the dial-up years and well past them, the handset in a Turkish pocket was a Nokia, usually a cheap one. That makes this a strange grave to stand at from here, because the Lumia era is the part of Nokia that Turkey skipped. By 2012 the phones around me ran Android and Windows Phone never got past a rounding error, so Cinemagraph was a clever camera trick that almost nobody I knew had access to.

~ what the crawl could find ~

Archive Team went after it and the result is filed as partially saved. To find the URLs at all they had to work backwards from where people had posted them: a combined Google and Bing crawl, a URLTeam pass, 140 addresses scraped out of Reddit, and a Twitter sweep that turned up 22,317 tweets mentioning memories.nokia.com. That number is the only real measure of how much the thing got used, and it exists because the service had no index of its own.

Microsoft dropped the Nokia name from the phones in 2015 and wound the brand's web services down over the same period. A rebranded version of the app, Lumia Cinemagraph Beta, moved the hosting to OneDrive, under a Microsoft account instead of a Nokia URL.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »