OneRiot

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

~ the last words ~

OneRiot was not called OneRiot for the first half of its life. The company started in Boulder, Colorado in 2006 as Me.dium, a browser extension for what it called social browsing. David Mandell and Robert Reich founded it with Peter Newcomb after moving out from New York, and Kimbal Musk ran it.

Me.dium raised fifteen million dollars in the summer of 2007 and then changed its name. A capture of the site from 4 November 2008 still says Me.dium. The next one, taken on 2 December, says OneRiot.com, Find the Pulse of the Web. Nobody ever published the day in between, and the archive is the only witness to the month.

What it turned into was a real-time search engine, which in 2009 was a real category with real money behind it. It was also a category that never built a Turkish-language surface worth searching, and whatever moved fast where I was that year moved through forums rather than through anything a crawler could rank by the second. The search engine lasted under two years as a destination. On 12 October 2010 the company announced it was finished with it, and on 13 September 2011 Walmart bought what remained.

~ the record ~

~ what it indexed ~

OneRiot pulled from Twitter and MySpace, with Digg and Delicious behind them, and later added Facebook through Open Graph. The ranking algorithm was called PulseRank, and the company described it as a measure of social resonance: how fast a link was being shared across the web right at that moment, and who was doing the sharing and how much weight they carried. The URL index refreshed every thirty-five seconds.

The index was the product and the website was not. By November 2009 Kimbal Musk was saying that more than seventy partners used the OneRiot real-time search API, with Yahoo joining a list that already included Microsoft and, less predictably, Reed Elsevier. Microsoft had already folded it into the Internet Explorer 8 campaign that March. Taptu wired the API into its mobile search that November, which is how a company in Cambridge came to be serving a Boulder company's results to readers who knew neither name.

~ the client list ~

There is a page on the archived site from October 2010 that is nothing but a wall of customer logos, and it works better as a document of that year than most things written about it. American Express and Time Inc. sit on the same grid as Justin.tv and TweetDeck, which is a fair picture of the two halves of the advertising market OneRiot was trying to stand between.

~ the ad network years ~

The pivot went up on the company's own blog on 12 October 2010, under Tobias Peggs, who had taken over as chief executive that July when Kimbal Musk moved up to chairman and a round of layoffs went through. The wording was not evasive. Future investment would go to the paid-search syndication product rather than to the organic search destination. Nine days later OneRiot handed its remaining search partners across to Topsy.

After that it sold mobile advertising targeted off social signals. The site's final working capture, taken on 3 September 2011, claims more than two billion monthly ad impressions across its own network of social mobile apps, with Microsoft's Bing and a Chevy Super Bowl spot named among the campaigns. Ten days later Walmart bought the company and moved the team into @WalmartLabs, and the price was never disclosed. By 20 January 2012 oneriot.com was serving a notice that the domain's DNS service had expired.

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