oneview

» see oneview.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

My bookmarks lived in a Favorites folder on one machine and died with it. That was the actual condition of the late nineties and I lived in it for years. Reinstall Windows and lose the lot. Sit down at a machine in an internet cafe and start from nothing. What I had no idea about was that a German agency had already built the fix, in 1998, and put it somewhere I could have reached over a 33.6k modem if the name had ever crossed my screen.

oneview came out of denkwerk, a multimedia agency in Cologne founded by Felix Hildebrand and Axel Schmiegelow, and the idea was small and correct: keep the links on a server rather than in the browser. Save something and tag it, mark it public or private, then search across everything you had kept and everything other people had. That is the entire feature set of every social bookmarking service that came after, written down five years before del.icio.us launched in 2003 and handed the category its name.

It got noticed at the time. The German Multimedia Award came in 1999 along with a World Medal from the New York Festivals, and a Best in eBusiness award followed in August 2000. Then the dot com crash arrived and the company behind the site did not outlive its own funding. In 2005 the assets of the old oneview AG were bought by a small group, Carl-Marcus Rudert and Guido Kaltwasser among them, and the site started up again.

~ the case file ~

~ before there was a word for it ~

The thing worth saying out loud is the date. Histories of social bookmarking start at del.icio.us in 2003, because that is where the word starts, and everything after descends from it by inheritance. oneview was doing the thing in 1998 in German, which means the category got invented at least twice and the version that got remembered is the one that happened in English.

This is not a complaint about credit. It is about how the record gets made. A product only enters the history of a category if somebody writing in the dominant language of that history notices it while it is alive, and a Cologne agency shipping in German in 1998 had almost no chance of that happening. There were probably others. Nobody would know.

~ the relaunch ~

In August 2012 dw capital, with Schmiegelow running it, repositioned oneview as a social sharing platform. Facebook and Twitter accounts hooked in, links posted elsewhere synced back automatically, and the collection organized itself by topic rather than by folder. The German trade press wrote it up as a genuinely good relaunch. The archive at that point held over fifty million bookmarks.

Fifty million is a real number and it saved nothing. By 2012 the browser had eaten the problem. Chrome and Firefox synced bookmarks across machines for free, tied to an account you already had for other reasons, which removed the only reason an ordinary person had ever needed a bookmarking site. That left the social half, and the social half had gone to Twitter years earlier.

~ what carried over ~

oneview closed in 2015. No announcement survives, the domain has stopped resolving, and the German Wikipedia entry gives the end a single sentence with no month in it. Seventeen years and fifty million saved links go out on that.

The links themselves are the loss worth naming. A bookmark collection is a map of what somebody thought was worth keeping, assembled slowly and by hand, and fifty million of them across seventeen years is a decent record of what the German-speaking web considered interesting between 1998 and 2015. Most of what they pointed at is gone too. The map went first.

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