PerfSpot

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

~ the eulogy ~

PerfSpot started in Phoenix, Arizona in 2006, out of a marketing business that ran co-branded parties where photographers handed out cards. The pitch was that you would go home and look up your own photos from the night, and while you were there you would find the strangers who had been standing next to you. Hart Cunningham was the founder and chief executive.

What it turned into was a MySpace-shaped profile site with a translation layer bolted on, and the translation layer is the reason anyone should remember it. At its widest the site ran in fifty languages and reported users in more than two hundred countries. Its users were spread thin across a hundred small markets, which is why the member number sounds enormous and the name sounds like nothing.

In September 2007 TechCrunch ran the Nielsen//NetRatings figures for British social networks and PerfSpot was the fastest growing thing on the chart, up 756 percent since April. Facebook, in the same measurement window, had managed 541 percent, and that was the month Facebook finally passed MySpace in the UK, 6.5 million British visitors against 6.4 million.

~ the dossier ~

~ the growth chart ~

By November 2008 the site was claiming 24 million members. The same TechCrunch that had carried the growth story a year earlier pointed out that Hitwise had PerfSpot's UK share of the social category going down, from 0.034 percent to 0.028, over the twelve months it was supposedly exploding. Registrations were not visits and visits were not a network.

Turkey had its own version of this argument and settled it differently. Hi5 was what people here actually opened, from about 2005 until Facebook took the country, and PerfSpot never came up in that conversation once.

~ friendvouch ~

The 2008 plan to make money was a scheme called Friendvouch. You subscribed to advertising offers, forwarded them to people you knew, and got paid when those people turned out to be interested. There was an initial cap of ten contacts per user, liftable once recipients confirmed they wanted the mail.

Mike Butcher's line at the time was that the network would eat itself, because the moment your friends realized the recommendation came with a commission, they would stop reading anything you sent. Nothing in the record suggests Friendvouch ever produced revenue worth reporting.

~ the red box ~

Sometime in the summer of 2013 a red bordered box went up above the logo on the front page. The text read that PerfSpot.com would be shutting down on July 24th, 2013, that all data would be deleted, and that anything you wanted to keep should be saved now. The archive still has the page with the box on it, dated 24 July, still 5,887 bytes of ordinary social network underneath the warning.

Four days later the whole thing was 426 bytes. A blue background, centered, with a single image tag pointing at logo.gif and nothing else in the document. That page stayed up for years, an unstyled company logo on a field of navy, which is a stranger monument than most dead networks get.

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