Picplz

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

~ the obituary ~

by the time picplz launched in november 2010 i was on a turkish android phone with a 3g sim and not yet on instagram either. the filtered-photo app category was something i watched land in the english tech press without picking a side. i did not download picplz, i did not download instagram in 2010 either. close enough.

picplz came out of mixed media labs in san francisco, the second startup from dalton caldwell after imeem shut down in december 2009. the cofounders were bryan berg and ali aydar, both imeem veterans, ali aydar himself a napster engineering alum. the product was a free ios and android app with a set of filters you applied to a phone photo before posting to a feed your friends could follow. that is the same sentence you could write about instagram in november 2010.

the difference was timing. instagram had launched october 6 2010 and was already a press story by the time picplz shipped a month later. mixed media labs had announced funding around the same week. on the technical merits the two apps looked comparable to anyone testing both, the early adopter crowd had already picked. by spring 2011 instagram was tracking past a million users and picplz was tracking in the low six figures.

the april 9 2012 facebook acquisition of instagram for a billion dollars closed the question. picplz posted the shutdown notice less than two months later. dalton caldwell told techcrunch that the gossip about the instagram sale was a waste of time, then quietly wound down the service. he went on to start app.net in august 2012, the paid twitter alternative that ran until 2017.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

on paper picplz had a slightly different shape from instagram. it had been location-aware from the start with brightkite-style checkin integration. the founders came from a music-social-network background rather than a hipster design background. the filters were applied after upload rather than before. these were the kinds of differentiators that read well in a techcrunch post and did not matter to a user picking which app to install when their friends were on the other one.

mixed media labs raised around 5 million dollars from andreessen horowitz in early 2011, the same firm that had also put money into instagram. when instagram got the billion-dollar exit a16z made roughly 78 million on a 250k bet. picplz returned nothing. dalton caldwell spent some of 2012 publicly explaining that the funding rounds were not really comparable and the gossip narrative was incomplete. people lost interest in the explanation quickly.

~ the day it died ~

the june 2 2012 shutdown notice gave users a month to export their photos through a working export tool. accounts and photos were deleted on july 3. picplz.com redirected briefly before going dark. the team folded into a new mixed media labs project that became app.net.

the broader picplz era lasted about 18 months from launch to shutdown. it is now mostly a footnote in two stories. one is the instagram-acquisition narrative where picplz is the also-ran. honestly, the other is the dalton caldwell biography where picplz is the bridge between imeem and app.net. neither story spends much time on the product itself.

~ what carried over ~

the picplz shutdown was an early example of a pattern that became common after 2012. when one player in a category took the bulk of the network-effect attention, the second and third options ran out of reason to exist within months of the verdict. it was not a slow fade like imeem. it was a clean stop on a posted date with full deletion. that became the standard way for the also-ran apps of the smartphone era to end.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »