Piczza (픽짜)

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

~ the obituary ~

You had a file that was too big to mail. That was the whole premise, and in 2008 it was a daily problem rather than a hypothetical one. Piczza, a Korean one-click hosting service that opened in July 2008, took the file and the other person's email address, or their mobile phone number, and did the rest. Six gigabytes was the ceiling, which in 2008 was an absurd number to put next to the word "attachment." It ran on every desktop platform, Linux included, and it could push a link out to me2day or Twitter if you wanted the file public.

The storage policy was the actual product. A review from 2009 describes the mechanics: the recipient could download free inside roughly the first twenty-four hours, and after three days the file deleted itself. Nothing accumulated. Piczza was never trying to be a drive or a backup, it was trying to be the postal step between two computers and then get out of the way. The economics of that are brutal. You carry all the bandwidth of a file-sharing service and keep none of the stored library that would give anybody a reason to come back tomorrow.

It closed on 17 December 2010 at one in the afternoon. The stated reason was internal and unglamorous: the company could not sustain the service. Embian named the hour and switched it off two and a half years after opening.

~ the case file ~

~ six gigabytes ~

It is worth sitting with how large that number was. In 2008 I was on a TTNet connection in Turkey and MSN Messenger was still where everything happened, and MSN's own file transfer was notoriously the worst way to move anything substantial: it tried to negotiate a direct connection between two machines that were both sitting behind home routers, and a transfer that had run for an hour could die at 90 percent with no way to resume it. The alternative was a mail attachment, and mail providers were refusing anything past a few tens of megabytes.

So the category Piczza sat in was universal, a shared problem with a dozen local answers, and different countries got different ones. The detail that marks this one as Korean is that it would address a file to a phone number, which tells you where Korean mobile infrastructure sat in 2008 relative to everywhere else.

~ the funny part ~

Embian also released OpenPiczza, a version you could install and run yourself, and they wrote it in Squeak. Squeak is a Smalltalk environment, a live object world descended from the Xerox PARC lineage, and it is a deeply unusual choice for a production web service anywhere on earth. The Korean Wikipedia entry notes this almost as an aside, that the open-source version used Squeak, which was rare domestically.

That detail reframes the whole service. A Korean company in 2008 shipped a large-file relay, then gave away a self-hostable build of it written in a Smalltalk dialect, hosted on Google Code. Somebody there was having a very good time. The service lasted twenty-nine months and the company said the quiet thing out loud about why it stopped, which is more honesty than most shutdown notices manage.

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