Pinger.pl

» see pinger.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 5 November 2007, in the oldest capture the archive holds, the counters on Pinger.pl read 29 users and 81 posts, and the earliest post is dated 3 November. The Polish portal o2.pl had opened the site a few days before. A blogger wrote on 6 November that o2 had launched "swój klon twittera", its own Twitter clone. Dziennik Internautów described the mechanics on 7 November: you could post every 15 seconds, by SMS as well as from the website, and o2's own messenger Tlen.pl could send pings too. There was a public API from the start.

A post was a ping, and it could run to 400 characters where Twitter allowed 140. The front page sold the idea as "MiniBlog! Blog bez wysiłku!", a blog without effort, set up in 30 seconds. Over the years it grew into something closer to a small blog host. By the end a page could carry photos and video files of up to 200 MB, and its owner could restyle it with custom CSS.

The closing banner went up some time between 5 and 18 January 2022: "Z dniem 31.01.2022 serwis pinger.pl zostanie zamknięty." The site ran past its own deadline. On the capture of 2 February the newest post is stamped Wednesday 2 February 2022 at 1:20:18. By that morning the address was redirecting to pudelek.pl. ArchiveTeam, which had been copying the site, lists it as saved.

~ the case file ~

~ twice the size of Twitter, in Poland ~

Megapanel, the Polish audience survey, gave Pinger 670,000 real users in June 2009 and an average time of more than 22 minutes per user, and Wirtualne Media called it the most popular microblog in the country. In May 2011 the same survey counted more than 1.7 million users and almost 29 million page views. Twitter had about 950,000 Polish users that month, and the other local microblog, Blip, was shrinking. Press of the time described the crowd as teenagers. Gadżetomania wrote in 2013 that the internet performers Gracjan Roztocki and Luntek had both made their names there.

The trade site Interaktywnie had already run a piece in September 2010 under a headline that began "Zmierzch mikroblogów", the twilight of the microblogs. In it o2's Marcin Kalkhoff said that "Pinger zarabia na siebie", Pinger pays for itself. Nothing like that happened in Turkey as far as I remember: no local microblog stood between people and Twitter.

~ 597 477 ~

The front page kept a running count of its members. It showed 100,070 on 1 July 2010 and 465,403 on 2 July 2014. On the capture of 1 July 2017 it reads 597,477 users and 17,143,536 posts, and it reads exactly the same on 31 January 2022. The counter had stopped years before the site did.

The owner had changed in between. Poland's competition office cleared o2's purchase of the much larger portal Wirtualna Polska on 27 January 2014, at a price pl.wikipedia gives as 375 million zloty, and the combined group took the bigger name. Pinger became one small property of a company built around a news portal.

~ zapisz jako ~

There was no export tool. The notice told users to archive their own data with the browser's "save page as" command, and it cited point 28 of the terms of service: "Grupa Wirtualna Polska nie świadczy oraz nie zapewnia przechowywania i archiwizowania danych". The group does not provide or guarantee the storage of data. Today pinger.pl redirects to Pudelek, and the old user subdomains land on the error handler of wp.pl. The registration is paid through March 2027.

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