PlanetAll

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

~ the goodbye ~

planetall sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. in november 1996 i was twelve, on the other side of the atlantic, two years away from my first dial-up modem. when the service died in july 2000 i had been online for two years and was using mirc and a hotmail account, not an american college reunion address book. planetall belonged to a thin window in time that did not reach me.

the founders were warren adams and brian robertson, harvard business school and mit. their pitch was that an address book and a calendar should know about each other and about the network. you typed in your contacts, you said which school or company each one came from, and the service told you when someone you knew had moved, married, or scheduled travel near a city where another member lived. it was a social network with the social part hidden behind a productivity wrapper, two years before sixdegrees.com made the graph itself the product.

on august 4 1998 amazon paid 800,000 shares for planetall, valued at the time around 97 million dollars. the wired and business press at the time treated the deal as a customer-acquisition move: amazon was buying a 1.5 million member database with addresses and birthdays. the service kept running for almost two more years under the amazon name, then was retired on july 2 2000 after the company folded its better features into a tab called friends and favorites on the main amazon site.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

the product had three loops. the address book was the entry point. you uploaded contacts, planetall reminded you of birthdays and anniversaries by email, and changes that contacts made to their own records propagated to your view. the school and employer directories were the social layer. you picked your high school and college, and the system showed you which other members had picked the same one, with a search by graduation year and major. the travel page was the third loop. you posted a future trip, the system flagged any contact whose calendar overlapped with yours, and a feature that looked novel in 1997 turned into a contact-rediscovery engine.

nothing in this stack required strong identity. you did not need a real profile photo. messages between members went through planetall as forwarded email. the graph was implicit, built from the school you typed in and the email addresses you imported.

~ why amazon bought it ~

the public reason amazon gave was customer connection. the implied reason in the trade press was that amazon wanted the contact-import flow and the birthday reminder hook for shopping. the august 1998 acquisition came in the same quarter as junglee, the comparison shopping service that gave amazon its third-party retailer engine, and accept.com, a payments shop. amazon was building infrastructure for a marketplace, not for a social network.

two years later that became visible. purchase circles, the 1999 amazon feature that grouped book purchases by employer and city, used the school and company directory model planetall had spent two years collecting. amazon eventually got a us patent in 2010 for a social-networking system whose claims trace back to the planetall design. the patent was filed in 1997 by the planetall founders before the acquisition closed.

~ the actual death ~

amazon announced on june 26 2000 that planetall would close on july 2. a company spokesperson told reporters the service felt "really superfluous" alongside the friends and favorites tab amazon had launched the previous year. members were directed to copy their data out before the closure date, and the contact import features were retained inside the main amazon account flow.

warren adams stayed at amazon for several years after the shutdown. the friends and favorites tab itself was quietly removed in 2008. by then sixdegrees, friendster, and orkut had been and gone, and amazon had decided its job was to sell things rather than to know who your high school class was.

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