Plasa.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

You reached Plasa.com by being a Telkom Indonesia subscriber. My phone bill went to a Turkish company, so the portal that came bundled with my line was a different one in a different language with the same idea behind it. In the dial-up years almost every national telecom decided that selling the wire was not enough, and that it should own the first page you saw as well.

Plasa.com launched in 1998 and took its name from the Plasa Telkom offices, the walk-in branches where Indonesians went to pay a phone bill or ask about a line. That was the strategy in one word. Take the brand the whole country already associated with the telephone, put it on a web address, and let the largest subscriber base in the archipelago arrive by default.

What sat on it was the standard portal spread of the period: a web directory, news, discussion forums, mailing lists, classified ads, electronic greeting cards, a school community section and some games. The piece that outlived the rest was Plasa Mail. A free address at plasa.com was the kind of thing people keep for a decade after they stop visiting the site that handed it to them, which is why the ending was messier than a portal shutdown usually is.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ebay turn ~

On 17 September 2012 Telkom and eBay set up a joint venture, PT Metra Plasa, to build a marketplace on top of the portal. It took two years to appear. In December 2014 eBay put 9.2 million dollars into the vehicle, Blanja.com launched on the eighth of that month, and Plasa.com stopped being a portal and became a shopping site under a new name.

Nobody announced a death. A sixteen year old address simply resolved to something else, which is how most portals of that generation actually ended. The obituary was a rebrand press release.

~ what happened to the mail ~

Plasa Mail did not survive the rename. Users were told to move their addresses to the @outlook.com domain, so a national telecom's webmail, one of the first free Indonesian email services, was handed to a foreign consumer product on the way out. If you want one sentence for where the portal era ended, that is a decent candidate.

~ the long tail ~

Blanja.com stopped taking buy and sell transactions on 1 September 2020, with Telkom saying it would concentrate on corporate and small business e-commerce instead. The plasa.com domain was pointed at Uzone.id in 2021.

So the portal became a marketplace and the marketplace closed. The address is now a redirect into somebody else's media property, still owned by the phone company, still pointing at whatever Telkom currently believes the internet is for.

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