Plinky

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

~ the goodbye ~

Plinky asked you one question every weekday. What is your favorite summer memory. Is being normal a good thing. You wrote an answer, or attached a photo or a map instead of writing one, and Plinky pushed it out to your blog and your Twitter and your Tumblr. That was the entire product, and the entire product was aimed at one specific feeling, which is sitting in front of an empty text box with nothing to say.

It came out of Thing Labs, the company Jason Shellen started after leaving Google, where he had worked on Blogger and had been one of the people behind Google Reader. Chris Wetherell was there too. Plinky was the first thing they shipped, and by the summer of 2009 the studio had already turned most of its attention to Brizzly, its Twitter client.

Automattic bought Plinky on 25 June 2010 for an undisclosed amount, which is a small footnote with a strange shape around it: three months later AOL bought the rest of Thing Labs for something like eighteen million dollars. Matt Mullenweg wrote a short post about the acquisition and WordPress.com started serving prompts almost immediately.

I had no use for it. In 2010 I had a job and no blog, and running out of things to say was not a problem I was having. Plinky was built for people who already had somewhere to publish and needed a reason to open it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the prompt ~

The idea outlived the site by a wide margin. Automattic kept generating daily prompts under the Daily Post banner long after the original was gone, and the shape turns up everywhere now, in the journaling apps that ask you a question at nine in the evening and in every writing tool with a blank-page problem to solve.

What Plinky had that the descendants mostly do not is that the answers were public and collected. You could read what four hundred other people had said about the same question, which turned a writing exercise into something closer to a very slow conversation.

~ what is still standing ~

The shutdown was 1 September 2014, and Automattic did something unusual with the corpse. plinky.com is still online in 2026. It still renders a prompt at the top of the page. The signup and login forms are disabled and there is nothing to submit an answer to, and the site says so in plain text: Plinky was created by Thing Labs, acquired by Automattic in 2010, shut down on September 1st, 2014.

Twelve years of hosting bills for a page that cannot accept a single new word. It is the cheapest kind of respect and almost nobody bothers with it.

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