Plixi

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

~ the obituary ~

For about two years Twitter shipped without the ability to hold a picture. If you wanted an image in a tweet you uploaded it somewhere else, that somewhere else gave you a short link, and the link went in your hundred and forty characters like any other. An entire category of company existed inside that gap, and TweetPhoto was one of the larger ones.

It started in San Diego in 2009 and grew fast, on the simplest possible product: take the file, host it, hand back a URL, put the tweet out. By August 2010 it was claiming more than twenty-five million unique visitors a month worldwide. That month it changed its name to Plixi, on the reasoning that a company called TweetPhoto had bolted its identity to somebody else's platform and would like to sell to Facebook users too.

The rebrand was correct and also five months from irrelevant. On 27 January 2011 Lockerz, a Seattle social commerce company that gave teenagers points for logging in, bought Plixi for a reported ten to fifteen million dollars. Plixi was serving over a billion photos a month at the time, which is the number that got quoted in every write-up of the deal and the last genuinely impressive number the product produced.

~ the case file ~

~ before the rebrand ~

The competitive set was TwitPic and yfrog and a dozen others nobody remembers, all doing the same job with the same business model, which was no business model. Hosting images costs money in direct proportion to how popular you are. Nobody in the category had a plausible answer for what happened at scale, so all of them were really building toward an acquisition, and the only question was whether the acquirer would be Twitter.

Plixi's answer to being a commodity was location. The October 2010 iPhone release turned it into a photo check-in service: you posted a picture and it was attached to a place, so the place accumulated pictures from everyone who had been there. It was a reasonable idea. Instagram had launched the week before with a filter set and no interest in explaining itself, and that turned out to be the version people wanted.

~ the lockerz years ~

Lockerz was not buying a photo service so much as buying traffic and an engineering office. Plixi became Lockerz Photos, the San Diego team came along with it, and the parent company spent 2011 and 2012 trying to be a shopping site rather than a photo site. By January 2013 there were layoffs, and most of them landed on the San Diego staff that had arrived in the Plixi purchase.

Twitter had meanwhile solved the problem the whole category was built on. Native photo uploads were announced in June 2011, which meant that from that point forward the reason to use a third-party host was nothing more than habit. The category did not so much collapse as get slowly forgotten, one user at a time, as new accounts arrived and simply never learned there had been an alternative.

~ the rules changed ~

On 15 March 2013 Lockerz announced it was shutting the Plixi API. The stated reason was Twitter's updated Developer Rules of the Road, published alongside the new API version, which made offering a photo API to third parties no longer worth doing. That was a fair description of the rules and also a convenient one, given the layoffs two months earlier.

By the time Plixi died, Turkish Twitter was still small. It got very large a few weeks later, during the protests that started at the end of May 2013, when the platform became the thing people in Istanbul used to find out what was happening two streets over. Everybody who arrived in that wave arrived on a Twitter that hosted its own photos and had never done anything else.

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