Poetica

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

~ the obit ~

Blaine Cook wrote a lot of the code that held Twitter together in 2006 and 2007, back when the site fell over weekly and the fail whale was a recognized piece of visual culture. He was its first lead engineer, left in 2008, and spent the years after that on open protocol work that most people never saw. In 2012 he started a company in London to fix text editing.

Poetica launched publicly on 17 June 2014. It was a browser-based collaborative editor with a Chrome extension, plus a WordPress plugin that put live Google-Docs-style co-editing inside the WordPress post editor, which was the part that got publishers interested. The plugin was open source.

Its distinguishing idea was visual and it is the reason the product is still worth remembering. Every other collaborative tool of that moment put suggestions somewhere else, in a comment thread parked out in the right margin or a change-tracking pane off to one side. Poetica drew the edit on the sentence itself, the way a person with a pen marks up a printout. Deletions were struck through where they sat, and insertions appeared between the words they belonged between. You accepted or rejected each one in place, and the document read like a marked-up page rather than a database of revisions.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the idea ~

This sounds like a small interface preference and it is actually a claim about how editing works. A margin comment asks the writer to hold two things in their head: the prose as written, and a description of a change to it. Drawing the change on the text removes that translation step, which is exactly why human editors have marked up paper that way for several centuries.

The investor list was unusually literary for a developer tool. Alongside Kima Ventures and the Knight Foundation's enterprise fund sat the author Steven Berlin Johnson, and the founders of Huddle and Postshift. These were people who thought about editorial workflow for a living rather than about seats and enterprise licensing.

~ what Condé Nast wanted ~

The acquisition was announced on 1 March 2016. Condé Nast took the product and the whole five-person team, who stayed in London, and pointed them at Copilot, the publishing platform it runs its own titles on. Cook stayed as a staff engineer. For a magazine company with a large editorial staff and a proprietary CMS, a tool that makes an editor's marks legible inside the CMS is a straightforwardly useful thing to own, and owning it outright is cheaper than licensing it forever.

That left the public service with nowhere to go. The founders announced on 4 April 2016 that poetica.com would close, gave users two months, and sent instructions for downloading a full archive of their drafts. The site went dark on 1 June 2016. The open-source WordPress plugin was discontinued at the same time, which is the part that stung for the people who had built it into a workflow.

Their post was candid about the arithmetic. They had taken on "the parallel challenge of creating a viable business model" and found that "these goals were often at odds" with building the thing well.

~ the funny part ~

Poetica solved a problem I have had continuously since university, which is that reviewing someone else's writing in a comment gutter is miserable. It solved it in London, two years after I had already given up and settled into Google Docs, on the grounds that Google Docs is where everyone else already was. A better editor that none of my colleagues use is a worse editor in practice.

poetica.com does not resolve at all now, which is rarer than it sounds. Most dead products leave a squatter behind. This one was bought by a company with lawyers, and when the service closed the name went quiet instead of going to auction.

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