Proust

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

~ the goodbye ~

Proust launched in July 2011 out of IAC, Barry Diller's holding company, and took its name from the Proust Questionnaire, the parlor game of self-revealing questions that the novelist did not invent but made famous. The site worked the same way. It asked you things. More than a thousand of them, grouped into the chapters a life is conventionally divided into, and your answers became a story that your family could read and add to. It leaned older than most social products of that year, deliberately: the use everyone described was a grandchild getting a grandparent to write things down before nobody could ask anymore.

On 4 January 2012 users got an email saying Proust would close at the end of the month, with an export tool offered. IAC's statement was blunt about why: the site "slowly gained users but did not result in an associated revenue substantial enough to maintain operations," and the company had decided the best option was to fold its assets back into IAC. Tom Cortese, the co-founder and chief executive, said in an email that he was totally bummed.

Then the closure was called off. Within days AllThingsD reported that Proust was staying open after all, and the site came back to full strength in February 2012 and ran for another nineteen months. The last complete capture of a working Proust, logged-out homepage and all, is 30 August 2013. By 14 November the same domain was serving an iPhone game called PROUST whose tagline was "It's Fun to Judge." Somewhere in those eleven weeks the memory bank went off and nobody wrote anything about it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the questionnaire ~

A thousand questions is a design decision with a theory behind it. Ask someone to write their life story and you get a blank page and an apology. Ask them what their first bicycle looked like, or what their mother's kitchen smelled like on a Sunday, and you get three paragraphs without effort. Proust was built entirely on that gap in difficulty, and most of the products that have tried to capture family memory since have arrived at the same trick.

What it never solved was the second visit. Answering twenty questions in one evening is pleasant. Coming back every week to answer twenty more, with no feed pulling you in and no audience beyond your own relatives, is a different ask, and the revenue line IAC complained about followed directly from it.

~ the shutdown that was called off ~

The January 2012 reversal is the strangest thing in this file. A company the size of IAC had emailed its users, briefed the press, published a statement explaining the strategic reasoning, and then within the month unpublished the whole decision. No explanation was given for the change of mind either. The archive of the site shows the pattern plainly: a run of redirects through most of January 2012, then the full homepage back on 11 February and holding steady for a year and a half.

What it bought was time rather than a future. Everyone who exported their data in January 2012 did the right thing. Everyone who read the follow-up, relaxed and left their family's stories where they were, had until some unannounced week in the autumn of 2013.

~ what happened to the domain ~

The afterlife is almost comic. proust.com in late 2013 is a lime-green wordmark on a dark purple background advertising an App Store game whose own blurb read "One of the best games of the year! ~ said someone somewhere." That ran for a couple of years. Then 403s through 2016, and today the domain sits on a German parking page offering itself for sale.

I came to this one as a reader rather than a user. An American family-memory network for people a generation older than me was never going to reach Ankara, and the Turkish version of the same impulse has always lived in photo albums and in the stories you only hear at funerals. The idea is good. The idea is also older than IAC, older than the web, and it does not need a subscription, which may be the real reason nobody has made it pay yet.

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