Qwerly

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

~ the eulogy ~

Qwerly was a London startup from 2010 that did one specific thing: you handed it an email address or a Twitter handle, and it handed back links to that person's other profiles across Facebook, LinkedIn and everywhere else it could resolve them. TechCrunch described it as DNS for people, which is both an accurate description of the architecture and a sentence that should make you uneasy.

Max Niederhofer, who ran it, framed the origin as an infrastructure question rather than a product one. He told ReadWriteWeb that the motivation was really the question of what you would need in order to build a decentralized social web platform. The answer he landed on was a resolver: a layer that could tell you that these scattered accounts belong to the same human being, so that something built on top would not have to ask.

This was never aimed at anyone like me, and by 2011 I was working as an engineer in Ankara and had no reason to touch a people-resolution API. The customers were CRM vendors and support desks in the US and Britain, and the product was sold in a language and a sales motion that stayed inside that world.

~ the dossier ~

~ the api that outlived the site ~

On 5 May 2011 Qwerly closed its consumer profile pages. The numbers made the decision obvious: around fifty thousand people visited the site in April while the API served more than thirty million queries. Niederhofer said demand for putting Qwerly data into CRM suites, customer support systems, email clients and address books had far outstripped interest in the website.

So the part people could see went away and the part they could not see kept growing. That is a common shape for this category and it is the reason so little of it survives in any readable form. A website leaves an archive behind it, while an API leaves a billing record.

~ who bought the pieces ~

Fliptop acquired Qwerly on 1 November 2011 in a cash and stock deal with undisclosed terms, folding the resolver into its own sales-intelligence product. LinkedIn then acquired Fliptop in August 2015, which put a people-matching engine built in London inside the company that owned most of the professional identity graph it had been resolving against.

qwerly.com today is an unrelated blog about HTML and web design, sitting on a recycled domain with no idea what used to be there. The identity-resolution business Qwerly was early to is now enormous and almost entirely invisible, sold to enrichment platforms and data brokers under names consumers never see. Qwerly's mistake, if it was one, was briefly having a front door.

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