Sconex

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

~ the eulogy ~

american high schoolers used sconex. that was not my crowd or my country. the site was a high-school-only social network built by joseph presbrey, an mit junior in electrical engineering and computer science, after a conversation with his collaborator jaward laraqui's sister, who could not get into facebook because she was still in high school. the founding year was 2004. the user surface was profile, photos, notes, groups, polls, class-schedule sharing, a yearbook-style vote-on-categories layer that the audience pushed all the way to the top of the engagement metrics.

sconex grew on word of mouth. typical sessions ran over twenty minutes. by early 2006 it was over half a million registered users with concentration in urban east coast high schools, the same demographic strip that gave myspace its first lift two years earlier. in march 2006 presbrey sold sconex to alloy media + marketing, a new york teen marketing firm, for over six million dollars. mit news ran the alumni profile that fall.

alloy already owned four million monthly unique visitors across its teen properties. the acquisition was meant to bolt on a real social graph and a content engagement layer. it did not quite work that way. by the time alloy got integration moving, facebook had opened to high school students in september 2005, then to anyone in september 2006. myspace was already the music and personality default for the same age bracket. sconex's competitive window had been narrower than its growth curve suggested.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

presbrey's own quote on the sale captured the timing dependency: had facebook not started, we may not have become so popular. the same launch climate that gave sconex its initial pull (a swelling appetite for school-friend graphs, no obvious dominant product yet) was also the climate that produced the larger competitors who would absorb it. sconex was an early signal of teen sn demand, not a durable platform for it.

before sconex, presbrey ran a high-school computer services business covering network programming and security software. by his early twenties he had built two profitable consumer-internet companies in succession. the sconex sale was his exit. he later worked at mit's computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory under tim berners-lee on the social web stack.

~ what got buried with it ~

by 2008 alloy had folded sconex into teen.com, its general-purpose teen portal. the sconex profile system, the school-by-school browse, the yearbook-vote layer all stopped being a standalone destination. teen.com itself ran into the same compression in the following years. alloy media + marketing was acquired by zelnick media capital in 2010 and the teen-internet portfolio drifted into managed decline.

the school-isolated sn category did not really come back. afterschool launched in 2014 and made it to broad adoption inside us high schools before pivoting to a more general teen app. yik yak briefly approximated the school-by-school feed with proximity instead of identity. neither one carried the sconex shape directly.

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