Simpy

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

~ the goodbye ~

You have almost certainly used Otis Gospodnetic's work without knowing his name. He co-wrote Lucene in Action, the book on the search library that quietly sits underneath a large share of the internet's search boxes, and he went on to found Sematext, which watches over other people's systems for a living. In between, from 2004, he ran a social bookmarking site called Simpy, and Simpy is the part of the story nobody remembers.

It launched in May 2004, the same season the whole category woke up. delicious had just shown that people would save their links to a website instead of the browser and tag them out in the open, and within a year there was a small crowd of imitators and rivals, Furl and Spurl among them. Simpy's edge was search, which made sense given who built it. You could full-text search your own saved pages and your own notes, not just the titles, and in 2004 that was not nothing.

It had the things the good ones had. Tag clouds, and a real API that people built little tools against. There were groups, called watchlists, where a few people could share one list. when a delicious clone named de.lirio.us shut down in 2006, its users were pointed at Simpy, a small sign it was respected in that world even if it never led it.

The distance here is not region for once, and it is not that i was too far from the category. It is quieter than that. i knew Otis Gospodnetic's name from search, from Lucene in Action on the shelf, for years before i had any idea he had also built a bookmarking site, and by the time i learned it existed it was already gone. The tool that was only ever going to be his footnote was a footnote to me too, arriving already dead. The real work stayed. the side project did not.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a delicious also-ran ~

Being second in this category was not a comfortable place. delicious had the name and the crowd, and social bookmarking turned out to be a game where the leader took nearly everything, because the whole value was in other people's links and other people were on delicious. Yahoo bought delicious in 2005 and even that slow decline took years to play out. The smaller sites did not get years. They got acquired for parts or they went quiet, and their users drifted to whichever big site their friends were already on.

~ the name behind it ~

Simpy went quiet around 2010. The record is thin, which is its own kind of ending for a bookmarking site. What is written down is that Reuters acquired it and it stopped operating as a public bookmarking service that April, and the domain did not survive. i would treat the acquisition line gently, because it is barely sourced and a small site simply going dark looks much the same from the outside. What is not in doubt is what its maker did next. Gospodnetic founded Sematext the same year and spent the following decade in search and monitoring, the work Lucene in Action had always pointed at. Simpy is the thing he built on the way to being known for something else.

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