Slide.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

slide was a web 2.0 widget company started by max levchin in 2005 after paypal sold to ebay. levchin put $1m of his own money in. the bet was simple: the social network profile page wanted to host other people's software, and somebody had to build the software. for a few years that bet paid. slide became the largest third-party app developer on the facebook platform, with slideshow widgets across myspace, hi5, bebo, and friendster. superpoke was its loudest product. you poked someone with a virtual sheep and they poked back with a virtual fish.

google bought slide on 4 august 2010 for $182m, plus another $46m in retention bonuses for the team. the deal was framed as google buying its way back into social after losing the platform war to facebook. it did not work. levchin came over as vp of engineering, but neither his team nor the products fit inside google. on 26 august 2011 google announced the shutdown. levchin walked the same day. the formal lights-out date was 6 march 2012.

slide lived one layer above where i was looking. by 2010 i had msn open in the corner and a forum tab in internet explorer, and the english-language myspace and bebo profile that hosted superpoke was a different social plane. slide's products never had a turkish footprint to land on. i learned about superpoke years later from retrospectives on the early facebook platform.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

at peak slide ran superpoke, funspace, top friends, funwall, and a small catalog of widget apps that shipped to whichever social network would host them. the model was unsubtle. get installed on a profile, run on autoplay, monetize the eyeballs. slide and zynga were the two biggest names in that layer of the facebook platform before facebook tightened its viral-spread rules in 2010 and shrank the entire category overnight.

~ how it ended ~

by the time google bought slide, the platform-app category was already in retreat. facebook had cut off the viral notification channels that fed install rates, and traffic to widget startups was dropping. google paid $182m for a company whose growth motor had quietly stopped. levchin stayed at google for one year. without a product to justify the price, he left. slide closed quietly. superpoke was already a punchline by then.

~ what got buried ~

slide is a clean obituary entry for the web 2.0 widget acquisitions that bought nothing. the team scattered. the urls went dead. levchin took the cash and went on to start affirm. there was no slide successor at google, and nothing on google+ inherited the widget dna. superpoke survives as a screenshot in nostalgia threads about facebook circa 2008.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »