Smeet

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

~ the obit ~

Smeet started as a telephone. In December 2006 the Berlin company sMeet Communications was running a chat community on smeet.de, and the pitch that went out with the 2007 version was a 3D world of themed rooms, a café and a schoolyard among them, where your avatar could place a voice call to another avatar. The call was the product. The world was the place you dialed from.

Seven people co-founded it and the money was serious for a German consumer web company of that period. Hasso Plattner Ventures and Partech International were in by October 2007, KfW came later, and the total reached about 8.6 million euros. What the money built was a browser 3D world where you furnished your own rooms, kept pets and spent a currency called Coins, with a Fame Points ladder running underneath the whole thing.

It scaled quickly. Two and a half million registered by April 2010, then around six million across twelve languages by January 2011. By that December it was eleven million users and a hundred and ten employees. A Tagesspiegel piece in February 2012 put it at fifteen million registered with two and a half million of those in Germany, and the last number the site ever published, on an about page from 2022, was more than twenty-two million Smeeters.

The Facebook numbers are the ones worth reading, because they are the only honest activity figures anywhere in the pile. As a Facebook canvas app, Smeet peaked around 582,000 monthly and 63,000 daily users in the spring of 2011, and by the middle of that June it was down to 360,000 and 32,000. Registration totals kept climbing for another decade while the activity numbers went the other way.

On 10 November 2023 the site posted a notice saying the lifetime of Smeet would come to an end, and that the first step was removing the option to buy Coins. On 1 December a second notice set the date: 5 January 2024, contracts canceled, accounts deleted, whatever virtual currency sat in the account expired with them. The servers went off that Friday at eleven at night, Central European Time, after a goodbye party held inside the world. The farewell post went up five days later.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the desktop client ~

Flash died and Smeet did something almost nobody else tried. In November 2020, with HTML5 and WebGL sitting there as the obvious routes, it shipped a downloadable desktop client for Windows and macOS and kept the same world running inside that. It bought three more years, on a user base that had to be talked into installing an application in order to keep visiting a website.

Ownership had changed by then. The Angaros Group of Singapore took it over on 1 January 2014, which the founder has described as a management buyout, and Sebastian Funke left the managing director role in January 2018. The company that ran it is still on the Berlin register today, with no insolvency filing and no liquidation entry against it.

~ the turkish locale ~

Smeet shipped in fourteen locales and Turkish was one of them, sitting in the footer beside Greek and Arabic. That surprised me when I found it. Turkey in the late 2000s went to Hi5 and then straight to Facebook, and MSN Messenger already did everything a chat room did, so there was no gap left for a 3D world to fill. I was twenty-three when Smeet launched, which is the wrong end of the age range for a world with pets and a fame ladder.

A German browser world translating itself into Turkish around 2010 is a decent marker of how big this thing believed it was about to get. Habbo had a Turkish hotel and middle schoolers actually went there. Smeet had a Turkish button.

~ the day it died ~

The site is still up. www.smeet.com serves the farewell page right now, more than two years after the servers went off, and the only reason a browser refuses it is a certificate that expired on 8 April 2026. Skip the certificate check and you get about eight kilobytes of goodbye.

Somebody built that page by hand. The HTML still carries a leftover JetBrains development stub, a websocket hook from the IDE it was written in, which means the final act of a company that once had a hundred and ten employees was one person in an editor making a static page that says thank you. The .de domain lapsed in the middle of 2024. The .com sits on CloudFront, paid up through Amazon's registrar, serving that one file to nobody.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »