Snapvine

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

~ the obituary ~

Snapvine was built for people who lived on their profile page. The decorated internet, autoplaying song included. What Snapvine added to that world was a telephone: you put a player on your page, and anybody who wanted to say something out loud called a Snapvine line and typed in your code. The message appeared on your profile for the next visitor to press play on.

The clever part was the part nobody saw. Neither the caller nor the owner of the page learned the other's number, because Snapvine sat in the middle holding both ends. In 2006 that solved a real problem for a teenager who wanted strangers to be able to talk to them without handing out a mobile number, and it did it using the one piece of technology every single visitor already owned.

Joe Heitzeberg founded the company in Seattle in 2005. Draper Fisher Jurvetson put in $2 million in 2006 and Bridgescale Partners followed with $10 million in 2007, by which point the widget was on five million profiles across MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and Xanga, and the player was loading 22 million times a day. Whitepages bought the company on 4 june 2008 for around $20 million and kept Heitzeberg to run a new division.

None of this reached me. MySpace was never the network in Turkey, the decorated profile here lived on Hi5 and I was not on that either, and the mechanism itself assumed a phone call to a US number was free or close to it. On a Turkish line in 2007 it was neither. Snapvine is a product whose entire premise was local telephony pricing, which is the most invisible kind of border on the internet.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Recording audio and putting it on the web in 2006 meant owning a microphone and finding a program, then finding somewhere that would host the file. Snapvine skipped all of that by using the phone network as the upload path. The barrier dropped to knowing a number, and voice on the social web briefly looked like it was going to be normal.

It also arrived in the one window when MySpace let anybody embed anything. A page could carry arbitrary markup, so a widget with a play button spread by being pasted from profile to profile without a platform ever approving it. That freedom is what made Snapvine possible and it is also what made it fragile, because the same platform could close the door at any time and did.

~ what got buried with it ~

The shutdown notice went up in late march 2010 and said the domain and everything on it would be removed on the 31st. There was no download button for the thing people actually cared about. Users were told to log in, subscribe to their own voice blog's RSS feed, and save the mp3 files one at a time. Almost nobody does that, so the recordings are gone.

What died was not the technology. Voice notes came back a decade later inside WhatsApp and every messenger after it, and they now carry more of the world's conversation than the ones typed out. What died was the idea of a voice message as something posted in public on a page with your name on it, addressed to whoever happened to arrive next.

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