Socialwok

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

~ the eulogy ~

On 26 June 2011 Socialwok turned off new signups and told its users the service would stop on 12 July. That gave everyone sixteen days to log in and pull their files back out, after which, the notice said, "all current data on the system will be deleted."

It had been running for less than two years. Ming Yong, Navin Kumar and Vikram Rangnekar launched it on 15 September 2009 at TechCrunch50, six days after taking the conference's DemoPit award, which made it the first Singapore company to win there. The product was a feed: status updates with files and calendar entries attached, sitting on top of whatever Google Apps account your company already had. The whole thing ran on Google App Engine. In 2009 that was a real idea. Nobody had yet decided what the inside-the-company version of a news feed was supposed to look like, and a dozen startups were trying to be the answer.

By May 2010 it had grown an Outlook integration, which tells you where the actual customers were. A tool built for Google Apps spent its second year reaching toward the mail client of the companies that had declined to switch.

~ the dossier ~

~ the letter ~

Most shutdown notices are written by a communications person and say nothing. Socialwok's was written by somebody who was tired. It apologizes for the inconvenience, then explains that keeping the service running has become infeasible, then gives the reason outright: "we really have no choice in the matter right now given our funding situation and the availability of the developers." Invites were already off, along with the Twitter and RSS imports. You had until the 12th.

It closes by hoping users "will be able to find suitable alternatives that can provide many of the functions that you have liked in Socialwok," and signs off from the team. The footer of that page still reads "Voiceroute © 2010," the name of the company behind it, with the Google App Engine badge next to it. Nobody had updated the year.

~ what mindjet actually bought ~

Mindjet acquired Socialwok in July 2011, and the usual way to tell that story is that a startup was bought and folded in. The dates do not support it. The shutdown was announced on 26 June, with the closing date already fixed, and the acquisition landed on the same 12 July that the servers went dark. What Mindjet bought was a team and a codebase from a service that was in the middle of deleting itself, not a going concern with users to migrate. Two months later Mindjet bought Cohuman as well and shipped the result as Mindjet Connect on 22 September 2011, which is where those engineers' work actually went.

From where I was sitting, an engineer in Ankara in 2011, the entire enterprise social category was something I read about rather than used, and this particular entry was two years old and gone before it had any chance of reaching an office near me. What survives of it is the letter. A three-person startup wrote its own obituary honestly and signed it, at a moment when the house style for this was already a paragraph about an incredible journey.

~ what google app engine promised ~

Socialwok was built entirely on App Engine, and in 2009 that was supposed to be the whole point: a tiny team could serve a corporate customer base without owning a rack. It worked. The service ran for nearly two years on a platform the founders never had to administer. What ran out was payroll and the round behind it.

socialwok.com does not resolve today. There are captures of it still serving a logo and a red wordmark as late as 2019, which belong to somebody else who picked the domain up, and the one page worth reading is still the one from 16 July 2011: a site with every link intact at the top and a note underneath explaining that none of them lead anywhere now.

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