SodaHead

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

~ the obit ~

i missed sodahead. it was a us poll-site with a community angle, and the cohort that ran on it was an early-blogosphere-adjacent english-speaking audience that had no real twin in the turkish web of 2007 to 2015. the poll-as-content category in turkey was something forums did inline, in a hi5 group, with one of those embedded poll widgets that the host site rendered as a clunky little table. a standalone poll-driven social network would have been a strange product to localize, and nobody seriously tried.

the founding story has a footnote that adds more weight than the user base would suggest on its own. jason feffer was vp of operations at myspace during the period that took myspace from an la startup to a 100-million-user network, and he left after the news corp acquisition. in 2007 he and michael glazer, whom he had known since childhood, launched sodahead in southern california as a poll-driven social network. you signed up, you posted a question with two or more answer options, strangers voted, the comment thread underneath the poll was the social part.

the venture capital came from mohr davidow ventures and mission ventures, with ron conway and the tech coast angels among the smaller early checks. the consumer site grew through the early 2010s with a recognizable left-and-right shouting-match comment culture. the side business that ended up mattering more was the b2b widget, where sodahead's polling technology ran on the pages of espn, fox news, abc news, good morning america, the los angeles times and warner bros tv. that customer list is what made the company interesting to a strategic buyer.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the prodege buy ~

prodege llc bought sodahead on 31 july 2014. prodege was the parent company of swagbucks, the consumer rewards site, and was in the middle of building a portfolio of consumer-data and market-research properties. sodahead's b2b polling business was the strategic prize. the consumer social network was, from prodege's perspective, a cost center attached to it.

for about eleven months prodege kept sodahead.com running while it worked through what to do with the consumer side. the public answer came on 3 june 2015 in an email to registered users that read, with no warning, that sodahead.com would no longer support user login, poll creation, commenting or messaging, effective immediately. the stated reason was "limited human and financial resources" and a refocus on the b2b polling business. eight years of comment threads and friend lists went read-only in one stroke.

~ the postmortem ~

the news-publisher polling business kept running for a while under the sodahead brand as a b2b product. the consumer-facing site, after 3 june 2015, was a static archive at best, and within a few years even that was gone. the email notice did not promise an export tool. the comments and the polls that had collected eight years of strangers arguing in public went into the same bucket as friendster's eventual lights-out, kept alive only in internet archive snapshots.

~ what survived ~

the shape of the death is what stays interesting. sodahead is one of the cleanest examples of the consumer social network bought for the b2b widget underneath it and then killed once the buyer figured out which half they wanted. the prodege playbook here was the same one that played out over and over again across the 2010s, when a small consumer community sat on top of a useful piece of enterprise technology and the acquirer kept the tech and switched off the community. sodahead was the b2b poll widget that happened to have a forum bolted on, and the buyer was honest about treating it that way.

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