Soocial

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

~ the goodbye ~

The announcement went up on 1 July 2013 and gave users thirty days. On 31 July all syncing stopped. The website stayed readable for another month so people could get their contacts out, and on 31 August that went too. The reason given was focus: the team's work had moved to integrating Soocial into Viadeo, and keeping the sync clients and the sync server alive alongside that was not something they were going to keep doing.

Soocial had started in Amsterdam in 2007 with one problem to solve. Your contacts lived in several places at once and none of those places agreed with each other. The SIM card had one set and the phone's own memory had another, usually the same people under different numbers, while Gmail quietly kept a third list that was half auto-created from anyone you had emailed once. Soocial sat in the middle of that, merged the duplicates and pushed one clean list back out to everything you owned.

The sync coverage was the selling point and it was unusually wide. Viadeo's own announcement claimed more than 500 platforms and devices, which in 2011 meant BlackBerry and Nokia handsets alongside the iPhone, plus Outlook and Gmail and a long tail of things nobody supports anymore.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the acquisition ~

Viadeo announced the purchase on 28 November 2011. Viadeo was the French professional network, the one that spent the late 2000s being the local answer to LinkedIn across France and Spain, with Tianji as its Chinese arm. Soocial came in with roughly 120,000 users and, more to the point, with the plumbing for keeping an address book current, which is exactly the thing a professional network wants to own.

What happened next is the ordinary shape of these deals. The technology went into the parent's product, the standalone service kept running on inertia for a while, and then somebody did the arithmetic on maintaining sync clients for a hundred dying handsets on behalf of a user base that was not paying the parent company anything.

~ ninety-one comments ~

The shutdown post is still up on soocial.wordpress.com, and so is the comment thread under it. People wanted to know what to switch to, and the honest answer in July 2013 was that the problem had partly solved itself. Android and iOS had both grown decent native contact syncing by then, and the general case Soocial addressed, the one where your phone and your computer and your webmail all disagreed, had become a smaller problem for most people than it was in 2007.

Partly, not wholly. Anyone holding contacts across a work account and a personal one, or anybody who had carried the same numbers through four phones from three manufacturers, still had the original problem and now had one fewer tool for it.

~ why i remember the problem and not the product ~

I never used Soocial. The need was real for me and for everyone I knew in Turkey around 2008: numbers on a SIM that you copied by hand when you changed handsets, a Nokia phonebook that did not match the one on the computer, and a Gmail contact list quietly filling up with people you had mailed once about a forum post. The fix most of us landed on was Google's, because it came free with the phone, and that is the whole story of what happened to this category.

soocial.com answers today under a different owner entirely, a branding agency with no connection to any of this.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »