Splinder

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

~ the obit ~

Splinder was an italian-language blogging platform that ran from 2001 until january 31, 2012. it was built by marco palombi at tipic inc, launched publicly in november 2002, and acquired by dada of the RCS group in october 2006 for about 4.5 million euros. at its peak around 2008 it hosted close to 600,000 registered users writing in italian, with a sister project called motime that tried the same trick for english speakers and got nowhere.

the platform ran on a strange-for-its-era stack of linux, drupal, php and xmpp. it had the standard blogging features of the period: comments, friends lists, photo posts, the ability to follow other splinder authors from inside the dashboard. for italian writers it was the obvious place to put a personal blog before wordpress.com became the default and before facebook absorbed the casual-update side of things.

i never used splinder. italian blogging is one of those national web layers that stayed regional at the language barrier. by 2008 i had broadband at home in ankara and my blog-shaped writing was happening on turkish forums like donanimhaber and frmtr, not on dedicated platforms. the italian web was the kind of thing i could read about but not really visit, because the language closed the door before the platform did.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

splinder's 2001-2008 window is the period when italian internet writers consolidated onto one platform. the dada acquisition in 2006 felt at the time like validation: a 4.5 million euro check from a real media group meant the italian blogosphere was now a real business. for two years after that splinder kept growing. by 2008 it was the default italian blog host, with a wordpress-clone feature set and the network advantage of every other italian blogger already being there.

~ the cracks ~

after 2008 dada stopped investing. wordpress.com had a better hosted product, blogger had google scale, and facebook started absorbing the audience for short personal updates that had been splinder's daily traffic. the platform did not get a redesign or a serious mobile push during the years it most needed one. by 2011 the userbase was a slow leak and the writing on the wall was clear enough that nobody was surprised when dada announced the shutdown on november 22, 2011, with a final closure date of january 31, 2012.

~ what got buried with it ~

the italian web lost about a decade of personal writing on a single date. wordpress.com shipped a splinder importer in january 2012 and the more technical bloggers used it to move their archives over. a lot of people did not. the italian-language archive of splinder is now a question for archiveteam rather than a question for google, and the long tail of late-2000s italian bloggers who quit when the platform died is one of those losses that does not show up in any english-language history of the web.

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