Spymac

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

~ the last words ~

Holger Ehlis and Kevin April put Spymac online at the end of 2001, and for a few years it was the biggest Macintosh community anywhere. Forums and galleries under a steady drip of rumors about unreleased Apple hardware, some of it real and a fair amount of it not. By 2004 the site claimed around 600,000 registered users and had 25 people on payroll, which for a fan forum in 2004 was a serious operation.

Then came the gigabyte. In April 2004 Spymac gave every member a free 1 GB mailbox. Google had just announced Gmail with the same number attached, but Gmail was invite-only and would stay that way for two more years, so for a lot of people Spymac was the first place they could actually hold a gigabyte of email without paying for it. The signup wave that followed was the largest the site ever had, and it brought in a crowd that had no particular interest in Macs.

That is the fork in the road. Spymac had built a Mac community and then acquired a general-purpose audience by accident, and it spent the rest of its life chasing the second group.

~ the record ~

~ leapfrog ~

The redesign was called Leapfrog and it arrived with the full Web 2.0 vocabulary of the period. Long-time members hated it and a lot of them left. The site kept going in the new direction anyway, adding video uploads with a revenue share for uploaders, and in January 2007 it revamped again into something closer to a mainstream social network. User numbers passed a million that March, which the company read as vindication.

By early 2010 the Spymac front page did not mention Apple at all. The title tag read "We make Stars! - Share Videos, Pictures and Audio" and the pitch was a talent competition with cash prizes. The keyword list underneath it is a museum piece on its own: web 2.0, videosharing, livestream, webcam, hollywood, dj, win money. Nothing in it is about a computer.

~ where i was standing ~

Turkish forum culture in those years was PC culture. The boards I read were about hardware you could actually buy in Ankara, and a Mac in 2004 was a price tag more than a machine. Rumor sites about unannounced Apple products were a hobby for people who already owned the announced ones, and I was busy putting my component list in a forum signature instead. The gigabyte mailbox is the one piece of Spymac that crossed over, and it crossed over as gossip.

~ what the domain does now ~

The talent-contest version of the front page was still up on 1 February 2010. By 1 March the archive has a 365-byte document with a title and nothing under it. That is the death, as precisely as anyone recorded it.

There was one twitch afterward. In November 2010 the old Mac community front page came back, meta description and all, "The World's Largest Mac Online Community", complete with an ad slot created in January 2006. It sat there for about a year without a community behind it. From 2012 the domain served AdSense, and by 2019 it was an unmodified Apache2 Ubuntu default page, the one that says "It works!" to nobody.

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