Sqwiggle

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

~ the goodbye ~

You left a browser tab open all day and it showed a grid of your coworkers' faces. Not a video call. Each tile was a still photograph taken from that person's webcam and replaced every few seconds, so the grid was never live and never more than a moment stale. Click a face and you were in real-time audio and video with that person immediately, no ring and no invite link.

The problem it named was a real one. A team scattered across time zones in 2013 had no cheap way to tell who was at their desk, and the alternative was a chat message asking "you around?" that might sit unread for an hour. Sqwiggle's answer was to make presence continuous and visual. It solved the problem by keeping a camera on everyone, all day, and calling the result an office.

The money is why it shows up in histories that have nothing to do with video. AngelList launched Syndicates in 2013, letting one investor pull a crowd of smaller backers into a deal, and Sqwiggle was the first company funded through it. The round closed at $1.1 million on 29 August 2013. Whatever else it was, this company is a footnote in how startup funding got rewired that decade.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

For about two years the remote-work blogs loved it. The reviews from 2014 all hit the same note of surprise: that the constant snapshots felt less intrusive than expected, that seeing a colleague lean back from their keyboard carried information a status dot never could. It got written up as the virtual office, and it spawned imitators that are still trading, PukkaTeam and Sneek among them, selling the same grid with a different name on it.

~ the decline ~

Slack shipped in 2014 and took the category from a completely different angle. It did not try to show you anybody's face. It made the text channel so central that the question of who was at their desk stopped being urgent, because the conversation was simply there whenever you got back to it. Sqwiggle had built an answer to a question Slack quietly retired.

The second problem was the camera itself. I was a computer engineer in Ankara through these years, in offices where the arrangement was that everyone showed up in the same building, and the hardest sell in the entire Sqwiggle pitch was always going to be the part where the webcam stays on. That has aged in one direction only. A product whose core mechanic was photographing employees at their desks every few seconds would struggle to get a meeting today, and in 2013 it got funded first.

~ the last week ~

Customers got an email early in the week. The public notice came on Twitter at 13:04 UTC on 11 May 2016, nine words of decision and twelve of thanks: "It wasn't an easy decision, but we've decided to shut down Sqwiggle. We appreciate all the support over the years. You all rock!"

The domain is still registered. It answers with 114 bytes of HTML whose only content is a script redirecting you to a parking lander, which is the cheapest possible way for a name to still exist.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »