Storylane

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

~ the goodbye ~

Storylane opened to the public in October 2012, after a summer of sitting behind an invite redirect. Jonathan Gheller's pitch was aimed squarely at the shortness of everything else: a place for the writing that does not fit in a status update, and does not want to be a blog with a theme and a domain name either. The homepage called its users "the dreamers, the makers, the travelers and the opinionated", which is more earnest than the era usually allowed, and the tagline under the logo read "People sharing things that matter".

The timing was good enough that the press reached for comparisons immediately. Late 2012 was the moment long-form personal writing on the web was being reinvented by several companies at once, and a site about depth rather than reach had a story to tell investors. The product itself was unfussy: write something with a cover image on it, then follow the people whose stories you liked.

It lasted seven months in public.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what Facebook actually bought ~

On 8 March 2013 Gheller announced that Storylane was joining Facebook. The coverage was careful about what that meant, because the deal was unusually explicit: Facebook acquired the five-person team and did not acquire the product or anything written on it. Nothing written on Storylane went to Menlo Park. The stories, users were told, remained theirs to keep and move, with export tools promised later.

This is the cleanest version of an arrangement that was everywhere in 2013. The buyer wants engineers who have already proven they can ship a social product, and considers the social product itself a recruiting artifact. Storylane's writers were not customers being transferred. They were people whose host had been hired away from them.

The announcement went up as a Storylane story, at /stories/show/1109697713/storylane-is-joining-facebook, with a banner across the homepage pointing at it. The site's last significant act of publishing was the notice that it would stop publishing.

~ left in the page source ~

Two things survive in the page source that were never meant to be read. The first is the Open Graph markup, which tags each post as storybin:story and each author as storybin:storyteller: the product's working name was Storybin before anyone put Storylane on the front. The second is the Facebook SDK call, which shipped to production with channelUrl: 'http://story.local/channel.html', a developer's own machine, left in the live file for anyone who scrolled far enough.

The Internet Archive dates the end tightly. The homepage is fully working on 29 April 2013, banner and all. Individual member profiles still answer on 4 May. After that the crawler finds nothing at all on the domain for over two months, and when it returns on 15 July the story URLs are 404. By 14 August 2013 storylane.com is serving a domain broker's template, complete with graphics named top_sell.gif and trademark_search2.gif.

The address did get sold eventually. Type storylane.com today and it redirects to storylane.io, a company founded years later that sells interactive product demos to sales teams. Same word, and no relation at all to the writing.

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