Storytlr

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

~ the obit ~

Storytlr began the way a lot of good software begins, as a thing one person wrote for himself. Laurent Eschenauer wanted his own homepage to show what he was actually doing across the web rather than sit there as a static résumé, so he built something in PHP that went and collected it. Friends looked at it and wanted one. He and Alard Weisscher put a real interface on top, pointed it at storytlr.com, and in 2008 started hosting it for anyone who signed up. Both of them had day jobs the entire time.

The category it landed in was called lifestreaming, a word that has aged into near-total obscurity and described something people now take for granted. Your output was scattered across half a dozen services. Your photos were on Flickr, your links were on Delicious, your short thoughts were on Twitter, your long ones were on a blog. A lifestream pulled all of it back into one page, in time order, under a name you chose, and Storytlr did it well enough that it got named in the same breath as FriendFeed when anyone wrote the category up.

What distinguished it from the venture-funded end of the market was that Storytlr assumed you wanted the page to be yours. You could point your own domain at it. The microblogging was first-party rather than an import. The whole design treated aggregation as something you did on your own behalf, which is an argument the indieweb would spend the next decade making at much greater length and with much better branding.

On 10 October 2009 the two of them posted that they were done. The reason was not a lawsuit or a failed funding round. It was that life had arrived: "our lives have moved on, kids were born, house were bought, new projects appeared and we don't have time anymore to operate this service properly." They had tried to make it into a company and could not, had looked for someone to hand it to and found nobody suitable, and would not leave it running badly. Users got roughly ten weeks to pull their data out, as CSV files and as zip archives of everything binary. The service stopped on 31 December 2009.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ lifestreaming, briefly ~

I had TTNet broadband at home by then and had been posting in one form or another for a decade, so the problem Storytlr solved was a real problem I had. The reason I was not a customer is duller than geography: in Turkey in 2009 the default answer to "I want a page that is mine" was WordPress on the cheapest shared host you could find, and almost nobody in my circle was running a dedicated aggregator on top of it. The lifestreaming scene was small and mostly Anglophone, and it talked to itself.

It also turned out to be early rather than wrong. Twitter and Facebook spent the following five years absorbing the function and moving the page from your domain to theirs, and the aggregation business folded into the feed business. FriendFeed went to Facebook in 2009 and was switched off in 2015. Jaiku went to Google and died quietly. Storytlr's founders just got tired first.

~ the afterlife in a repo ~

The shutdown post came with something most shutdown posts do not: the source. Storytlr went out under Apache 2, PHP on the Zend Framework, with installation instructions, so anyone who wanted their lifestream back could put it on their own server. People did. For a few years storytlr.org existed as a project site rather than a service, and the repository under eschnou on GitHub is still there to read.

The last commit landed on 13 February 2014. The project page that survived it was candid about what that meant, warning that the code was no longer maintained and might be unsafe to run on a public server, since it depended on versions of PHP and Zend that had stopped receiving security patches years earlier. storytlr.org itself now answers nothing at all. The code outlived the service by four years and the project site by rather longer than that.

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