Sulia

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

~ the goodbye ~

Jeff Reynar and Jonathan Glick started Sulia in New York in 2009, during the stretch when Twitter was a firehose anyone could license and a whole industry grew on top of it. The problem Sulia set out to solve was that the firehose was unreadable. Its answer was to sort people by subject rather than by popularity, using editors and algorithms together to work out who actually knew something about hurricanes or about the Knicks. What it sold was a clean stream of those people.

For a while the customers were other companies. Sulia supplied curated topic streams to apps like Flipboard under a commercial deal with Twitter, which worked until Twitter decided that filtering its own content was a business it wanted back. Glick was fairly relaxed about it afterward, saying Twitter had never been secretive about intending to do all this themselves in the long run, which is a generous way to describe watching your revenue line get reassigned.

The pivot was a rebuilt Sulia aimed at readers instead of licensees, a self-described subject-based social network with thousands of categories and experts inside them. By September 2012 it had around four million users and ten million monthly visits, and the money kept coming, about ten million dollars in total with roughly five million more arriving in the summer of 2013. Two years after that round the site was a single page of thanks.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the firehose years ~

An enormous amount of 2009 to 2012 was built on one company's API. Sulia was one of several dozen businesses whose entire product was a better view of Twitter than Twitter offered, and few of them outlived the moment the platform decided that the better view was a feature rather than an ecosystem. A few got bought on the way down. The rest pivoted, as Sulia did, and spent their remaining funding proving the new idea did not work either.

Twitter in Turkey was not small in those years. By 2013 it was the place a country argued with itself, and the government was blocking it by March 2014. What never crossed over was the American layer built on top: a company in New York deciding which hundred people were worth reading about the Knicks, in English, for an audience of American media professionals.

~ what the goodbye said ~

The page that replaced the site is still in the archive, under a heading reading "So long (for now) from Sulia". It calls the closure a sad time for everyone who worked on the platform over five years, and singles out the friendships made with the community rather than any of the metrics. Then it gets to the point, which is that there were many things Sulia did better than any other platform, and the team had learned that those things were not popular or lucrative enough for it to succeed as a business. That is often the way it is with startups, the note adds, before saying thank you three separate times.

Underneath there is an email address for anyone who wanted to discuss reviving it one day, and a postscript offering to delete your personal data immediately on request. The GDPR was still four years off in 2014, so that offer was manners rather than compliance.

~ dating it ~

No announcement went out, so the capture sizes do the work. The archive holds a normal Sulia running between 27 and 33 kilobytes through the middle of September 2014. On 1 October it comes back at 11,539 bytes, and from 4 October onward every capture is about 2,700 bytes, which is the goodbye and nothing else. Recode noticed on 21 October, more than two weeks after the site had already turned itself into a note.

sulia.com still has a nameserver record and resolves to 127.0.0.1, which is the address a machine uses to mean itself. Somebody is paying for a domain that points at the inside of whatever server is asked about it.

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