Sympatico

» see sympatico.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

sympatico never meant anything outside canada, and that is most of what it was. a national product in the most literal sense available: a phone company deciding what the internet's front page looked like for one country, then putting that page on every machine it sold a connection to.

bell canada and the other incumbent telcos launched it on 29 november 1995. the isp and the portal shipped together, the portal managed by a bell subsidiary called medialinx while the connection was sold as bell sympatico. if you were canadian and online in the late nineties there is a strong chance your homepage was this, not because you picked it but because it was already there and changing it required knowing that you could.

the content was the standard portal mix of the era. headlines and weather down one column, a horoscope somewhere, a search box that was really somebody else's search engine wearing a canadian wrapper. what separated it from the american portals was that it was closer to a utility than a startup. sympatico did not have to win an audience. it came with the phone line.

the idea that a country can have a default homepage is the part that does not travel. a national front page implies one provider large enough that its defaults turn into a whole country's habits, and it implies people leaving those defaults alone for years at a time. for me a homepage was always a setting rather than a destination. this grave is about the long stretch when that was a minority position.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the microsoft years are the strangest part of it. sympatico ran as a joint venture with msn, and for a long stretch the canadian portal lived at msn.sympatico.ca, which meant bell's customers were reading their news through a microsoft product with a bell name on the front of it. the arrangement ended in 2009, after which msn.ca and sympatico.ca were competitors aimed at the same country.

the isp side had already been detaching. bell sympatico became bell internet on 8 august 2008 and the email addresses moved from sympatico.ca to bell.net, though the old addresses kept working for years, because taking away somebody's email address is the one thing a telco cannot do quietly. by may 2012 bell internet had over three million subscribers across ontario and quebec and was the largest isp in canada. the name sympatico by then belonged to a website and nothing else.

~ what it became ~

bell media relaunched the portal as theloop.ca on 13 december 2012. the pitch was that a wall of headlines was finished and the future was lifestyle channels with names like living and style, filled out with material from bell's television properties. the seventeen years got a mention in the press release, in the tone people use for describing something as heritage right before removing it.

what actually killed it was older than the rebrand. a portal is a guess about what you want, assembled in advance by people who do not know you. once search worked well enough, and once a phone put a browser in every hand, the guess had no value left in it. canada kept the isp and lost the front page, which is the trade every country made, with different names on the door.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »