Taltopia

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

~ the obit ~

Taltopia launched in Los Angeles on 28 February 2008, built by Allen Vartazarian out of UC Berkeley and Anthony Zanontian out of UC San Diego. It had started as FameSource and took its new name along with its first outside money, 800,000 dollars from a single angel investor. Before that the two of them had paid for it themselves.

The site was an upload-and-be-judged community sorted into categories, music and art and acting and dance among them, with comedy and modeling added alongside. You put up a video or a recording of your work and the community rated it through a Fame and Shame vote, lifted fairly openly from Digg, one button to push you up and one to push you down. Every member got a page at taltopia.com followed by their username, listing their work and their fan club, and industry people could post castings for members to answer.

The whole design assumes a reader who wants to be found by someone in the entertainment business, and the business in question is thirty minutes from Burbank. Taltopia reached Turkey in the sense that the page loaded here. Its central promise did not travel with it, because a casting call you can answer is not the same as a casting call you can attend.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ famebucks ~

Taltopia ran its own currency. Famebucks were earned by using the site or bought outright through PayPal, and members could hand them to each other. What they purchased was attention rather than anything material. The Wall of Fame was an auction: 23 slots, bid in Famebucks, and the highest bid of all got the front page.

Underneath that were contests in two flavors. Staff ran sponsored ones with real prizes and corporate partners behind them. Members ran their own, writing the rules and the deadline themselves, with a pot of Famebucks for the winner. So the economy was closed, which is the honest version of what a talent site sells: everyone pays in promotion to be promoted, and the house holds the only exit.

~ the cracks ~

There is no shutdown notice to quote, so the file size tells it. From 2010 onward the taltopia.com front page came back at a steady 18 to 19 kilobytes on almost every monthly crawl, year after year, all the way to 12 December 2016. The next capture, on 16 April 2017, is 1,411 bytes. Nothing after that ever gets above two kilobytes again, and the address now serves a lander offering the domain for sale.

Nine years is a long run for a site nobody remembers. It outlasted most of the 2008 cohort it launched with and kept its servers paid straight through the arrival of the thing that answered the same need better, which was a phone camera and a free account on a network with an algorithm behind it. Vartazarian and Zanontian never issued a statement about any of it.

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