TheFeature

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

~ the eulogy ~

A phone company paid for a magazine and then did not tell it what to say. That is the fact about TheFeature that is hardest to convey now. Nokia funded it from august 2000, and what appeared under that funding was a publication with Howard Rheingold and Douglas Rushkoff on the masthead, arguing about what happens to people when the network follows them out of the building. Very little of it was about handsets. Almost none of it was about Nokia handsets.

The subject was the mobile internet at a moment when that phrase described an aspiration rather than a product. In 2001 a phone got you a few lines of monochrome text over a protocol that charged by the second and worked badly. TheFeature wrote as though the interesting question had already moved past that, which turned out to be correct by about six years. Rheingold's Smart Mobs, the 2002 book about crowds that coordinate through phones, overlaps heavily with what he was publishing here.

Nokia was the phone in Turkey through exactly these years. Everyone I knew had one, and the 3310 was less a product than a fact of the environment. But the magazine Nokia was paying for was written in English for the people building the industry, not for the people buying the phones, and it never crossed the gap into where I was. I found out this thing existed while researching something else entirely, more than twenty years after it launched.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it covered ~

The recurring subjects read now like a list of things that later happened. Location awareness turns up constantly, always attached to the question of what it would do to privacy, and so does the camera in the phone, treated as a change to journalism rather than as a specification bump. The site was working on this while the actual devices were still incapable of most of it, which is why the writing aged so much better than the hardware coverage of the same period.

It looked good too, which mattered for credibility with the design-conscious crowd it was courting. Razorfish built the site between 2000 and 2003, Sascha Höhne redesigned it in 2004, and in 2005 it collected two Webby nominations, in Magazine and in Telecommunications. That was its final year.

~ the day it died ~

It closed in june 2005. There was no collapse to point at. Traffic was at two million page views a month against 520,000 unique readers, the awards were recent, and the editorial operation under Justin Ried and Carlo Longino was functioning. The sponsor simply stopped, in the way sponsors do when a marketing budget gets reorganized and a line item that was never a business has to justify itself to somebody new.

The timing is what stings. TheFeature died eighteen months before the iPhone was announced, having spent five years explaining to anyone who would read it why the phone was about to become the primary computer in most people's lives. Its writers scattered into blogs, and Carlo Longino carried on at MobHappy. The company that spent five years funding the clearest available thinking about where mobile was heading also managed to be the company that got run over by it.

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