Thoora

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

~ the last words ~

Thoora was a news discovery engine out of Toronto. It went on stage at TechCrunch50 in September 2009 with a pitch about tearing down the wall between social and traditional media, pulling both into topic pages you could follow. Then it went into private beta and stayed there for two years.

The product that finally opened in September 2011 was built around curation rather than a feed. Its own page asked you to "curate and publish beautiful, authoritative, topical pages on the subjects you care most about," using Thoora's aggregation engine to find the stream and its editing tools to trim it down. There was a website and an Android tablet app. A WordPress plugin let you push a finished page onto your own blog.

On 12 December 2011 TechCrunch reported that it was closing. Three days later the site and the apps went off, along with everything anybody had curated on them. Thoora had been open to the public for thirteen weeks.

~ the record ~

~ two years in beta ~

The delay is the whole story. Asked why a service unveiled in September 2009 took until September 2011 to reach the public, Thoora pointed at the explosion of social media and content since 2009 and said it had been busy integrating all of it.

In those two years Flipboard launched on the iPad and became what everybody meant by a beautiful reading app, while Techmeme kept doing the unglamorous version of the same job with a human editor and a tight page. Thoora never got a phone app out the door at all. By the time it opened its doors, the problem it had been built to solve had two better answers already installed on the device you were holding.

~ the three months ~

Rogers Communications put in seed money, reported at just over four million dollars, which made Thoora one of the better-funded Canadian consumer web startups of its moment. The archived homepage tracks the shape of that spend. From February 2010 to February 2011 the private beta page runs twelve to fourteen kilobytes, a real site with a real product sitting behind the login. From August 2011 the public version is five to six kilobytes, lighter and plainer. The last capture before the end is dated 6 December 2011.

The next one is from 4 January 2012 and it is eleven hundred bytes: the page header and its stylesheet, with nothing left to put inside them. Nothing was ever shipped after that. The domain is for sale today through a broker that calls itself Digital Junkyard, and the name is at least honest about the inventory.

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