Threadsy

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

~ the last words ~

Threadsy went on stage at TechCrunch50 on 15 September 2009 and made the finals. The idea had a clean shape to it. Your messages were scattered across webmail on one side and social networks on the other, and Threadsy pulled them into a single browser window split in two: an inbound column for anything addressed to you personally, and an unbound stream for the feeds you merely followed. Mail and mentions in one place, timelines in the other. The tagline was pull yourself together.

It stayed invite-only for eight months and opened to everyone in May 2010. The reviews at the time were interested rather than converted, which is the usual reception for a unified inbox, and the usual problem followed: a product like this is only as good as its permission to read your accounts, and in 2010 and 2011 both Twitter and Facebook were actively narrowing what third parties could do with their streams.

In October 2011 the company announced Threadsy would close, and in November it did. The business behind it kept going. It pivoted to Swaylo, a tool that scored your reach and audience on social networks, which was a smaller idea aimed at marketers rather than at your inbox.

~ the record ~

~ the two buyers ~

What happened next is unusual enough to be worth laying out. On 15 March 2012 TechCrunch reported that MyLife, a people-search site, had bought the technology from the recently shuttered Threadsy, planning to use it for a social inbox in a new iPhone app. Terms were not disclosed. Five months later, on 24 August 2012, Facebook acquired Threadsy the company, which by then meant Swaylo and its engineers. That was an acquihire, and the paid product SwayloPro was left to run separately for the existing investors.

So the code went one way and the engineers went another, and neither buyer wanted the thing that had been on stage in 2009. Facebook bought a team that had spent two years learning how messages move between networks, during the same period in which it was tightening its own platform rules on exactly that.

~ the last login page ~

The archive has a small, slightly sad detail. After the November 2011 shutdown, threadsy.com kept answering, and what it answered with was the login screen. The captured page from January 2012 still carries the username and password fields under a sign up now button, and the forgot-password flow still promises that an email has been sent to the address you used to sign up for threadsy. The page is byte-identical from October 2011 through at least May 2012, so for half a year a closed service kept inviting people to create an account on it.

~ the permission problem ~

Threadsy launched at an American conference and then rationed itself through invites for eight months. The TechCrunch coverage reached Turkey the same day it reached anyone. The invite did not, and the accounts it wanted to unify were not quite my accounts either. Email was Gmail, chat was still MSN for people here well past the point the English-speaking web had moved on, and Twitter was a thing I had rather than a thing I lived in.

The underlying wish has not gone anywhere. Every few years someone ships another unified inbox, and the obstacle is never the engineering. It is that the companies holding the messages have no reason to let a fourth party assemble them, and the better the assembly works, the faster the permission gets withdrawn.

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