Thunderclap

» see thunderclap.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2012 I was writing code for a living and running nobody's accounts. Thunderclap belonged to the people who did that professionally, in press offices and campaign teams. It is worth a grave anyway, because the entire product was a permission that two companies had granted and could take back, and it is rare to see a business sit that nakedly on top of somebody else's setting.

The trick was clean. You authorized the app and pledged your account to a campaign. Thunderclap counted pledges against a target, in the manner of a funding site, and if the target was missed nothing posted at all. If it was met, at the scheduled minute the identical message went out from every pledged account simultaneously, and a timeline that had been quiet suddenly carried the same sentence from forty people you follow.

It launched in May 2012 out of De-De, a New York product studio backed by the advertising executive David Droga, with David Cascino as founder. Within two years the client list read like a media conference agenda: the White House, the United Nations, the BBC, Major League Baseball, plus a long tail of brands buying the appearance of a spontaneous groundswell.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Twitter tried to kill it almost immediately. On 7 June 2012, six weeks after launch, Twitter suspended the app's authorization token and told De-De to bring its application into line with the API terms, on the grounds that mass identical scheduled posting is what the anti-spam rules were written about. That was a fair reading. The thing was, by design, duplicate content posted by automation.

Thunderclap relocated to Facebook on 21 June and kept operating there, then came back to Twitter on 23 July after six weeks of conversation with the trust and safety side. Winning that argument is what bought it the next six years, and it is also what taught everyone involved the wrong lesson: that platform access was something you could negotiate back.

~ the unraveling ~

Nothing underneath it was owned. The accounts, the audience graph, the delivery, all of it lived at Twitter and Facebook, and Thunderclap's only asset was a stored permission per user. That is a fine position while the platforms are competing for developers and a terrible one the moment they are being questioned by legislators.

Cambridge Analytica broke in March 2018 and the lockdown followed through the spring and summer. Facebook shut down or restricted a long list of APIs, including the permission that allowed an outside application to publish to a person's timeline on their behalf. Read from Menlo Park it was a straightforward abuse fix. Read from Thunderclap it was the product being deleted by a policy paragraph.

~ the postmortem ~

In August 2018 Facebook revoked Thunderclap's ability to post, which left a crowdspeaking platform that could not speak. The site closed on 15 September 2018. There was no farewell tour and barely any coverage, for a tool the White House had used, which says something about how invisible infrastructure becomes once it is embedded in other people's campaigns.

The domain now redirects to a company with the same name and no relation to any of this. The mechanic did not die, it just went manual: a coordinated posting hour, a shared graphic, a hashtag everyone agrees to use at eight o'clock. What Thunderclap had was the scheduling, and the platforms decided that scheduling on your behalf was a thing they would rather do themselves.

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