Tipo

» see tipo.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Tipo went online on 11 November 2003 and it was not a children's site. Shai Bloch and Adi Bardnuin built it as the Israeli Messenger community, and for a while it also answered on the domain messenger.co.il. The pitch was that you would meet people there and then go talk to them in NetMeeting. There was an 18+ section. It came down later, once the traffic started arriving from somewhere else.

The somewhere else was children. From 2005 the site turned steadily toward a younger audience, and by the end of that year it had dropped the messenger description and started calling itself the children and youth portal. Almost nothing of the original plan survived except the accounts and the habit of letting users build their own corners. Tipo spent the next nine years as the most popular site of its kind in Israel, across every age bracket it covered.

Ownership moved twice. Hype Active Media held it at the start and sold about half the control to 012 Smile in 2009. In May 2011 the company passed to Walla Communications, which is where it died.

I was nineteen in November 2003, and the messenger version of Tipo is the only part of this I can meet on equal terms. NetMeeting was sitting on the Windows machines I used, and the Israeli kids finding each other through Tipo were doing in Hebrew roughly what we were doing on MSN. The nine years after the pivot ran in a language I do not read, for an audience I had aged out of before it existed.

On 27 October 2014 the staff put up their last news post and announced that the site would close for good on 1 December. Ilan Yeshua, the Walla CEO, had made the call on economic grounds. Users got up petitions and collected the signatures and it changed nothing. Tipo went dark on 2 December 2014, one day later than advertised.

~ the record ~

~ tipo zone ~

The main thing Tipo did was let you have a website. Tipo ZONE was free, required no programming, and came with an administration panel that handled pages, links, a gallery and polls for whatever you were making. You could run more than one. The Hebrew record puts over 100,000 sites in the channel by 2014 and flags the figure as unsourced, which is the honest state of it.

One item in that admin panel was called Mashivon Zone. It sat in the menu for years and it never opened.

~ our city ~

Ha'Ir Shelanu, Our City, was the public chat. Six categories with three rooms in each, eighteen rooms in total. You made a character to walk around in, and there were supervisors drawn from the users themselves who kept order and ran games in the corners of the rooms. Earlier versions had been themed around the Honigman clothing brand, which is how an Israeli fashion chain ended up in the visual memory of the people who grew up there.

~ the channels ~

Tipo Communities ran more than seventy forums covering sport, television, games and art, each with a moderator who was also a kid, and a ranking system that promoted you by post count. Tipo Gamez opened in April 2005 and carried games from elsewhere alongside ones built in house, some of them starring the site's own characters. Tipo TV ran from 2006 to 2009 on video uploaded from webcams, and during the 2006 election it did a stretch with Channel 10 News.

A youth radio station called WFM launched on 20 October 2005 with a million and a half shekels behind it and Tipo attached to it. It closed in November 2006.

~ the last month ~

The shutdown was not clean. For about five days after 2 December you could still reach the whole site by going around the main address, either straight to the IP or by editing your hosts file, and plenty of people did. On 8 December 2014 Tipo was disconnected properly. The only things left were the games channel and the toddlers channel, which stayed up until the end of January 2015.

Our City came back without the company. Former users rebuilt the chat as a star instead of a city, with new rooms and new clothes in it, on a site called Tipost. The site builder did not come back. Whatever was in those hundred thousand pages went off the internet on 8 December 2014 and stayed off.

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