Trackle

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

~ the obituary ~

Trackle was American at the data layer, not just in its marketing. The pitch was that you would set up a watcher for the things in your life that changed without telling you, and the examples the company led with were new crime reports in your neighborhood, fluctuations in what your house was worth, fresh Craigslist listings matching a search, price drops on a product you wanted, NFL and NCAA scores, and ski conditions. Every one of those is a feed that existed in the United States in 2009 and nowhere else. There was no version of this product for Ankara, because there was nothing to plug into it.

It was built by people with real track records. Pavan Nigam had co-founded Healtheon with Jim Clark and had run Cendura until Computer Associates bought it; Naveen Saxena had come through Cisco and Fidelity. The company was called Soruka Corporation, a name that never once appeared on the site except in the copyright line at the bottom. New Enterprise Associates put money in, along with angels. The product went public in February 2009 and spent most of that year carrying a "[beta]" tag next to its own logo.

The unit of the thing was a Tracklet, which was a saved search agent with a shape. You picked a category, filled in the parameters it needed, and Trackle ran that search on a schedule against whatever RSS feed sat behind the category, then pushed anything new to you over email or SMS. A preview button let you see what a Tracklet would catch before committing to it. You could mark one public, and look at what your friends were watching.

~ the case file ~

~ the directory ~

The most interesting version of Trackle arrived in December 2009, when it opened a public directory of Tracklets, so that the alerts other people had already built became browsable and subscribable rather than private. That is a good idea and a familiar one: the valuable artifact is not the result but somebody else's query, already tuned by a person who cared enough to tune it. It is the same insight that made saved searches and shared feeds worth having, and Trackle got to it two months before it stopped shipping anything.

~ the pivot ~

By 2010 the consumer product was gone from the front door. The apex domain redirected to a page selling "your eyes on the web" to businesses, offering to watch your competitors and your own brand across news and regulatory filings, with sample reports and a fifteen-day trial. The alerting engine was the same; the customer was now somebody with a budget rather than somebody worried about burglaries two streets over. The copyright line at the bottom of that page reads 2008 to 2010, so it was written near the start of the pivot and then left alone.

~ the silence ~

No shutdown post exists. There is no farewell page, no acquisition notice, nothing in the trade press, and the company blog on TypePad stops in 2009. What there is instead is a status code. The Internet Archive holds a working Trackle page from 21 November 2011, roughly four kilobytes of the brand-monitoring pitch. After that the main site is never captured serving content again: through the whole of 2012 every request to trackle.com returns HTTP 500, on the robots file and the widgets and the export endpoint alike, month after month, for over a year. The web server kept answering and the application behind it did not.

By June 2013 the domain had been repointed to inspovation.com, which is Pavan Nigam's next company and which still loads there today. A reused domain under a founder's later venture is not usually a disguise for anything, and it is not here: the brand-monitoring tool was dead well before the redirect, and the shape of the death is a startup whose remaining staff stopped restarting the process.

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