Triposo

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

~ the obituary ~

Triposo built its guides out of open travel data, which meant it had pages for places in Turkey years before anyone in Turkey had heard of the app. That is the accurate description of my relationship with this one: I was in the database rather than on the product. It was made for people flying somewhere else and worrying about roaming charges.

The company started in 2011. Richard and Douwe Osinga, Dutch brothers who had both worked at Google, built it with Jon Tirsen on a premise that sounds obvious now and was contrarian then: nobody needs a travel writer to tell them which neighborhood has the restaurants. That information already exists, scattered across open sources, and a program can assemble it into a guide for any city on earth at roughly zero marginal cost per city.

So they wrote the program. Triposo generated guides for tens of thousands of destinations, which is a coverage number no publisher with human writers has ever come close to, and it did it without sending anybody anywhere.

~ the case file ~

~ the algorithm ~

The feature that made people actually keep it was offline operation. You downloaded a city before you left, and the whole guide worked on the plane and in the arrivals hall and anywhere else your phone was refusing to speak to a network. In 2012, when international data roaming could cost more than the hotel, this was not a convenience but the entire reason to install it.

The press understood it immediately. Lifehacker called it a smart mobile travel guide that tells you where to go next, Fast Company wrote about planning and journaling a trip while offline, and Engadget settled on describing it as a worthwhile travel guide to everywhere. Three million iOS downloads by January 2013, by which point it was also pulling in Facebook Events to show you what was happening in a city while you were standing in it. InterWest led a $3.5 million Series A in July 2012, and another $3.1 million followed in December 2015, the year downloads passed ten million.

~ from app to api ~

Musement, the Milan company selling tours and attraction tickets, acquired Triposo in October 2017. Phocuswire filed it under consolidation in tours and activities, which is the correct category and also the clue about what was being bought. Musement wanted the content engine. An algorithm that already knew what was interesting in fifty thousand places is a useful thing to bolt onto a business selling tickets to those places.

What happened next is visible in the website itself. The last version of triposo.com has nothing on it about a travel app. The headline is Triposo API, the subtitle is travel content made easy, and the pitch is aimed at companies rather than travelers: we help you find the best places to travel, shop, eat and drink across the world. The consumer product had already been allowed to lapse. New users could not create accounts by 2021, and app support, in the company's own phrasing, had been dropped for some time.

~ the goodbye page ~

The shutdown notice is unusually complete for a product this quiet at the end. As of the 1st of March 2023, all Triposo services will be definitively discontinued. New customers could no longer create an account; existing ones could not buy credits or change plans. API queries would be served as usual right up to the date, which is a courtesy most dying services do not extend.

Then the page says Goodbye, in a heading. It has been a great journey, underneath. Then Goodbye again, as a second heading, with the line all your personal data will be deleted sitting directly under it. App users' data was already gone. API account holders were told their email and company name would be permanently deleted by the end of March 2023.

Saying goodbye twice on the same page is a strange thing to ship, and it is the most human detail anywhere in this story. Somebody built that page knowing nobody much would read it, and wrote the word twice anyway.

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