Trover

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

~ the obit ~

trover's peak years overlap with mine on the smartphone, but the app never made it into my routine. between 2014 and 2017 i was using google maps for navigation, instagram for whatever photo posting i bothered with, and a notes file for trip planning. trover sat in the slot that none of those covered cleanly, photos as a discovery layer on top of the map. it was a us travel-app crowd thing, and that crowd was thin in turkey. i learned about the brand the same way i learned about most quiet 2010s travel apps, after the shutdown coverage.

rich barton co-founded trover in 2011 in seattle with jason karas. barton is the same person behind expedia in the late nineties and zillow in 2005. the trover product was a mobile app where users uploaded geo-tagged photos of places they had been, attached short notes, and let other users browse the map at a destination to see what was actually there. it was supposed to be a discovery feed against the older trip-advisor and yelp style of place review.

expedia bought trover in june 2016 for an undisclosed price and folded it into its product portfolio. the app kept running as its own brand. for about four years it sat as a small unit inside expedia, with steady but not breakout user growth. then march 2020 happened.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

trover landed at the right time for a small audience. instagram was already the photo network everyone used, but instagram had no real geo-discovery layer. you could not open a map of istanbul and see where strangers had been taking pictures last week. trover let you do that. the userbase was self-selecting toward the kind of person who already kept a photo blog about travel. that gave it a real signal-to-noise advantage for a few years.

the acquisition logic for expedia was that trover's photos and notes were good seed content for destination pages on expedia.com. that integration happened in parts. the standalone app kept its identity and its userbase. you could see the seam between the small social product and the booking giant if you used both.

~ the postmortem ~

covid hit expedia's revenue hard in the first quarter of 2020. the company reported a 15 percent year-over-year revenue drop and a 39 percent drop in gross bookings. expedia announced widespread cuts. trover was on the list. on 1 july 2020 the team told users the app would shut down a month later. the august 1 date held. the apps disappeared from the stores. the servers went down. the trover.com domain showed a goodbye page for a while and then quietly went to nothing.

~ the long tail ~

the trover team had built something that worked at its scale, but its scale was never going to justify the budget once the parent company started cutting. that is the recurring shape for a niche-social product owned by a larger booking platform. gowalla had the same story in 2012 when facebook bought and shuttered it. trover lasted longer inside expedia than gowalla did inside facebook, but the ending was the same. the photos exported by users live in personal libraries. the map of who-took-what-where is gone.

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