Truemors

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

~ the obituary ~

Truemors was a box you typed a rumor into. It went live on 15 May 2007, seven and a half weeks after Guy Kawasaki registered the domain, and it was WordPress underneath with a voting mechanism bolted on. Anyone could post anything. Everyone did.

Three hours in, somebody hacked it and the site had to come down for a while. At thirty six hours Yahoo Small Business told its owner that his traffic made him inappropriate for the service and evicted him, which took his monthly break-even from $29.96 to $150. Two days in, The Inquirer called it the worst website ever, a verdict that sent another quarter of a million page views through the door. Kawasaki's published response was that there is no such thing as bad PR.

The first day brought 261,214 page views from 14,052 visitors and 405 posts, of which the staff deleted 218 as junk or spam. Half the blogosphere complained the site was full of garbage and the other half complained about the deletions, which is roughly where moderation policy has stayed ever since. Staffing was one and a half people.

It never grew past that opening week. The posts kept arriving at a trickle and the ads never materialized. On 9 July 2008 NowPublic bought it. Kawasaki announced the sale the next morning in four sentences, thanked everyone for contributing their stories and took a seat on the buyer's advisory board. No price was published then or since.

~ the case file ~

~ day one ~

The thing that made Truemors worth watching was never the rumors. It was that a well-connected man ran a public experiment on how little a web company cost in 2007, and reported the results whether or not they flattered him. He wrote no business plan and pitched no venture capitalist, and said so in those words.

The money bought a working site and a hosting bill payable by card. It also bought a spam problem that arrived before the first afternoon was out. VentureBeat's write-up on launch day said the site had been overrun by nonsense and suggested, gently, that a moderator might help.

~ the twelve thousand dollar receipt ~

The receipt is the part I kept. Kawasaki itemized it three weeks after launch. Development was $4,500, done remotely by a small shop in South Dakota. Legal fees came to $4,824.14, which is more than the software cost. The logo was $399 and the domains were $1,115.05, because he registered 55 of them including the misspellings. The product itself passed me by completely, a rumor feed in English for the American blog audience, with nothing in it for anyone reading from Turkey. The bill is a different matter. For an engineer it is a rare honest number from that period, written down by someone with no reason to make it look either heroic or cheap.

~ what nowpublic did with it ~

It stopped being a site of its own within a month. On 5 August 2008 it still answered on truemors.com, with a Nononina, Inc. copyright line in the footer and a NowPublic tab already in the navigation. The next day it was a redirect to truemors.nowpublic.com, where it ran on as a subdomain of somebody else's product.

That lasted seven months. The newest item on the page froze at 27 February 2009 and stayed frozen through the middle of March, with the archive crawler picking up the same stale list week after week. By 21 March the address was bouncing visitors to a NowPublic tag page, and it went on doing that until 2013. The domain now belongs to an exam-prep site and redirects there.

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