Trunk.ly

» see trunk.ly as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Weeks before it was bought, Trunk.ly had gone on record about the new Delicious and called the relaunch one step forward and two steps back. On 9 November 2011 AVOS Systems, the company Chad Hurley and Steve Chen started after YouTube, announced it had bought Trunk.ly in order to improve that same Delicious. Signups closed the following day.

Tim Bull and Alex Dong formed the company in November 2009 and opened the service to the public in December 2010. The idea was narrow and it was good. Instead of asking you to bookmark anything, Trunk.ly watched the accounts you already used, collected every link you had favorited on Twitter or liked on Facebook, fetched the pages behind those links and indexed the text. You filed nothing. You searched a pile that had been filling itself for a year.

AVOS did not want the pile. It wanted Bull and Dong, who moved across to Delicious, and Hurley's public line was that the two visions for the future of bookmarking were closely aligned. The service stopped taking new accounts on 10 November and stayed up two more months so people could pull their links out through a settings page. That put the end in January 2012, thirteen months after launch.

~ the record ~

~ the two month clock ~

Two months is a generous wind-down for an acquisition this size, and the founders' note was warm about the whole thing: thank you for your support, we never expected that twelve months ago we would grow Trunk.ly to the success it's become. The export lived at a settings URL and handed back your links on request.

What it could not hand back was the reason to use the product. Every link service that dies returns a list of addresses, and a list of addresses was never what Trunk.ly was for. The value was that the list assembled itself out of things you had already done, and that the words inside the pages were searchable, and an export file holds neither. The file you got back was a list of addresses.

~ the part that aged badly ~

The whole design rested on two companies leaving their doors open. Trunk.ly needed to read your Twitter favorites and your Facebook likes on a schedule, forever, for free. Twitter began closing that kind of access in 2012 and finished the job in 2013, about a year after Trunk.ly was already gone. Even with no acquisition, the plumbing was going to be cut.

I have no memory of this one and had no way to get one. It ran in Australia from December 2010 to January 2012, and in that window the habit it fed on, a Twitter account whose favorites were worth harvesting, belonged mostly to English-language media people. The link habit I knew ran through forums, where you pasted a URL into a thread and it stayed with the thread and belonged to everyone reading. Thirteen months is not long enough for a service to travel.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »