Trusera

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

~ the obit ~

Trusera never reached Turkey in any form and was never trying to. It was an American health product shaped around an American health system, aimed at people who had been handed a diagnosis and could not get a straight answer about what happened next. That is a problem everywhere, but the specific shape of it, where the doctor is a fifteen minute appointment and the rest is yours to figure out, is a very local shape.

The founder's story is the product. Keith Schorsch had been an executive at Amazon. In 2004 he got sick, and by the company's own telling on its about page it was a friend's phone call that saved his life, the kind of call where somebody who has already had the thing tells you what to ask for and who to ask. What he had was Lyme disease. Trusera was an attempt to make that phone call available to people who did not happen to know the right friend.

The site went up in 2007 and spent about a year behind an application form. The first archived capture of trusera.com is from june 2007; the company's own about page says flatly that it launched in june 2008, meaning the year in between was closed testing and the public opening came later. Even after the beta label came off you still had to apply to get in. What you did once you were in was write your own experience out and answer somebody else's question about theirs.

It called the thing it was selling the Power of Been There, with a trademark symbol on the end, which is a lot of legal punctuation for an idea that amounts to people talking. i was in my early twenties then and healthy, which is its own kind of distance from this. Nobody arrives at a site like this out of curiosity about social software.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

Trusera landed in the middle of what the industry was calling Health 2.0, and it deliberately stood on the opposite side of that movement from the records companies. Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault were both trying to be the place your medical file lived. Trusera did not want your file. It wanted the part no file contains, which is what the treatment actually felt like and what nobody had warned you about.

The company raised around two million dollars in a single round in 2007 according to the startup databases, which was never a lot for the ambition, and it was pushing against PatientsLikeMe and Medpedia in the same window. In october 2008 it started publishing documentary-style video of people with serious health histories, including the former major league pitcher Bill Krueger talking about his child's autism diagnosis. That is a marketing budget being spent, and it came from money the company did not have much of.

~ the two dates ~

TechCrunch reported on 24 march 2009 that Trusera was nearly out of money and that Schorsch had set a hard line: unless a round closed by the end of april, the site would shut on 30 april. It did not shut on 30 april. The company blog carries a post titled Trusera Update, Open Beyond April 30, so the deadline slipped and everybody got a few more weeks.

The end came on 20 may 2009 in a post headed Trusera will close on May 27. Schorsch wrote that the additional funding had not been secured and that difficult economic times make it hard to sustain even strong communities. TechCrunch ran its own piece the same day under a headline saying the site had officially closed its doors, which is where the date confusion in the record comes from. The announcement is the 20th. The closure is the 27th, a Wednesday, exactly as the founder's own post says.

The post is careful in a way most shutdown notices are not. It tells members to export their stories and journals before the date, points at a feature built specifically to let them do it, and tells them to message their friends on the site if they want to keep in touch afterward. The content was to be secured rather than deleted, in case circumstances changed and the place could reopen. In the same paragraph Schorsch writes that hundreds of thousands of people benefited, which is the only membership figure anybody ever put on the record.

~ what the address became ~

trusera.com answers today, on plain http and on https alike, with about sixty kilobytes of WordPress. The site is a generic content farm whose menu runs from Wellness to Auto, everything bylined to a single name, publishing the kind of article that exists so that a page can exist.

The tell is in the head. Before anything else renders, the page carries a paragraph set to display none containing a link to a PUBG currency generator, dated 2019. It has been sitting there long enough that the domain has changed hands or purpose at least twice since. Somebody bought a dead health community's address for the links pointing at it, and what those links now support is hidden spam for a game.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »