Twick.it

» see twick.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Twick.it opened its public beta in November 2009, built by Markus Möller and Sean Andrew Kollak, and its own community called it an explain engine rather than an encyclopedia. The unit was a twick: one explanation of one thing, 140 characters maximum. If you could not say it in a tweet you were not allowed to say it there at all.

The ranking did the rest of the work. Anyone registered could vote an explanation up or down, and the highest-rated one surfaced first when someone looked the term up, so the crowd was not writing an article together the way Wikipedia does. It was running a competition, with as many rival definitions of a word as people cared to submit and one of them on top at any given moment. By late 2011 there were over 18,000 explanations, and the German figures put the final total above 20,000 across two languages from roughly 2,000 accounts.

Underneath it was ordinary for its year, PHP and MySQL on the server with Prototype and Scriptaculous doing the front end, and a REST API so other sites could pull definitions in. There was a podcast from February 2011. The team showed it at CeBIT in 2010 and collected prizes that year, which is usually the point in a small company's life when everyone assumes the hard part is over.

It stayed German, and that is the whole reason it never got near me. A 140-character explanation is the least portable thing on the internet, since there is no room in it for context and every word has to land in the reader's own language on the first pass. A German-language reference site in 2010 had a ceiling drawn around it before it wrote its first entry, and the ceiling was the language, not the idea.

~ the record ~

~ what a twick was ~

The constraint was the product. Wikipedia's answer to what is a hedge fund runs several thousand words and assumes you will read as much as you need. Twick.it's answer had to fit in the space of a text message, which forces the writer to decide what the single most useful sentence about the thing actually is.

That is a real skill and the format did surface people who had it. What the format could not do was hold anything with genuine internal structure. Some concepts compress to one line and some do not, and a site that only accepts the compressible version ends up excellent on slang and useless on anything technical.

~ the awards year ~

2010 was the good year. Twick.it took second prize in the Society category at the German Social Media Award and won the social category of the Wikitude World Cup for its augmented-reality build, where the idea was that you could point a phone at something and read a one-line explanation of it. That was a genuinely forward guess about where phones were going, made by two people with a PHP site.

Awards for small web companies are a trailing indicator of press attention rather than a leading indicator of anything. The jury sees the demo. The problem was never that the demo did not work.

~ why it stopped ~

The owners announced in June 2012 that it would end, and it ended on 1 August. The stated reason was that the interest they had hoped for did not materialize, which for a user-written reference site means the writers did not show up in the numbers needed to make the thing worth consulting.

Twenty thousand entries sounds respectable until you divide it by the number of things a person might want explained. Somebody looking up a term who finds nothing goes back to Google and does not return, so every gap in the coverage costs you a reader permanently. Reference sites die from the holes, not from the entries.

~ the code went out anyway ~

In August 2014, two years after the shutdown, Möller and Kollak published the software and the database as open source, with the user data anonymized first. Nobody made them do this. There was no acquirer with a legal obligation and no community campaign that anyone recorded, just two founders deciding that what they had built should not vanish because it had failed commercially.

It is a small thing and it is rarer than it should be. Most dead sites of this size take their content into a dead hard drive and that is the end of it. Twick.it left the corpus behind, anonymized and readable, which means the failure is at least documented from the inside.

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