TwitterPeek

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

~ the obituary ~

twitterpeek was a us-only product on a us-only carrier deal, aimed at a problem that essentially only existed inside the us prepaid market. it never reached turkey. in 2009 i was a graduate student with a laptop and a phone that already had twitter on it through a browser, like everyone else outside of the us t-mobile prepaid demographic this thing was actually for. the gadget existed mostly so that bloggers in new york could write blog posts about how it should not have existed.

peek inc was founded in 2007 by three ex-virgin-mobile-usa employees, with amol sarva as ceo. the company's first product, the original peek, launched in september 2008 at 99 dollars and did email and only email. that one got real praise. david pogue at the new york times called it "sweet" and "simple." time magazine put it on its 50-best-inventions list for the year. the idea of a no-distraction blackberry replacement at a fifth of the price made sense as an answer to people who wanted mobile email without committing to a smartphone contract.

the twitterpeek launched 14 months later on november 3, 2009. it kept the same form factor but stripped email out and replaced it with twitter. the device cost 100 dollars and included six months of service. after that you paid 8 dollars a month, or 200 dollars upfront for promised lifetime access. that was the headline number every press release led with. lifetime twitter for 200 dollars. the reception was instantaneous and brutal. cnn put it on its 2009 year-end top-ten tech failures list inside a month. gizmodo later included it on a 50-worst-gadgets-of-the-decade compilation. on february 1, 2012 peek shut hardware support down entirely. anyone who had paid 200 dollars in 2009 had used the lifetime service for 27 months before it expired.

~ the case file ~

~ what they actually thought they were building ~

the peek team's pitch made sense in 2008 and made progressively less sense every quarter after that. the original observation was that smartphones were expensive and most people only used them for one or two things. an aol-aim user only needed messaging. a blackberry user only needed email. so why pay 200 dollars upfront for an iphone and then another 60 or 70 dollars a month on a contract, when you could pay 99 dollars once and 8 dollars a month for the one thing you needed. the original peek shipped at the right moment for that argument. the twitterpeek shipped at exactly the wrong one. by november 2009 the iphone was 30 months old, android was a year old, mid-tier smartphones were dropping under 200 dollars, and "the one thing you actually do on your phone" had already become five things.

~ the funny part ~

the lifetime-access tier was always doomed by math. peek did not own the network. they paid t-mobile (and behind it cingular gsm wholesale) for data on a per-line basis. every lifetime customer was a recurring monthly cost on peek's books with zero offsetting revenue. the company could carry that load for a couple of years on venture money but not indefinitely. the february 2012 shutdown was the moment peek had to stop subsidizing its own promise. amol sarva framed it in the press release as the devices "reaching end of life." the devices were fine. the math was the part that had ended.

~ what carried over ~

the dedicated-single-service hardware category never really came back. nobody made a dedicated facebook device or a dedicated tiktok device after this. the lesson of twitterpeek was not "users do not want twitter" but "users do not want a separate piece of plastic for each thing they do online when the phone they already have does all of it." every subsequent attempt at a focused-purpose connected device has had to argue against the ghost of the twitterpeek. the rabbit r1 in 2024 caught the same reviews almost word for word.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »