UOL Fotoblog

» see fotoblog.uol.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

UOL is the largest Brazilian internet company, part news portal and part dial-up provider, and in 2004 it launched a photoblog service for its paying subscribers. The pitch on the front page explained the distinction for anyone who had not met the format yet: a blog and a fotoblog are both diaries on the web, but in a blog you use more words and in a fotoblog you use pictures. The tagline under the logo was "o seu diário fotográfico", your photographic diary.

It arrived the same year as UOL Blog and a photo album product, which tells you what UOL thought it was buying. This was not a bet on photo sharing. It was a feature in a subscription bundle, sold next to email and dial-up minutes, and the paid tier bought you more uploads per day and more space for them.

It ran for fifteen years. The last archived front page, captured eleven days before the end, still has the furniture of a 2005 web product on it: a ranking of fotoblogs, a search that filters strangers by sex and age, a panel for recommending somebody else's page, and a banner announcing that fotoblogs were readable on your phone in WAP format. The copyright line at the bottom still reads 1996 to 2011.

~ the dossier ~

~ behind the subscriber login ~

Fotolog launched in 2002 and became one of the defining things that happened to the Latin American internet. Brazil and Argentina took it over so completely that the format turned into a youth culture with its own slang, and at the peak it was counting users in the tens of millions.

UOL Fotoblog was the other model: the same idea, charged for and available only to people who already paid UOL for their connection. That ceiling was built in from day one, and it is also why it survived. Fotolog was free and had to sell advertising against enormous traffic, and it was gone by February 2016. This one cost UOL almost nothing to run and died when somebody finally did the accounting.

~ the january clearout ~

January 2019 was when UOL closed its user-content era. The forums were deactivated on the 7th, with the DNS changed that afternoon. The blogs and the fotoblogs both went on the 31st. The notice on Fotoblog's front page was in capitals and gave the date without a reason attached to it: the creation of new fotoblogs is disabled, UOL Fotoblog will be switched off on 31/01/2019.

Archive Team got a page about it up and a screenshot saved on 20 January. Fifteen years of Brazilian photo diaries behind a login that no longer exists is not the kind of thing a volunteer crawl can reach, and most of what was in there went off with the servers.

~ from here ~

My equivalent years were spent on a Turkish internet that had its own version of all this and shared almost none of the same brand names. Photoblogging in the Brazilian sense, where the daily photo is the whole social network, never took hold in Turkey the way it did in São Paulo or Buenos Aires. What did reach me was the generic shape of it, which is that around 2004 a very large number of people worked out that they could publish one picture a day, and then did it for years. In this case the host kept that running until 2019 and then sent out a notice in capital letters.

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