UpMyStreet

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

~ the obituary ~

UpMyStreet could not have been built in turkey, and the reason is the postcode. A british postcode covers about fifteen addresses, so it is a real name for a small piece of the world, and a national statistics office had published enough about those small pieces that a website could put them back together. A turkish posta kodu covers a district. There is no query to run.

So this is a grave for a category of thing that only ever existed properly in one country. I did not use it and could not have. What i can do is describe what it did, which is worth the trouble, because for about a decade it was the most useful civic website in britain and nothing has replaced it.

It launched in 1998. You typed a postcode into a box and the site came back with house prices on that street, results for the local schools, recorded crime figures, how the council was performing, and a list of nearby businesses sorted by distance rather than by who had paid. That last one sounds minor and was not. In 1998 every other local directory sorted by advertising spend.

Behind it was Stefan Magdalinski, who launched the site and later thought up its message boards. It came out of the same small british scene that produced most of the country's civic web, and it was the commercial one, which is why it is the one with a grave.

~ the case file ~

~ what a postcode could tell you ~

ACORN is a geodemographic classification built by a market research firm called CACI. It sorts every british postcode into a consumer type, with category names like wealthy achievers, and it exists so that companies can decide where to open a shop or who to send a catalog to. It is expensive and it was never meant for the people being classified.

UpMyStreet put it on a public page for free. You typed in a postcode and the site told you which bucket the market research industry had placed that street in. This was a strange thing to be able to see, and it is the reason people who used to teach with the site have never stopped complaining about losing it. The site handed the public a description of themselves that had been written for somebody else to read.

~ conversations ~

In january 2003 the site brought UpMyStreet Conversations out of beta, a message board system organized by place instead of by time. Every ordinary forum stacks posts newest first, because time is the axis it understands. Conversations made where you were the primary axis and treated how recent a thread was as secondary, which meant the board you saw was the board for your own streets rather than the board for the whole site.

It was launched to the world by an article in the Guardian, and the idea was Magdalinski's. It is also, from more than twenty years away, a fully worked prototype of Nextdoor, running in 2003, in britain, attached to a site that already knew where you lived. Nobody made any money from it.

~ what really happened ~

The ownership history is the boring part and it is also the cause of death. UpMyStreet went into administration in 2003 and the comparison site uSwitch bought it for a million pounds. uSwitch was sold on to E.W. Scripps, and when Forward Internet Group bought uSwitch later, UpMyStreet stayed behind at Scripps, attached to nothing, run by nobody in particular. By 2012 it had shrunk into supplementary location information sitting next to property listings.

Zoopla announced the purchase on 10 may 2012 for a sum it did not disclose, reported as under a million pounds, with its own release dated the following day. Nielsen had counted 600,000 unique users that march. The redirect was live immediately, so the site never had a last day in any meaningful sense. You went to the address and arrived somewhere else.

~ the long tail ~

What Zoopla wanted was the traffic and it got the traffic. What it did not carry across was the reason anyone had typed a postcode in. Zoopla's neighborhood statistics work at the level of a london borough, which is around 300,000 people, and a figure averaged over 300,000 people tells you nothing whatsoever about a street.

There is now no british website that does what UpMyStreet did. There are open-data rebuilds, including one at upmystreet.org with no connection to the original, and there is the government's own statistics portal for anyone willing to work at it. What went missing is the box. You typed in where you lived, and it told you.

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