Upoc

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

~ the goodbye ~

Upoc started in New York in 1999, founded by Carlo Martino, Alex LeVine, Greg Clayman and Gordon Gould. The premise was many-to-many text messaging on ordinary phones, and the founders expected it would mostly be friends talking to friends. Gould said later that interest groups turned out to be the dominant form: fans of a band, or people in one neighborhood who had a single subject in common and nothing else.

The technical problem it solved first has been forgotten because it stopped existing. In 1999 an American carrier's text messages largely stayed inside that carrier. A Sprint customer and a Verizon customer could not reliably reach each other, which meant a group drawn from the general public could not exist at all. Upoc sat in the middle as an aggregator and did the translation between networks, and Gould claimed it was the first third party to be fully cross-compatible across them.

What it built on top was a directory of public groups you joined by sending a text to a short code. A message to the group went out to everybody in it. The best known was NYC-celeb-sightings, which did exactly what it says: people walking around Manhattan texted in what they had just seen, and a few thousand strangers got it on their phones a second later. The company topped out around twenty-five staff.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the groups worked ~

The structure is recognizable now because Twitter later shipped the same primitive and called it something else. You subscribed to a stream by name and anybody in it could broadcast. The whole thing ran over the only piece of software every phone already had, so there were no accounts to install and no data plan to buy. The cost of membership was whatever your carrier charged per message, which in 2001 was the entire business model of the mobile industry.

On 11 September 2001 the Manhattan voice networks collapsed under load and Upoc was one of the few that kept moving messages across the city. That is the single fact its founder volunteered a decade later when asked what the service had been for. Text got through on the day voice did not.

None of this reached me, and the reason is specific rather than geographic. Upoc was a layer of deals with American carriers, and a deal with Sprint buys you nothing in a country Sprint does not operate in. SMS in Turkey was universal and cheap by the early 2000s, but what it carried was person to person, and the group conversation I was actually in sat in MSN Messenger on a computer. The idea of a public room you joined from a handset arrived here much later and arrived as an app.

~ seven million for twenty-six ~

Upoc sold to Dada USA in August 2006. The reported price was around seven million dollars against roughly twenty-six and a half million that investors had put in, which moconews wrote up at the time as a loss of about nineteen million. Dada USA was renamed Dada Entertainment and later became a subsidiary of Buongiorno, the Italian mobile content group, and at each step the thing being bought was further from what Upoc's users thought they were part of.

Gould's own reading, given to Street Fight in April 2011, was that the money followed fear and greed in cycles and that group messaging eventually succeeded as a platform rather than as a destination. If he were building it again, he said, he would focus on APIs rather than standalone sites or apps. That interview ran seven months before his old company was switched off.

~ the last text ~

On 25 October 2011 at 21:45 UTC, Upoc's Twitter account posted that all good things must come to an end, and the same sentence opened a notice on Dada Entertainment's website. Service would stop on 30 November 2011. As of 1 December the community would be disbanded, with web and WAP access, profiles, groups, address books and messaging all terminated together.

The notice asked people to log in first and collect any information or contacts they still needed, and gave two ways to close an account early, one through the mobile site and one by emailing a phone number and password to customer service. Twelve years of groups had accumulated inside a service that existed because phones could not reach each other, and by 2011 phones could. The sign-off thanked the community for the input and feedback of those twelve years, and then the short code stopped answering.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »