Userplane

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

~ the obit ~

There is no honest way for me to say whether I ever used Userplane, and that is not modesty. Almost nobody who used it knew they were using it. It was sold to site owners rather than to people, and the entire reason to buy it was that your visitors would assume the chat box belonged to you.

Four people started it in Santa Monica in 2001: Mike Jones, Kevin Prentiss, Nate Thelen and Javier Hall. What they built was a hosted chat service you embedded. There was a group room product for communities and a one to one messenger for sites that wanted private conversations, both delivered as a widget that loaded inside your page. You set the colors and put your name on it, and Userplane carried the traffic and the abuse reports.

AOL bought the company in August 2006 for around $40 million. The logic held up on paper. Userplane was running chat for a large share of the biggest dating sites, plus the language exchange sites where two strangers in different countries practice on each other. AOL wanted to be the layer underneath other people's communities instead of only operating its own messenger. Mike Jones left a couple of years later and eventually ran MySpace, which tells you roughly where that generation of Los Angeles internet people ended up.

Then very little happened. By May 2008 clients were telling reporters the service had been neglected if not abandoned, and AOL was denying it was closing. In June 2009 TechCrunch ran a piece about startups circling the business, which is what the press does when a product is visibly unattended. One more release came in 2011, an SDK with a rebuilt web messenger and a presence bar. After that the record goes quiet until it ends.

A product like this was never going to have a Turkish moment, because the chat layer here was already occupied. MSN sat on every machine from roughly 2002 to 2010, at home and in the internet cafes, and it was not one option among several. It was the default so completely that asking for someone's address meant asking for their hotmail address. A chat box inside a web page had to argue against a window that was already open on the same desktop. In the United States the messenger market stayed split enough that site chat had somewhere to stand. Here it did not.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what forty million dollars bought ~

The asset was the client list, not the code. Chat was not difficult to write in 2006 and is not difficult to write now. What Userplane had was contracts with sites that could not build it themselves and did not want to operate it, plus a running system that had already survived the load those sites produced on a Friday night. AOL was buying its way into communities it did not own.

It never used them. The obvious move was to wire the embedded rooms into AIM, so that a conversation started on a dating site could carry on inside a messenger AOL controlled and counted. That is the reason to buy a white label chat company, and nothing like it appeared. Userplane kept running as a business unit AOL stopped funding, which is a slower way of closing something.

~ what actually buried it ~

The technical cause is dull and worth stating plainly. Userplane's widgets ran as Java applets and Flash objects, because in 2001 those were the only ways to hold a live connection open inside a web page. By 2013 browsers were disabling both by default, and the replacement, a chat box built on websockets and ordinary javascript, could be written by one competent engineer in a week. There was nothing left to sell.

Its Wikipedia entry cannot decide whether it ended on 1 August or 24 September 2013, and that is about the right amount of ceremony for a product that spent its last five years as a line item. The sites that ran on it swapped in something else. Most of their users never noticed the box had changed hands twice.

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