Vizify

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

~ the obit ~

Vizify started in 2011 in Portland, Oregon, built by Todd Silverstein and Eli Tucker, with Jeff Cutler-Stamm as the third founder. The pitch was that your professional self online had become a wall of text on LinkedIn and a column of posts on Twitter, and that none of it looked like a person. Vizify read those accounts with your permission and rendered them back as an illustrated page: a map of the places you had lived, your most-used words drawn as a cloud. It gave you one short URL to hand to somebody who was about to interview you.

The feature that got it written up was the video bio. Vizify would take the same data and assemble a twenty-second animated clip out of it, captioned rather than narrated, embeddable anywhere you could paste an iframe. In 2012 that was an odd thing to be able to generate from a Twitter login and nothing else. There was a free tier, and a paid one that let you point your own domain at the result, so your-name.com resolved to the bio.

On 5 March 2014 Yahoo announced it had bought the company. The five-person team went to Yahoo's media product organization in San Francisco, and the same announcement said the service was being sunset. This was the Marissa Mayer period, when Yahoo was buying small design-literate teams at roughly one a month and almost never keeping what they had built. Vizify got the standard treatment: the people were the asset, the product was overhead.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the goodbye page promised ~

The wind-down was unusually careful for an acqui-hire. New signups stopped on 5 March. Anyone on a paid plan got a full refund of everything they had ever paid, not a prorated remainder. Premium customers who had registered a domain through Vizify were given instructions to take ownership of it for free, which matters more than it sounds: a dead startup holding your personal domain name is a slow problem.

Then two deadlines. If you did nothing, your bio stopped being active shortly after 7 April 2014. If you opted in, Vizify froze a snapshot of your bio and kept it live at the same URL until 4 September 2014. That second date is the real death. The terms of service were written to terminate on whichever date applied to you, which is a level of legal tidiness most shutdowns do not bother with.

~ the recruiter problem ~

Vizify was built for an anxiety that was sharpest in one labor market. The assumption underneath it, that a hiring manager would search your name before the interview and form an opinion from whatever surfaced, so you had better manufacture something nicer for them to find, was a specifically American idea about work around 2012. I was an engineer in Ankara through those years. Nobody around me was registering a domain to host a prettier version of themselves, and a CV went out as a PDF attachment and that was the entire ritual. The product reads now less like a tool than like a measurement of how worried the English-speaking web was about being looked up.

~ the redirect nobody turned off ~

vizify.com still answers. What it serves is a 128-byte document containing a meta refresh and nothing else, pointing at /yahoo.html, and /yahoo.html is the March 2014 announcement with its stylesheet intact. The thank-you list is still there, naming chairman Jonathan Sposato as lead investor and signing off with seven first names. The FAQ tab still works and still carefully explains what will happen to your bio after a deadline that expired twelve years ago.

Somebody at Yahoo paid for that domain registration every year for over a decade and never pointed it anywhere else. The acquisition outlived the acquirer, since Yahoo itself has since been sold twice.

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