Wallop

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

~ the obit ~

wallop was invitation-only. the invite network ran through silicon valley alone, and it never reached ankara. honestly, the project started in 2003 as a research thing inside microsoft's social computing group, designed around the idea that a social graph should be visualized as a relevance-weighted network rather than a flat friend list. the prototype produced lava-lamp-style flash visualizations of who you talked to most, which was clever but also the entire pitch.

microsoft spun the project out as wallop inc on 25 april 2006, with karl jacob as ceo and roughly 13 million dollars from microsoft plus a small venture syndicate. the public-facing beta launched later that year, still invitation-only, still flash-heavy. by mid-2008 facebook had crossed 100 million users by simply letting anyone sign up. wallop pivoted to selling cool-cards and party-on apps for facebook and bebo, then closed its own social network on 18 september 2008.

the rest of the company survived as a facebook-platform app developer for another year or so before fading out (cant remember exactly when the lights went off). by 2026 the only thing left of wallop is a wikipedia stub and a couple of techcrunch deadpool entries, which is the standard residue for a 2006-era social-network startup that never escaped beta.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it tried to do ~

wallop's research thesis was that a social network should reorganize itself around interaction frequency, with people you actually talked to floating to the center of the visualization while weak ties drifted outward. the flash client rendered this as colored orbs connected by lines that thickened and thinned over time. it was a real piece of social-computing research and a real user-interface mistake at the same time, because the people who joined social networks in 2006 wanted a friend list, not an art piece.

~ the invite-only mistake ~

wallop kept the invitation gate long past the moment when other networks dropped theirs. facebook opened to anyone with an email address on 26 september 2006. bebo was already mass-market in the uk by then, and orkut was open in brazil and india. wallop stayed gated through 2007 with the idea that exclusivity would protect quality. by the time the gate came down there was no reason for anyone outside microsoft research to sign up.

~ what it became ~

after closing the network the company tried to monetize the social-graph code by building third-party apps for facebook and bebo, which is the chapter most ex-employees pointed to in linkedin profiles for the next decade. nothing from that period seems to have survived. the wallop.com domain went dark and the flash files stopped loading once browsers killed flash. the brand is now a curiosity tagged under "microsoft research spinouts that never took off".

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »