Wapedia

» see wapedia.mobi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 2004 the phone in my pocket made calls and sent messages. There was a WAP browser somewhere in the menu and I knew what it was, in the way you know a road exists without ever driving down it. Turkish operators billed data by the kilobyte in those years, and the answer to any question worth looking up was to wait until you were sitting in front of a computer.

Wapedia started in August 2004, built by Florian Amrhein. What it did was take Wikipedia articles and cut them into pieces small enough for a handset to hold. The address was wapedia.mobi. That domain was itself a bet, made by people who thought the mobile web would end up as a separate place with its own top level namespace rather than as the same web viewed on a smaller screen.

The Wikimedia Foundation had no mobile site until June 2007 and no serious apps for years after that. So for most of a decade, if you wanted an encyclopedia on a phone, you were reading somebody else's copy of it. Wapedia was the copy most people found.

It paid for itself by putting advertising inside articles that had been written by volunteers for free. The license permits exactly that, and it still made people uneasy, because everything being sold had been produced by somebody who was not being paid.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

Taptu was founded in Cambridge in 2007 on money from DFJ Esprit and Sofinnova, and it came out of mobile search rather than out of the encyclopedia business. Wapedia ended up as one of its products alongside a touch search engine, which tells you how the company thought about it. It was traffic and a working codebase, not a mission.

Dedicated apps went out in 2009 for iPhone, Android and webOS, which was the correct read of where phones were heading and about two years ahead of Wikipedia making the same move. Mediafed bought Taptu in September 2012. Wapedia lasted another fourteen months after that.

~ the fall ~

Reformatting is a service only for as long as the source refuses to do it. Once m.wikipedia.org worked properly and the official apps were decent, there was no argument left for a third party sitting in the middle, taking the same text and putting ads on it. Nothing was killed here. The reason to exist just closed underneath it.

~ the long tail ~

The site went off on 4 November 2013. The Android build came down from Google Play nine days later with 2.2 million installs behind it, which is a respectable number for a product almost nobody would name today. Taptu itself lasted until 31 March 2015.

The.mobi idea died the same way. Phones got browsers that could render real pages, and the whole plan of a parallel mobile internet with its own addresses turned into a footnote. Wapedia was the best thing built for that internet, and it went down with it.

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