WAYN

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

~ the obit ~

wayn was for people who traveled and wanted a social network built around it, a map of where you had been and where you were going next. in the 2000s that was not my life. i was a student in ankara, then an engineer, and the flights that would have filled a wayn profile were not really happening yet. so it stayed a name i read about, never a login. to be honest.

wayn stood for where are you now, and it started in london around 2002, built by jerome touze and peter ward. back then. the pitch was simple, put a pin in every place you had visited, then find other members who had been there or were about to go.

on paper it got big. the number they used by 2013 was 22 million registered members, growing by thousands a day. but registered is not the same as active, and wayn never found the thing that would turn a pile of accounts into money, or into a habit people came back to.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

before instagram made the travel photo the whole point, wayn was trying to be the place you announced your trips. in those days that was a real gap. you could tell people you had been to bangkok or you were headed to prague, and the site would line you up with others on the same route.

~ the cracks ~

the problem was that facebook then instagram just absorbed the behavior. once your friends were already on facebook, telling a separate travel network where you had been felt like extra work for no reason. wayn kept the big signup number in the headlines while the actual attention leaked away to the places everyone already was.

~ how it actually ended ~

the money ran out the way it usually does, quietly and then all at once. wayn went into administration in the autumn of 2016. lastminute.com, an old dot-com survivor itself, bought the assets and moved wayn's database and content into its media division. the social network stopped being a place you could go, and became a mailing list somebody else owned.

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