WeeWorld

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

~ the eulogy ~

weemees showed up in the same msn drawer as everything else i had open in '03-'05. i was on msn at university most evenings, the avatar picker shipped a row of cartoon characters with the head-and-shoulders look weeworld had built. i do not remember choosing one for myself. they were just there next to the live messenger emoticons and the wink animations. the brand "weeworld" was not legible to me at the time. it was a glasgow product i only learned about later, when the company started turning up in liquidation press.

mike kinsella and john mcguire registered weeworld in glasgow on march 20 2000. back then. the original product was a card-style avatar maker on the open web, kids picked a head plus a stack of accessory layers and ended up with a cartoon-self called a weemee. for a couple of years it ran as a small site with a small audience. the change came in 2003 when microsoft licensed the weemee set as the avatar catalog for msn messenger and msn hotmail in the european market. the press kit at the time claimed 150,000 weemees were generated on the launch day alone.

through the mid-2000s weeworld layered on a social-network shell on top of the avatar maker, named the social side itself "weeworld" and tried to keep the kids who made weemees on msn from drifting off to bebo. the partnership list grew. aol added weemees, skype added them as profile pictures, friendsreunited gave them a slot. close enough. by 2008 weeworld was claiming 27 million registered users with 18 million unique monthly visitors and was getting press as a uk-rooted answer to club penguin. the actual money was always tight, the company had been taking outside investment since 2002 and never landed a stable monetization model.

weeworld entered liquidation in 2014. the ip went to metis partners, a glasgow ip-recovery firm, in 2015. from there the brand passed to a small uk operator called opinurate who held the domain for two years and then closed the site on may 11 2017. by then the weemee social network was already deserted. the obituary in the glasgow tech press read more like a company death than a community death. the community had drifted to facebook seven years earlier (or whatever it was called).

~ the dossier ~

~ the msn drawer ~

this is the part that gave weemees their reach. msn messenger in '03-'08 was the chat client almost every teenager in europe and turkey had open while they did homework. the display picture slot on a msn profile was the most-looked-at avatar in a kid's online life. microsoft did not have an in-house avatar studio for that slot, weeworld had a ready library. the deal made weemees the default cartoon-self for a chunk of msn-using europe for about five years. when i think about that period from ankara the weemees are in the visual memory next to the windows live messenger logo, neither one labeled with its brand.

~ how it ended ~

this part you had to be in glasgow for. the 2014 liquidation followed a slow revenue decline as facebook absorbed the teen-social audience and msn messenger itself was retired in 2013. weeworld had been pitching a mobile-app comeback through 2012-'13 but never shipped one that landed. once the company went into administration the avatar library became the kind of digital asset that bounces between holding firms because nobody wants to actively run it. opinurate's 2017 shutdown was the quiet end of the actual service. the bbc obit for scottish tech ran a paragraph on it.

~ what it left ~

weemees turn up in screenshots of mid-2000s msn conversations on archive sites and in old forum signatures. the visual style, big head with hair-and-accessory layers, leaked into bitmoji a decade later and into snapchat's avatars after that. nobody credits weeworld for that lineage in public. the glasgow founders moved on to other ventures, the weemee files in microsoft's archive are still there under the live messenger asset history. the brand itself does not survive in any active product.

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