Where I've Been

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

~ the obit ~

the product was one picture. you filled in the countries you had been to and the map went onto your profile where people could look at it. everything else the app ever added was scaffolding around that single image, which means the app was really a way of publishing a number about yourself.

a turkish passport in 2008 needed a visa for most of the places worth coloring in. that is a different relationship to a map like this one, and it is why i understood what the thing was long before it occurred to me to want one. i was twenty four with ttnet at home in ankara. the countries on my map would have been the ones you can drive to.

craig ulliott wrote it as a facebook application in 2007, working freelance, with michael dalesandro alongside. it had over four hundred thousand users by that june, which in the first year of the facebook platform made it one of the fastest things on there. by august the rumor was that tripadvisor had paid three million dollars for it. the rumor was wrong, and it tells you what the app was worth in the room at the time.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the app tab ~

early facebook let an application put a tab on your profile page. that tab was the entire distribution channel for a product like this one, because the map was not something you visited, it was something visitors found on you. the app crossed onto myspace in september 2007 for the same reason, went standalone at whereivebeen.com in july 2008, and by april 2009 was reporting over eight hundred thousand monthly actives.

that april it relaunched around a flash map with local search and a booking path bolted on, which is the moment somebody decided a map of your holidays should be a travel agency. it was a reasonable idea in 2009 and it did not save anything, because facebook then removed application tabs from profiles. the map stopped being visible on the page where people saw it. tripadvisor's own competing app, cities i've visited, took the same hit in the same change.

~ what tripadvisor bought ~

the acquisition closed in july 2011 for an undisclosed amount, four years after the three million dollar rumor and well after the traffic curve had turned. tripadvisor's number for what it was getting: ten million people had built a map, and close to half a billion places had been pinned onto them. that is an enormous pile of stated intent about where humans have been and want to go, which is exactly the asset a travel review company would want and exactly the thing a colored map was never going to monetize on its own.

so the app was bought for its database and kept running as a brand for two and a half more years. that is the usual arrangement. nobody at tripadvisor was going to invest in a facebook tab product in 2012.

~ the sun has set ~

whereivebeen.com was serving a normal front page on 3 december 2013. by the 27th it was a black page with a background photograph and four sentences on it, the first of which read that the sun has set on where i've been. it thanked everyone for their support over the years and pointed at tripadvisor as the new home. that page stayed up into 2014 and then the domain went behind a 403 that lasted for years.

what died was not really a service. it was a way of getting a picture of yourself onto a profile page, and facebook had killed that format two years earlier. the map survived inside tripadvisor as a feature, and people are still asking on tripadvisor's own support forums where their travel map went.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »