Whrrl

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

~ the eulogy ~

i missed whrrl. it was a us mobile-carrier app in an era when turkish carriers had no real gps-social integration and the iphone was still a grey-market device in ankara. the check-in category as a whole arrived to me late, mostly through foursquare after 2010, mostly on twitter references. whrrl sat under that layer, in the tier of us location-social apps that never had a turkish account to be created against.

pelago, inc. was founded in 2006 by jeff holden and darren vengroff, both amazon.com engineers who had worked on the recommendation systems side. the funding walked them into the top tier of us mobile-social capital: kleiner perkins caufield & byers in november 2006, then deutsche telekom leading a $15 million series b in may 2008, then follow-on rounds through 2009. bezos expeditions was on the cap table. the total raised was around $22.5 million by the time of the exit.

whrrl went live in october 2007 with a geosocial recommendation flavor. the pitch was that the app would help you find new places based on what your friends had actually been to and reviewed, rather than a raw yellow-pages database. by early 2010 the product had gone through three major versions and settled into a "story"-shaped check-in flow where a group of friends could co-author a shared post about a night out. in june 2010 pelago layered on a rewards program called society rewards, meant to bridge whrrl activity into brand partnerships.

none of it converted at scale. groupon announced the pelago acquisition on 18 april 2011 and framed it as a talent buy. jeff holden joined groupon as a product vp and a chunk of the pelago team joined a group internally called "grouponnovations". the whrrl app itself was pulled from the app stores and switched off on 30 april 2011, twelve days after the deal.

~ the dossier ~

~ the story-layer check-in ~

whrrl's key difference from foursquare was the story layer. foursquare's model was a single-user check-in that broadcast to your friend graph as a data point. whrrl's model was a co-authored story you built with the other people you were physically with, closer to a group blog entry than a status update. the design assumption was that people go out in groups and the check-in should reflect that group rather than treat each person as a separate signal.

the mechanic was clever in isolation. it did not spread because the check-in itself was already a barely-motivated action and adding a group-coordination step on top of it made the barrier higher. foursquare won the same window by keeping the check-in single-tap and gamified. by 2010 the two products were competing for the same small pool of urban check-in early adopters and foursquare had the network graph.

~ the acqui-kill ~

groupon in early 2011 was preparing its ipo (it filed the s-1 that june). the company was under pressure to show that it had a discovery engine capable of surfacing local deals to relevant users, not just a coupon push. pelago's team, with amazon-recommendation backgrounds and a mobile-social product already in market, was the acqui-hire target that fit that story on paper. groupon spent an undisclosed sum on the deal. the pelago employees moved into product roles. whrrl's cohort of active users was small enough that killing the app was a rounding error.

the shutdown notice went up almost immediately after the deal was announced. users had twelve days to grab their check-in history before the api went dark, and the app icon disappeared from the ios and blackberry app stores. jeff holden stayed at groupon for a couple of years, then moved on. groupon's ipo went through in november 2011 at a $12.7 billion valuation, then the stock lost most of that value over the following two years.

~ the long tail ~

whrrl left almost nothing behind as a product. the app is gone and the domain redirects to a groupon path. the story-layer mechanic did not carry into any other check-in product that survived. foursquare split into two apps in 2014 and eventually retreated to being a location-data api provider for enterprise. the whole check-in category as a consumer surface faded by 2016.

the pelago team's real legacy is on the amazon side of jeff holden's career, not on the whrrl side. holden ran uber's product organization from 2014 to 2018 during the period when uber was building rides and eats out from the same location graph. the recommendation instincts he had at amazon and the geo-social patterns he had worked on at pelago were both feeding into that. whrrl the app is a footnote. the engineers who built it kept working.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »