Wiggio

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

~ the eulogy ~

Dana Lampert started Wiggio in 2008, not long out of Cornell, on the observation that every group project runs on a different tool than the one the institution bought. The university has a learning management system. The six people actually doing the work have a group chat and a shared folder somebody set up on a personal account. Wiggio tried to be one place for the second category, free, with no procurement involved.

It came out of private beta in February 2009 and the press at the time described it as a Yammer for college students, which undersells how far down it reached. The groups on it were sororities and intramural teams, the kind of organization that has fifteen members and a two-year memory. By 2012 it had passed a million users, better than eight in ten of them academic, spread across more than two thousand universities.

In March 2013 Desire2Learn bought it. The Canadian learning-platform company was flush, having raised eighty million dollars, and Wiggio was its second acquisition in two months. The numbers at the handover were 1.1 million users and a hundred thousand groups. Six Wiggio employees took offers and became D2L's Boston office. The price was never disclosed.

~ the dossier ~

~ a million group projects ~

The feature list is a catalog of the things a student organization argues about. You could send a message to the whole group and have it arrive as email or as a text, which mattered enormously in 2010 and is close to meaningless now. There was a shared calendar that synced outward, file storage, document editing, conference calling, and polls for when nobody could agree on a meeting time.

American campus life produced this software and American campus life is the only place it entirely makes sense. A Turkish university in that era did not have two thousand chartered student organizations each needing its own file store; the departments had what the departments had, and group work happened over whatever everyone was already logged into. Wiggio solved a coordination problem that is a function of how many separate small institutions a campus contains, and that number is not the same everywhere.

~ the sentence that aged ~

When the deal was announced, D2L's vice president of market development told reporters that Wiggio's platform would continue to operate as a stand-alone service for the foreseeable future. It is a fair thing to say on acquisition day. Nobody promises a termination date in a press release, and a buyer who has just spent money on a product has no reason to announce its ending.

From 8 March 2013 to 17 November 2017 is 1,715 days. What happened in between is the ordinary version of this: the collaboration tools got folded into D2L's own suite and handed to its paying customers for free from the fall of 2013, and the free public site at wiggio.com went on answering without anyone being responsible for it. No team owned it. No roadmap included it.

So it decayed in place. The web moved underneath it while browsers withdrew support for the plugins the older features had been built on, and the conference calling stopped working one piece at a time without anyone filing a bug that would reach a person able to fix it. By the time the decision was taken, closing it was mostly an act of tidying.

~ one page, no date ~

The last version of wiggio.com is 965 bytes. A dark bar across the top with the logo in it, the colored dots beside the lowercase wordmark, and four sentences underneath: the direct-to-consumer free Wiggio service has been closed, this was not an easy decision for our team, we care deeply about our users, thank you for being a Wiggio user. There is no date on it and no way to retrieve anything you had put in. It kept serving that text into the last days of 2018, thirteen months after the lights went out, and the domain itself has since stopped resolving altogether.

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