Windows Live Expo

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

~ the obituary ~

Microsoft's answer to Craigslist assumed you would rather buy a used monitor from somebody already on your Messenger list. That was the whole pitch. Expo was classified advertising with a social graph bolted onto it, arriving at a moment when Craigslist had deliberately refused to build one and was winning anyway.

It carried the codename Fremont inside the company and ran first as an employee experiment around Puget Sound. A quarter of the people who could use it did, and they posted a bit over three thousand listings, which were the usual company-town inventory of computers and electronics and cars and furniture. The public beta opened to American consumers on 28 February 2006. Everything was geo-tagged by zip code and you set the radius yourself, anywhere from twenty-five miles out to the whole country. Garry Wiseman, the product unit manager, said what set Expo apart was that people could set their own search parameters, which is a modest claim to make about a product built to take on Craigslist.

The rest of it was Windows Live wiring. A listing could be mapped through Windows Live Local, so you got satellite imagery of the street before you drove to it. You contacted the seller through Windows Live Messenger instead of email, with an anonymous inbox standing between the two of you so neither side handed over a real address. You could push your own listing onto your Windows Live Space. MSN Alerts would tell you when something matched, by mail or on your phone.

None of this reached me, and the reason is not really Microsoft's fault. Classified advertising is the most local thing on the internet. Turkey had sahibinden.com, which started in 2000 and simply owned that ground, and it is still what people open there when they want to sell a car. Expo was an American product answering an American habit. The odd part, from here, is that the Messenger contact list Expo was built around was an entirely real thing in Ankara in 2006. Microsoft had the graph. It just put the marketplace on a continent where I was never going to see it.

~ the case file ~

~ the deadpool ~

Expo got no farewell worth remembering. The word went around in June 2008 through LiveSide, an enthusiast blog that followed the Windows Live products closely enough to keep a running list of the dead ones, and the site stopped operating on 31 July. Microsoft was cutting hard across the brand that year, and Expo was one of the easier calls: no revenue to protect, no constituency loud enough to make noise about it.

What killed it is not complicated. Craigslist had already won on the only axis that matters in classifieds, which is whether the person selling the sofa lives close enough to drive to. That advantage compounds and it cannot be bought with features. Expo turned up in 2006 with better maps and a contact list and lost anyway, because a marketplace with fewer people in it is worse no matter what it has been wired into.

~ what got buried with it ~

The idea did not die, it relocated. Buying and selling from people you have some connection to is now most of how secondhand goods move online, through Facebook Marketplace and whatever neighborhood app your city settled on. Marketplace launched in 2016 with Expo's exact premise, ten years late and on a graph finally big enough to carry it.

Microsoft had the right thought in 2006 and the wrong graph. A Messenger contact list is a list of people you talk to. It is not a list of people who live near you, and when the thing being sold is a sofa, only the second one counts.

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