wize.life

» see wizelife.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

seniorbook opened in September 2012 out of Deggendorf in Lower Bavaria, put up by the ERL property group, and described itself in German as a community for people with experience. The intended member was over fifty. What it offered was ordinary for the period: groups organized around interests, photo uploads, discussion threads, a way to find people. The servers sat in Germany under German data protection law, and the operator said so in the pitch, which tells you who the target was worried about.

The category has a poor record and everyone building in it knows this going in. Social networks aimed at older users get funded and admired in the press, and then the members who might have joined turn out to already be on Facebook talking to their grandchildren. A network defined by an age bracket has to be better than the network everyone in that bracket is already inside, and being better at privacy has never been enough.

I was twenty-eight when seniorbook opened and thirty-eight when wize.life closed, which puts me outside its target range for the whole of its life. It was German-language only on top of that, and its entire proposition rested on members sharing a country and a generation. Distance here is not a matter of the product never reaching Turkey. It is that the product was not for anybody my age in any country.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the suffix problem ~

On 11 October 2016 seniorbook became wize.life. The reason was Facebook. For years Facebook had asserted rights over the word book in the names of other services and had pursued that position through the courts, and the operators in Deggendorf decided to rename rather than defend a suffix. A German website for pensioners changed its name because of a trademark stance taken in Menlo Park by a company that was never going to notice either outcome.

The replacement name was chosen to stop signaling age at all. seniorbook told you exactly who it was for and that was the marketing problem, since a large share of people over fifty do not think of themselves as seniors and will not sign up to something that says so on the door.

~ what the domain points at now ~

By October 2020 the platform reported 300,000 registered members and 17 million page views, funded completely by advertising, with no venture round behind it and no subscription tier. Those are respectable numbers for a German-language niche community and they were not respectable enough. Operations ended on 31 March 2022, given as business reasons, after nine and a half years.

wizelife.de still answers. What it answers with is a 301 redirect to hipure.de, a shop selling a 500 ml bottle of micronutrient concentrate for 59 euros, and the redirect carries a tracking tag reading utm_source=wizelife. The community is gone and its leftover traffic is still being spent on something.

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