Writeboard

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

~ the obit ~

Writeboard launched in October 2005 out of 37signals in Chicago, the same small shop that had shipped Basecamp the year before and had just extracted Ruby on Rails from it. Writeboard was a shared text document with a password on it. You wrote and you saved, and the save became a numbered version you could set beside any earlier one to see what had changed.

What made it strange for its moment was the absence of an account. There was no registration form and no profile. You typed a name for the writeboard and picked a password, and the site handed you a URL. Anyone you mailed that URL to could open it and edit it, which meant a draft could travel through a group of people who had never heard of 37signals and never would.

A few years in, the company wired Writeboards into Basecamp Classic and Backpack, and that is where the volume went. By 2012 the standalone site was a side door into a feature that lived somewhere else. In April of that year 37signals took Writeboard off its homepage and stopped letting anyone start a new one at writeboard.com. There was no farewell post. The Internet Archive has the site serving normally on 18 April 2012 and redirecting away by 1 May.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ no signup, no account ~

The no-account design read as a philosophical position at the time and it was one. 37signals spent that decade arguing in public that software should do less, and Writeboard was the argument compressed onto one page. Getting Real, the book they published in 2006, made exactly this kind of restraint its case.

I knew the company before I knew the product. Rails came out of Basecamp in 2004 and by the time I was at university the Turkish developer forums could not stop talking about it, so 37signals was a name I had read a hundred times. Writeboard itself never came up. A Turkish student group passing a draft around in 2006 did it over MSN and email attachments, and a password-protected English-language web page was one more step than anybody was going to take.

~ the sunset ~

37signals was careful with the word. Writeboard was not shut down, it was sunsetted, which in their vocabulary meant the existing ones kept working and the door closed behind them. Anything already created at writeboard.com stayed readable. You just could not make another.

Ta-da List got the same treatment in the same stretch. The company had spent seven years shipping a product catalog and then decided the catalog was the problem, and in February 2014 it renamed itself Basecamp after the only thing it still wanted to sell.

~ what replaced it ~

The shape survived even though the product did not. Google Docs made the shared editable URL normal, and every pastebin and scratchpad since has copied the trick of handing you a link instead of a login. Basecamp's own text documents are the direct descendant, and the retirement page points at them.

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