Yahoo Koprol

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

~ the obituary ~

koprol did not reach me at the time. it was indonesian-coded at the social layer and i was sitting in ankara in 2010 finishing graduate coursework on a ttnet line with no reason to install a jakarta-first geo-tag app. the indonesian internet of that era ran on a habit of opening the same friendslist on different brand wrappers, koprol being one of them. it overlapped with a foursquare moment but on a regional carrier path the western tech press only covered when yahoo signed the term sheet.

the actual product launched in february 2009 out of pt skyeight indonesia, a jakarta startup founded by satya witoelar with fajar budiprasetyo, daniel armanto and leo laksmana. development had started in july 2008. you posted a 200-character note about where you were standing and what you were doing. the site grouped you with other koprol users in the same neighborhood and bridged your post to twitter and facebook with a blackberry messenger relay that was load-bearing in indonesia in 2010.

yahoo bought the company on may 25 2010, its first southeast asia acquisition. the price never went public. techcrunch read the move as yahoo trying to get ahead of foursquare in a region where foursquare itself was barely setting up. inside yahoo the koprol team kept working out of jakarta. by 2011 the membership was tracking somewhere near 1.5 million accounts across major indonesian cities, with bandung and surabaya growing faster than jakarta itself.

~ the case file ~

~ how it actually ended ~

marissa mayer became yahoo ceo on july 16 2012. her first weeks ran on a cull list compiled by the previous administration, since yahoo had spent 2010 to 2012 buying small properties faster than it could integrate them. by late june 2012 the koprol team got the closure notice. the shutdown date was set for august 28 2012, a thursday. the announcement went up on the koprol blog in bahasa indonesia first, english version second, with no migration path to a yahoo-owned successor.

the founders did one unusual thing in the final weeks. on july 27 2012 yahoo agreed to hand back the koprol trademark and the domain rights to satya witoelar with his two co-founders. the three of them spent the following month building a successor under the same name with new servers and a smaller scope. the successor never reached the 2011 user count. the original yahoo-hosted koprol shut down on august 28 as planned.

~ what got buried with it ~

this part i was reading about from the outside, but the indonesian internet in 2010 to 2012 had a small dense web of geo-tag and mention apps that the global tech press never quite covered. koprol was one piece. the other pieces were tinychat-style hangout rooms and the early kaskus forum-to-mention pivot, threaded through a generation of jakarta dev teams trained on a workflow where you shipped a mobile site first and an iphone app later. when yahoo bought koprol it briefly became a vehicle for proving that you could build an indonesian internet product without leaving jakarta. when yahoo shut koprol it took that proof down with it.

satya witoelar later co-founded gojek with nadiem makarim. that part of the indonesian internet would scale to the size yahoo had quietly aimed at and missed. the koprol grave itself stayed online as a static info page for a few months past august 2012 before it too went dark.

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