yfly

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

~ the last words ~

yfly was built for american teenagers, with their parents looking over their shoulder. i was a turkish university student in my early twenties. those are two different rooms, and yfly's room had an age limit i was already past.

nick lachey launched it on the first of february 2006 with a couple of business partners, and pitched it as a safer social network for the thirteen-to-twenty-seven crowd. the hook was celebrities. musicians and actors set up accounts to reach fans directly, and the press showed up because a pop star was hosting the party.

safety was the other selling point. yfly brought in a well-known internet-safety expert to watch for adults sneaking in, gated joining through your actual school so strangers stood out, and put warnings on the site reminding teens that a parent or a predator might be reading. the intentions were good. the effect was a social network that told its users they were being supervised, which is not what a fifteen-year-old is looking for.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

for a moment the celebrity thing worked. a launch with nick lachey's name on it got coverage that a normal startup would never buy, and plenty of teenagers signed up to see which stars were around. but a famous host gets you in the door, not a reason to stay. once the novelty of a celebrity account faded, yfly was competing with myspace on myspace's own turf, and losing.

~ the fall ~

the safety-first pitch aged badly. it was aimed at parents more than at the kids who had to use the thing, and kids could feel it. by the time facebook opened to everyone and pulled the whole teenage internet toward itself, yfly had no answer. it faded out around 2010, quietly enough that no one seems to have written down the exact date it ended.

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