Zing.com

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

~ the last words ~

Zing started in San Francisco in 1998 on a simple premise: plug a digital camera into a PC, push the pictures up, and they live on the web in albums you can send to your family. It added greeting cards under the ZingCards name and sold prints it described as 35mm quality. Kleiner Perkins and Alloy Ventures led the money and about fifty three million dollars went in, fourteen of it in a single round in August 1999. By April 2000 Media Metrix had Zing as the number one photo site on the web with more than 1.7 million unique visitors in the month.

The business underneath never closed. By mid-2001 four million people had signed up and only three hundred to three hundred fifty thousand of them had built an album. That minority was consuming something like eighty five to ninety percent of the company's resources and producing most of its revenue, and it still was not enough. David Ezequelle, who had come over from Alloy Ventures seven months earlier to run the place, decided the consumer site cost more to keep than it would ever return and turned it off.

Turkey in 2001 was not a digital camera country. A compact that could do anything worth uploading cost more than a decent monthly salary, film developing at the corner shop was cheap and good, and a full album pushed up a dial-up line was an evening's work per roll. I was seventeen and the camera in my house used film. Photo sharing as a habit did not reach me until phones made the camera free, which was six or seven years after Zing had already proved you could not charge for it.

~ the record ~

~ the letter and the fifteen free prints ~

The final home page carried a box across the top reading "This site is shutting down permanently on July 2nd." Below it: "Dear Zing Members, With the greatest regret we must inform you that, as of July 2, 2001, the Zing.com service will be shutting down permanently. After this date, your photos will no longer be available on Zing.com." Then the handoff, to Ofoto, a Kodak company and at that point the leading online photo service. Any Zing member who signed up at Ofoto got fifteen free four-by-six print credits and twenty percent off everything bought there through 31 July 2001.

What distinguishes this from the rest of the 2001 shutdown letters is the next section. Zing built two ways out. Picture Downloader was an actual application for Windows and Macintosh that pulled every image off the site into a folder on your machine, sorted into the albums you had made. Save To Your Machine was the low-tech version, a page that rendered all your pictures at once so you could save them in a batch. A company with two weeks of runway wrote export tooling for people who were leaving.

~ the day it actually stopped ~

The announced date was 2 July and the servers ran past it. The archive has the full site at 5,961 bytes at ten to one in the morning on 3 July, nav bar still running from Welcome through ZingCards, and the 1,583 byte goodbye page on the fifth. One contemporary report gave the date as 30 June, taken from a notice the CEO first posted on the company's dev subdomain. Three different dates for one shutdown, inside a window of five days.

~ what was left of the company ~

Zing Network did not file for bankruptcy. It had been hosting other people's photo sites all along, NikonNet for Nikon and ImageStation for Sony, and the plan after killing the consumer brand was to be that and only that. The plan lasted about as long as the brand had. Nikon moved its infrastructure to ArcSoft and Sony brought hosting in house, which left an infrastructure company with no one to be infrastructure for. The domain answers a wall today, and its captures after 2002 shrink to a few hundred bytes at a time.

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