Zorpia

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

~ the last words ~

Zorpia had 26 million accounts and close to none of them were in Turkey. It was a Hong Kong product whose actual market turned out to be India, and the route it took to get there is the only reason anyone still says the name out loud.

Jeffrey Ng founded it in December 2003. The pitch was ordinary for the year: unlimited photo uploads and a profile you could restyle to your own taste. What was less ordinary is that it held a Chinese internet content provider license, which very few social networks headquartered outside the mainland ever managed, and it kept running for the better part of two decades on a business nobody could quite describe.

By 2013 the company was claiming 26 million registered users worldwide against roughly two million unique visitors a month. About 40 percent of them sat in India and another 10 percent in mainland China. Alexa put the site inside the 6,000 most visited addresses on the web. For a social network that the English-language tech press had never written a profile of, those are strange numbers to be carrying around.

None of it reached me. The social network Turkey actually used in that window was Hi5 and then Facebook, and Zorpia was never competing for that slot. It grew in places where an email invitation still had weight left in it, which turned out to be the entire business.

~ the record ~

~ how the numbers were made ~

In April 2013 Tech in Asia published an investigation into behavior that users had been complaining about for years. People kept finding accounts in their own names that they had never created. Invitations arrived looking like they came from friends, assembled out of address books nobody remembered handing over, and deleting your account did not reliably stop the mail arriving.

Jeffrey Ng did not really deny any of it. He told the reporter that the behavior came off as creepy and posed a potential security threat to the user, and he could not explain where the contacts had come from for people who insisted they had never given them up. The conclusion the article reached was that Zorpia worked better as a delivery mechanism for advertising than as a place where anyone was actually socializing.

~ the funny part ~

The address book trick was not invented at Zorpia. Half the industry ran a version of it during those years and several of the bigger names paid settlements over it. What Zorpia did differently was keep running the play for another decade after the rest of the web decided it was embarrassing.

The reward was 26 million registered accounts and no way to turn any of them into a business worth announcing the end of. An account created on your behalf is not a user. It is a row in a table that inflates a number that impresses nobody who has to buy the company.

~ what it became ~

By early 2020 Zorpia had been picked up by Twoo, the dating product run by the Belgian company Massive Media, and zorpia.com stopped being a destination and started being a redirect. That is the whole death. No shutdown post, no export tool, no date anyone bothered to write down, just a domain quietly pointing at somebody else's flirting app.

Twoo itself closed in 2022 and moved what was left of the population over to Plenty of Fish. Sixteen years of photos and journals became a routing decision made twice by two companies that had no interest in either.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »