Zwinky

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

~ the obit ~

i knew zwinky as something you removed, not something you dressed up. by the late 2000s i was the computer engineer friends handed a slow laptop to, and half the time the reason it was slow was a toolbar like this one sitting in the browser and pointing the search box at mywebsearch. the avatar was the bait. the toolbar was the actual product.

zwinky came out of iac around 2006, part of a cluster of avatar and toolbar sites the company ran through its mindspark arm. you made a cartoon character with a big head and big eyes, then used it as a signature across the service. it landed with teenagers, mostly american ones, in the myspace window.

in april 2007 iac added a virtual world on top, zwinktopia, right at the peak of the everyone-needs-a-virtual-world moment that also gave us a dozen habbo imitators. back then. your avatar could now walk around and meet other avatars instead of just sitting on a profile. for a stretch that was enough to keep the numbers up.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the toolbar that came with it ~

here is the part people forget. to get the full zwinky experience you installed an application, and that application brought the mywebsearch toolbar along with it. the money did not really come from the avatars. it came from search queries routed through that bar and the ad revenue attached to them. that is why zwinky felt less like a game and more like something that had latched onto your browser.

for a lot of families it was the thing a kid installed and a parent later paid someone to take back out. it sat in the same bucket as the other bundled toolbars of that era, the ones antivirus tools eventually started flagging on sight.

~ the postmortem ~

the model died before the site did. browsers got stricter about toolbars, search shifted, and the bundled-adware trick stopped paying. iac closed zwinky on august 26 2016 to put its attention on other properties. the kid version, zwinky cuties, had already gone dark back in 2013.

for a while the domain stayed up. then it started redirecting to gaming wonderland, another iac casual-games site, which is about the quietest ending a virtual world can get. no farewell event, just a forward to something else the same company owned.

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