Yahoo killed Andy Baio's baby. And Kickstarter is bringing it back to life.
A year ago, Yahoo shuttered Upcoming.org, the cool community events service Baio built in his spare time and sold to the web giant at the dawn of the social networking movement. When Yahoo said the service was shutting down, Baio bemoaned what he called the "fuck-off-and-die style" of the announcement, and he lamented that nothing had come along to take its place as a reliable way of tracking local events. But now Upcoming is reclaiming its own place.
>Think of it as the "Reverse Oculus" -- a case where Kickstarter let someone pull a creation back from the clutches of a corporate giant.
In a rare case of intellectual property altruism, Yahoo recently offered to sell the Upcoming web address to Baio for a "nominal sum." He gladly accepted. And on Wednesday, he launched a Kickstater campaign to revive the project. Within 90 minutes, donors pledged the $30,000 he needed, and the campaign is now at $59,767 and counting, with 23 days left to go.
Kickstarter typically is a way of getting new projects off the ground. It helped create Oculus Rift, the virtual reality company recently acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. But Baio's story is something new. Think of it as the "Reverse Oculus"--a case where Kickstarter let someone pull a creation back from the clutches of a corporate giant and revive it on their own terms. Many of those who helped kickstart Oculus accused the founders of abandoning their vision in selling out to Facebook. But now, Kickstarter is driving the opposite effect.
Of course, we also should give ample credit to Yahoo. Baio says a Yahoo employee--a former coworker of his--contacted him out of the blue about buying the service back. While other entrepreneurs have been known to buy back their online creations--the creators of the web portal Bebo and the photo service Webshots come to mind--such deals typically involve a bankruptcy (as with Bebo and Webshots), a good deal of money, or an aggressive campaign by those who originally built the tool.
"I don't think this ever happens, where they go back to the founders," says Baio, who worked at Yahoo for a time. "What an amazing thing for them to do. I have given them a hard time in the past but I'm incredibly grateful to them--and I would like other companies to follow this."
Baio started Upcoming.org in 2003 as a side project while working as a webmaster in the Santa Monica, California office of a financial company based in Texas. Though he launched it as a bare-bones site, it took off, thanks to a combination of selective event listings, an open architecture, and social tools that predated the arrival of Facebook. Other events sites were cluttered with too much stuff--YMCA classes, movie listings, library sales--but Upcoming only included events that users cared enough about to type into the site. Users also could make friend connections, indicate they were attending an event, and let people known if they liked it. That might sound familiar. But all this information was public. You didn't have to join a tight-knit social network to see it.
Yahoo bought the site for $2 million in 2005, around the time it acquired several other early social networking sites, including photo hub Flickr and bookmarking service Delicious. By the time Baio left Yahoo in 2007, however, the site was in disrepair. The way Baio tells it, Yahoo didn't do much with Upcoming besides ripping out some of the social tools that made it special and then testing--and canceling--a redesign. In April of last year, Yahoo announced that the site was closing. Eleven days later, it was gone. The company gave users no way of exporting their data, but a group of web activists managed to backup the entire site via Archive.org.
Though he knew the site was dying, the end was painful -- in part because no other site or app had come along to replace it. "I miss it," Baio says. "I really just miss it." Facebook has events, but you don't know about them unless you're invited or their specifically tagged as "public." Local newspapers typically have online listings, but they lack social tools, and they're jammed with events that don't matter to most people.
"I find myself in the same situation I was in back in 2003," Baio says. "I am missing events I would like to go to. I'm not hearing about them. When I travel to a new city, I'm looking at local event listings or trying to talk to friends or looking at weird little niche event calendars. When I go to New York, there's like six things I need to look at, plus asking people on Twitter."
Depending upon how much money he raises on Kickstarter, Baio may be able to throw not only his own time into the new project but also hire some help. The $30,000 goal represented the minimum needed to give Upcoming part of his own day, but he can't give the whole thing. His popular XOXO indie technology conference, which he runs with co-founder Andy McMillan, is about to enter its third year, with 7,500 people vying for about one tenth that many seats.
>Baio says Upcoming will never look like a "$100 million VC-backed startup," in part because he promises in his campaign that he won't sell the service again.
Baio says Upcoming will never look like a "$100 million VC-backed startup," in part because he promises in his campaign that he won't sell the service again. The goal is to build Upcoming into something independent and self sustaining, with a "long, slow growth curve." In other words, the anti-Oculus. In the wake of the Oculus controversy, the effort puts a new shine on Kickstarter, though others have used the crowdfunding site in somewhat similar ways. Video game company Harmonix is trying to kickstart a remake its 2003 PlayStation 2 game Amplitude, and famously, the site helped launch a Veronica Mars movie after the television series was cancelled.
Under his agreement with Yahoo, Baio gets the Upcoming web address and the right to use the logo on a t-shirt for backers, but none of the code. That's fine, he says. The current codebase was built on Yahoo's infrastructure, and the original Upcoming was built in a different era. These days, Upcoming can leverage powerful online services available elsewhere on the web. Baio plans to use Foursquare's programming interface to retrieve venue names and locations; OpenStreetMap for mapping; and Twitter for authentication. And given that it's 2014, he's even considering a mobile app, if he can find the right help.
As for a business model, Baio is still thinking that through. In his Kickstarter campaign, he says top donors get site-wide sponsorship or an entire city dedicated to them or their project, and he might sell advertising along similar lines, letting companies buy similar sponsorship. But he's not sure. "I'm overwhelmed now," he says. "Kickstarter has changed my life."
1Correction 12:42 EST 05/08/14: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Baio backed up the Upcoming site to Archive.org before it was shutdown. An independent group handled the backup. The earlier version also said Yahoo had sold Baio the Upcoming name and concept. It merely sold him the Upcoming web address and the right to use the logo on backer t-shirts.
