[dr_dshiv]

Back in 2004, some friends and I started a social network at yale called the “socially connected academic peer exchange” or scape. The concept was to help people have more meaningful connections IRL because it was easier to share one’s deeper interests online than at a party. Or so we thought.

We launched with a focus on photo and media sharing to try to compete with Facebook, which was just pokes at the time. It was growing too fast though — it was too popular. And in any case, we probably had misconceptions about a bunch of things.

[diggan]

Ironically, searching "scape web app" today shows "Scape | AI-native CRM that captures all your conversations" which felt very on the nose.

[AstralStorm]

Interesting. Did it get eaten by general baseline interests and lost the focus, ultimately moving to cater to lowest common denominator? Failed or sold?

[dmichulke]

Please continue

[dr_dshiv]

We built scape in 9 months and ran it for 9 months, if I recall. We were all young and naive — it just felt like we failed to make something that “clicked.” Facebook had very few features (pokes and the wall), but they weren’t competing on features. We struggled to get more than a thousand people to sign up across a few NE colleges.

We had this whole social blogging and communication system — it was really very cool in concept. But we had too much of a “if you build it, they will come” marketing plan.

We gave up after a year and a half. We ended up selling a version of it to Teach for America.

I’d consider it a failure — we gave up. I rather wish we’d have tried to raise money, though.. I can’t believe we got as far as we did — different times