Ten years ago Splinder closed. If you arrived on the net after January 31, 2012 you have missed something and above all you cannot understand the sense of dismay that some felt. Splinder had been the most important Italian digital community at some point in its history. How it was born will be told in those days by one of the founders, Andrea Santagata, to the Post: “We were a group of friends at the bar. Marco (Palombi) Francesco (Delfino) and Paolo (Werbrouck) of Tipic had developed an embryo of a Drupal-based blog creation platform. Fabio (Cabula) and I followed in the evening for passion Bloggando, a site that reviewed the Italian blogs, then well 900 (including that of Luca Sofri, the director of the Post). One evening we met together for an aperitif and the idea of Splinder was born: an easy way, in Italian, to create and manage your own blog. Marco came up with the name and ran the group, Fabio and I designed usability and functionality, Paolino wrote all the code “.
It was 2001. In fact in that year before, in April, there was a post on Marco Palombi’s blog – called Splinder, in fact – entitled The Lonely Net, in which Palombi wrote: “Using the Net today can be a lonely experience but it shouldn’t be! One of the unanswered questions that people have when using the Net is: What are other people doing? What are they looking at? What are they talking about? What are they playing? Where can I join them? Where is the action taking place? What’s hot and what’s not? Today there is no single answer to the question, so there is an opportunity to build the tools to provide the answer”.
In short, Splinder was born in 2001 with the idea not only to become an easy platform for Italian bloggers, but also to create a community: it was a social network before its time. I quote Santagata again: “Splinder’s success was immediate, dozens of new blogs opened every day of all kinds (there was also Platinette’s blog, to say). Then over the years new and more advanced platforms have arrived, such as WordPress, and Splinder has lost some ground, but has nevertheless remained one of the most important blogging platforms in Italy “.
In 2006 Splinder was sold to Dada (which in the meantime had entered the RCS group); in 2008 it claims to have 400,000 blogs. It is the most successful moment. In the meantime, however, Facebook had arrived, the golden age of blogging was coming to an end. The announcement of the end, November 22, 2011: a box on the homepage, January 31 closes. Immediately Banzai Media, where Santagata had moved in the meantime, offers to continue providing the service, but the CEO of Dada, Claudio Corbetta, declines the offer, essentially saying that they were about to close a platform that was now dying: “At the moment the really active subscribers on Splinder are a few thousand. The hundreds of thousands of users we have heard of have unfortunately been inactive for some time ”.
A few memories of what Splinder was like you can find them here
An analysis of the numbers of that experience Who