That's wonderful! Thank you very much!
-Thank you very much! Bye!
-Thank you! Not even kidding- that is a man being pulled by Huskies. That's brilliant! This morning- I mean, what we should've
done is got him on the park bench, and asked him about his Huskies, but I wouldn't tell him the microphone was on. -For next time!
-Effort! What we need is a mic that actually sits there and is directional rather than on us -That would involve some planning.
-Yeah we haven't been good at that. Anyway, on that subject, Emojli... Hi, I'm Matt
-And I'm Tom -And this is The Park Bench. And today we are answering a question from Random Addendum on Twitter -And other people
-And several other people: What was it like running and then shutting down "Emojli"? We set up an emoji only messenger. -Year and a half ago.
-Year and a half ago. We'd have- Yo had come out. Yeah, which was the IM program that you could only send the word YO. Everyone had forgotten about
that now, haven't they? -Yeah.
-Had, has? Whatever... And also Unicode had released their
newest set of emojis, And Unicode, if you don't know, they're the people who-
-keep track of emoji. So they have other jobs, but nowadays in the press they are the people who...
-The emoji people. Well done, Unicode. Matt, sorry, I just love it. It's a massive
international collaborative effort of standardisation, and the only thing they
get press for is emoji. -Yeah, they're the emoji lot.
-Yeah. -Preservation of language? Nope- emoji. So, the two things happened at the same time, we both had an idea at the same time, thinking, "Just a sec- no one's done an emoji only messenger."
-Yep. -We met up...
-We've told the story. If you want the story of the set up, we will link to the thing, but it worked. Like, you saw that video about two days after launch day, I think, when we put that up, and we haven't really talked on YouTube about it since. Pardon to say, it's dead now. Gone That was worryingly synchronised, Matt.
-Yeah... So yeah, Messenger; iPhone, later Androids, and then-
-70,000 users! -For a stupid little idea.
-And so let's talk about what it was like running it, 'cause it was mainly a tech support job.
Yeah. We set up the database, we set up the apps, that's it. It just runs itself because... that's all it is. It's just a messenger. -Until the email started rolling in
-And it kept rolling in We put a public email address saying hello@emoj.li- -Yeah, That was a mistake. That's dead now, as well. "Oh, why won't it work on bladdy bladdy blah?" I'm like, "because we haven't made it work on bladdy bladdy blah." -It was quite fun because people kept assuming we were a startup, because we are two white techies launching an app, so of course it's startup and not a cheap joke, but we actually started getting emails from investors. -Some more credible than others.
-Yes! Some blatantly trying it on. "Oh yeah, we've got a big
corporation here. We've got lots of money that could..." Really? Really? Let's have a quick google- No, you're some bloke operating out of a tiny little office somewhere in Europe. Oh, you got a LinkedIn profile.
-Yes so does everyone. I don't know what any of these words mean. Wasn't it... We had a phone call with someone who claimed to be working with Ashton Kutcher's team. Now, that's a big claim. It might have been true. Either way it was always, "Oh, we'd like equity in your business for a small amount of-" It's not-
-It's not a business. We were happy to give it off to someone, 'cause it was something we've made and didn't give a crap about...
-Yes ...now we've finished it, it's like, "Great! here's the code to make it work! Deal with it! Have it! Give us a bit,-" -Because let's be honest- that's seventy thousand users, you could actually do something with that. Like, if we had put weeks and weeks of effort into this, we might have been able to make it. Maybe it would have been one in ten odds, one in one hundreds rather than one in ten Proper marketing and then making it work on every platform and bug-fixing it- Like, there's all number of things we could have done, we could have done what... what's it... WhatsApp have done and started opening to other things, having a web... We could have done that. We both have jobs we quite like.
-Yeah. At that point I had a full-time job didn't I?
-Yeah YouTube is now my full time job which is wonderful,-
-But before then you were working in office- -Yeah I was working in office writing web toys
-FOR THE SYSTEM! -Yeah. Literally for a newspaper. Brilliant. That's what paid my bills well enough that I could go YouTube full-time
-Yeah -Um, you were a-
-And I'm a... yeah, same job as I'm doing now -Yeah.
-Fixing radio stations -We're quite happy with that, so... we weren't really wanting to sell equity in exchange because, we said this in the big talk; it's a job.
-Yeah. -You don't get twelve million dollars, you get a debt of twelve million dollars...
-Yeah ...you have to pay back, or default on it.
-The investment is an investment. It's paying you to do some work in advance, it's...
-Yeah. We don't like work. So what happened is, it steadily rolled on. You actually worked on the Android version, which astonished me, 'cause you were bored? It was over Christmas... I had Christmas off that year and... Needed something to do, sat around the living room, listening to my family. I can talk and code at the same time, you know it's... So we launched that, and that got us a few more users and few more downloads but there's an interesting thing in Europe, and in Britain in particular... Americans won't have this- in America, data protection is a civil thing, not a criminal thing, so you sue a company, but there's no criminal penalties if you screw up, generally, unless it's really really egregious Britain has something called the Data Protection Act, which means that if you store personal data about people, you have to register as what is called a data controller and that's about fifty quid a year if you're a small company, or you're setting up an app. I would love to see- I was going to do once, we never got around to it, I was going to email all the top startups, the hot startups in London's Silicon Roundabout, and ask for their data protection registration information, 'cause I'm fairly- If any interested journalists out there want to write that article I am fairly sure half the apps in London haven't actually bothered to register for data protection. -Which would not have taken... this is a good idea Yeah. Oh, no, it's a brilliant idea-
-You're holding people's data, you've got you have some kind of way saying, I am going to protect this. I'm not gonna leak it, I'm going to hold it safe...
-Yes, this is what I'm going to do Yeah.
-It's a brilliant idea but I bet they're not doing it, so you can have that idea for free. You have to renew that every year along with domain names and... You... you had to get Apple registration -Yes, the Apple registration was around a hundred quid...
-Yeah -...and then we were donated server.
-Yes! I keep thanking ByteMark for this. ByteMark are lovely. If you want a techie server set up in the UK... I think they're in Sheffield or something like that?
-York. -York! You're right, they're in Yorkshire. I forgot they're in York. They are lovely. And gave us a free server, but it came to the point where we had to either spend two hundred quid to keep the joke going...
-Yeah ...or kill it. -And it made no money. Lit- All the- Okay, it got on the mail website,
-And then we got- got in papers, but-
-But there was no- yes but anything gets on the Mail website. You can have a squirrel fart in the park
-I'd watch that We should invite it on -And I just know that we've just lost three viewers who've just got up to go, "squirrel farting in park" and just see if there's any Mail article about it. -If there was
-If there was, that would be quite good But all that publicity, we have made no money from it
-No -We lost money
-Yeah we lost money. We paid to make it, we used our time to make it. Okay, it was a joke, it was great fun- I'd still think it's worth it. Do you think it's worth it?
Oh, it was absolutely worth it... -Yeah
...but it was also worth killing it, because I saw the stats on how many of those 70,000 users stuck around after five minutes, because I sent out all the push notifications that said we're shutting down, please download your data if you want it.
-Yeah Which we did by the way, because that's important -Yeah, because amount of times you- You've put time and effort into using a platform, and okay, this is a stupid joke, but you know, I've uploaded photos to platforms before, and had to download the whole lot again and...
-Yeah. ...and you can't do that, or-
-But that's okay but the worst thing is when they say "Yeah we've shut down now. We're shutting down in two days you can't get you can't your data... -You can't get anything out. -It wasn't beyond the wit of man that someone might have had a meaningful conversation in there, it might have been someone who is talking with a long-lost relative, there's someone who's now passed away, something like that, and you want to give him the option even if it's just an HTML or a JSON output it's really, really simple, but it was some way of getting data out and that's important -Not pretty, it's just functional
-Yeah -You get the stuff out.
-It got the job done. and then because of the Data Protection Act, because we were unregistering from that- By the way, the Information Commissioner who is the people who handle the Data Protection Act, I emailed them, when they emailed and said, "You need to renew in 30 days", I emailed them and I said, "Ah, no, we're not renewing, please
take it off the register on this date." And you know who's really good at
handing unsubscribe requests? They're fantastic!
-Oh, of course! Because that's their job! -Because they screw up they got to investigate themselves! They're amazing at that!
-Oh god, yeah -Yeah, so they just said, "Yeah, that's fine. No, we've got that sorted". So we had to delete all user data, all user names, everything before that date. So we issued a database command. I think it's still... -It's on a Vine
-It's the most recent- I haven't used Vine in months. If you want to see the exact date and moment we shut it down, it's the most recent Vine I have as I record this. -I think it's on my Vine.
-Was it? -It's probably the second most recent-
-I probably re-Vined it or something like that. -You can have a look if you want though, it's us pressing go on a keyboard. Yeah, and a MySQL command because it was MySQL, 'cause of course it was MySQL. Oh, we played Hoppy Paula on background
-We did to make it- 'cause you can do that on Vine, you don't really ask for copyright for a six second clip of a song Can we get away with fair use on that? I don't know, we tried. and we hit the button and, poof, everything kind of evaporated into nothingness. and we deleted our backups and ByteMark decommissioned the server So the data is no longer there, we're safe on that respect.
-Yeah. Has anyone updated the Wikipedia article on it? 'Cause someone set up a Wikipedia article
-Oh, did they? I didn't even think to look -Yeah. Have you got your phone? Get your phone. Yeah, because appar... So, you don't have a Wikipedia article
at the minute- Don't, don't, don't do that because what will happen is a Wikipedia admin, and I know a Wikipedia admin and that's the reason I've got a Wikipedia page because he did it first because he's a jerk, what will happen is he will have to go in and delete it because of notability. I personally don't think I'm notable enough but, -I certainly don't have any references.
-Exactly. So, no, all that will happen is it will get speedily deleted, you'll have waste use your time and angered Wikipedia. Don't do that, it's not nice So I have it the article.
-All right, what's it say? -I see past tense.
-YES! Initial release- August 29, 2014, 14 months ago 14 mo- oh, bloody hell... Emojli was a social application-
-That's it, that's all we need to know, that's all we need- We can talk about this on Citation Needed at some point now. No, because what we're doing there is we're setting ourselves up for a 15 minute roasting from Gary and Chris. Oh, God yes.
That is just handing them... Here you go, here's a really easy ball. Knock it out the park! Get ready on a ding, ding, ding, ding, biscuits, ding... A lot of people asked, by the way,
because I sense we're coming to the end of this, a lot of people have asked us whether we should do a video about how the Citation Needed crew met, you should do one with them we absolutely will next time we meet up, which is like once every four or six months at this point? We've all got lives in different bits of the country but that will happen at some point. -Yeah it's hundreds of miles between us...
-But that is that is the story of Emojli. We set it up, -And then we killed it.
-Yes Do you want to start a new app at some point, Matt?
-No.
