To a web tool dying young
From the moment you peaked over the horizon, you glimmered.
From your footer flashed fresh faces telling us About you: A founder, several funders, a dreamer, and a coder.
You celebrated yourself in a blog as attentive as a teenage boy with good intentions but…
You tried to grow up healthy. Your founder and funders fed you according to best practices.
Edsurge and Mashable sang your jingle.
You nourished yourself with beta members and captured the sunlight of freebie accounts, a power grid to emit your own bright light.
You had friends, and they talked about you. The edtech coaches brought teachers and students to meet you. Some of them remembered your name.
Your Tweets hit like snap-caps on the sidewalk at the feet of followers.
The smell of promise lingered
as the fumes faded
and the followers walked on to window shop.
You started to show symptoms. The doctors circled round. The entrepreneurs ordered tests. It was serious.
Your blog announced changes in your terms. The entrepreneurs ordered tests.
Your freebies shrank. Not five but three. Not three but one. The entrepreneurs ordered tests.
The teachers and edtech coaches who lingered out on the sidewalk, browsing among all the shops and occasionally stepping inside one to buy, did not see the signs around your eyes.
Your speech slurred a bit. You moved a little slowly and did not always respond.
Your freebies, sick and pale, hid behind a log-in. No more clear glass to see inside.
They moved you to the hospital of backup servers.
Your early adopter friends did not visit, somehow afraid of contagion. It felt more comfortable to visit the newborns than to comfort the chronically ill.
They left old flowers for you, the projects of last year or last class or last week.
Your light grew very dim, your blog posts dated seven, ten months ago.
The entrepreneurs signed your DNR. You lingered long breathing barely, but rarely allowing a login to work or a project to save.
We do not know when you left us. Edsurge and Mashable do not have obituaries.
Your only marker is a domain name seller.
We miss you — a little. Now we have to revise our plans and find other examples, but there are others like you venturing over the horizon every day. The first time it hurt. Now we know not to care too deeply.
Rest in peace, but know that you took part of my students with you.
