Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Wagglepop Auctions: a short, strange trip

(Off topic? Maybe, maybe not. This might have been a cool place to snag some retro goodies, if only...well, read on.)

Ironically, there's plenty of success to be had in the field of chronicling failures--especially if you're chronicling them online. Jump the Shark has been around since before I got my first PC, and while the laden-with-schadenfreude "joys" of F'dCompany.com wore thin long before the dot-com boom went bust, the site is still hanging in there. But the short, strange saga of Wagglepop (which ended with a bang yesterday) has to be a record, even in the age of blink-and-you'll-miss-it business news.

The start-up online auction site had everything going for it--a charismatic founder with plenty of eBay sales experience and some tech know-how, a catchy/quirky name (not everyone liked it, but who could forget it?), and absolutely perfect timing. In the wake of eBay's latest fee increases, zillions of sellers were eager to cheer on an alternative venue, and Wagglepop had a thriving "popper" culture of its own even before its prelaunch last week. There were Wagglepop mentions in the Wall Street Journal and in USA Today, Wagglepop webrings, Wagglepop specialty template designers, and cute Wagglepop fan items.

So how did it end up blown to smithereens in a little over a week? Incredibly, the whole Wagglepop story--from "I hope it does as well as eBay or Google" to "I wonder if there are grounds for a class action lawsuit?"--is chronicled in one long thread at the Online Traders Web Alliance (OTWA) message board. It runs for 87 pages as of this writing, but the drama begins on page 2, and it never lets up. Someday, years from now, business students will be handed printouts of this thread as a cautionary tale.

In the meantime, one frustrated exPopper has listed a "commemorative" non-fan item at--you guessed it--eBay.

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