The Rise and Fall of Profile Banner

When I came back from lunch, there were over 10,000 people using my app. I saw random posts on the Facebook page, saying things like, “I LUV THIS” and “ZOMG!!!”. I posted a few replies asking folks where they came from. They linked me to this article.

A couple hours earlier I decided to test what I had learned about the Facebook API. I built an app letting users tag themselves in image segments to create a banner on their profile. I got the idea from French artist Alexandre Oudin, who did this as a way of protesting Facebook’s new feature that let friends’ tagged photos appear on users’ profiles. I called it Profile Banner. I left a comment on the article I read about Oudin, including a link to the app, and went to lunch.

This was December 10, 2010. By the end of the month, over a million people had installed the app and customized their profile.

This was a different time on Facebook. There were a slew of “nonsense” apps including games (Farmville), social sharing apps (remember SuperPoke), and spammy quizzes (currently all over the news). Facebook gave developers a lot of tools to help their apps spread. For example, every time a new user installed your app, a story was published to all their friends announcing it. This created a viral effect that helped Profile Banner spread across the world.

Facebook also had fewer privacy and content controls. Their API let any user (or app) tag the users’ friends in any photos. And there was no approval process. This is a big reason why Profile Banner was so popular. It let users push tagged photos off their profile, and replaced them with a custom image or message. But this same openness allowed Profile Banner to push banners onto their friends’ pages without permission. I knew this feature might be abused. In my naivete, I though making users check a box agreeing to “not be a jerk” was the only safeguard I needed. For this, and the sheer oddness of my app, Facebook shut me down when I hit 1.3 million users.

It’s difficult to explain the sense of loss I felt. I had been riding pretty low since getting fired the year before. I wasn’t sleeping much, and had crazed ideas of starting a non-profit. I was struggling to find my place in New York, and resisting the urge to take another job in performance marketing. The meteoric rise of Profile Banner was a vindication. It confirmed that I hadn’t failed to save my last company. My potential had been wasted there.

I had deployed some ads to try and make a little money off the thousands of daily visitors I was seeing. The server costs were growing, and I thought if I could break even, it would be a win. Even though the mostly international traffic was barely worth anything, the sheer volume astounded me. Losing that income meant I was back considering where to get my next paycheck.

I spent weeks trying to get through to Facebook to plead my case. I sent impassioned thousand-word emails to blind addresses, enumerating my great intentions with writing Profile Banner. I mansplained “divergent behavior” and appealed to every sympathy. What finally cracked their wall of automation was a connection I made hanging out in a #facebook IRC chatroom. A guy named Joel heard my story and felt like Facebook should be easier to reach in these situations. He pinged some folks internally, and responses started comming back to my pleas. Within a week, Profile Banner was back online. Overnight the clouds parted, the rain let up, and the sun broke through.

A funny thing about Facebook apps… or maybe all apps and sites… or maybe all creative endevours ever: when you find success, there are hoards of copy-cats waiting to pounce. While Profile Banner was reaching the top of the charts for fastest-growing apps, dozens of development teams all over the world were copying the functionality. Many copied the exact title also. This is when I learned you cannot trademark something that exactly describes what it does. So my choice of “Profile Banner” turned out to be less strategic than a made-up word like ProBannerFunPalace. While my app was disabled by Facebook, millions of people searching for it found my competitors’ clones. So even when my app got turned back on, I was far behind many of them. But just as Facebook’s policies had tripped me up, with a little strategy they could be weilded as a weapon against my competitors. When they copied my app idea, they also copied many of my users’ uploaded banners to make their apps look well used. Those banners were the property of my users, and while they granted me the right to display them, it was against Facebook’s policies for other apps to use them without permission. I filed several intellectual property infringement reports and my largest competitors vanished into the App purgatory I’d recently escaped.

Over the next few months, I traveled the world maintaining the app like my golden goose. I migrated to a cloud-based server farm. I had the app translated into eight languages. I tested ad platforms to maximize revenue. This was one of the happiest times in my life. Even though I’d worked on several successful projects, and built more sophisticated system, the simplicity (and silliness) of Profile Banner made its scale and success somehow more rewarding. When I told people what I did for a living, and how vast it had grown, I could simultaneously dismiss it all as nonsense. The “humblebrag” was not quite a thing at this time, but I guess I was a pioneer.

And then it was over. In September of 2011, just 10 months after I launched, Facebook announced Timeline: a new profile design featuring a large, customizable “Cover Photo” at the top of the page. No more strip of tagged photos meant no more Profile Banner. While it took several months for Timeline to roll out worldwide, it was clear my app would fade almost as quickly as it started. I knew this day would come, and I’d steeled my heart against it. Rather than flashing back to my firing, or my Facebook ban, the loss of Profile Banner seemed like a natural sunset for a strange chapter in my life. I spent my adult life a happy cog in other peoples’ machines. But forced out on my own, after a few sleepless months of struggle, I drifted into this dreamlike, gilded reality.

Everything that’s come after: the founding and growth of adMixt, my chance meeting and risky move to be with Eunice, all stemmed from the magical rise of Profile Banner. I doubt I’ll ever find an easier success than those peak months. But it was never hard work I shied from. And this was not a lesson in following ones dreams or visions. I’ve followed many that lead only to failure. Maybe I’ll never make sense from the exprience. I just feel lucky.

Thanks to everyone who used Profile Banner. Thanks to Facebook for giving me a second chance. Thanks to you for reading this.