kiwihoo

A social network written by hand in 2008, back when you still imported your Messenger contacts.

it used to be called ciudadsexy.com

What this was

A place to meet people and keep in touch, with your own profile, friends, groups, photos and a map to put yourself on.

It was not a mockup or a weekend experiment. It had sign-up, sessions, moderation, search, private messaging, a forum, blogs and an in-house currency called kiwis that you bought and spent inside the site. It shipped in six languages: Catalan, Spanish, English, French, Italian and Portuguese.

Every member could change the colours of their page and reorder the sections of their profile. Photos took comments and notes drawn on the image itself, the way Flickr tags worked. Groups had their own files, their own colours and their own messaging.

Three steps of history

What was inside

All of this comes from the original database schema. Nobody is going from memory here.

Tailored profiles

Your own colours and your own section order, member by member.

Friends and favourites

Requests, lists and live presence.

Groups

With categories, shared files, their own messaging and their own palette.

Albums

Photos and video with comments and notes drawn over the image.

Map

Geographic position and markers on Google Maps, back at version 2.

Messaging

Private between members and collective inside each group.

Blogs and forum

A journal each, and one shared forum on top.

Kiwis

An in-house currency, with its purchase and spending history.

Messenger contacts

Import from your MSN address book, which in 2008 was how everyone arrived.

The size of the thing

57,755files
949 MBof code and material
6languages shipped
1person writing it

Why it does not come back on

The whole codebase is kept and backed up in two places, but serving it as it stands is not possible, and would not be wise either.

197 files call mysql_query(), and that extension was dropped in PHP 7.
As many use eregi() and split(), removed in the same cut.
Its database no longer exists: it was retired years ago.
Running it today would need PHP 5.6, unsupported since 2018, on a shared machine.

So the domain stays, this page tells what there was, and the code rests where it belongs: in the archive.