Browser-Based OS
MySites
A web desktop with files, apps, publishing, and identity, used by roughly 72 million people before the browser-as-OS was a category.
Founder and CEO of MySites, where I led the team that built it.
Most of the computer already lives in the browser, but it is scattered across tabs and accounts. The user has no home.
MySites made the browser a personal operating system: a web desktop fronting around twenty services, photos, video, music, files, messages, calendars, blogs, everything rendered client-side with no page reloads. Every item carried permissions, tags, version history, comments, and feeds. Every user got a personal subdomain. The desktop metaphor was not nostalgia; it gives things a place, and the web is powerful but almost always placeless.
It reached roughly 72 million monthly users, years before "the browser as an operating system" was a common idea. It launched out of Tampere in 2008, made its US debut sponsoring Mashable's Summer Tour, and raised a 500K euro seed from German angels, with a four-person team spread across Finland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
Growth came from an unusual angle: we had storage to spare, so we became the cloud backend other social platforms ran on, Dazzboard, Muxlim, and XIHA Life all built on MySites, folding their users in.
Everything I have built since is a version of the same idea: things that are usually separate, made into one coherent surface a person can call theirs. IPFS as a drive. Identity as an account. A page as a store.
Gallery
- The web desktop in 2008: pages, files, pictures, music, messages, calendars, and blogs, every service one click away in the browser.
- The built-in site builder: drag and drop pages together, pulling your pictures, files, and posts straight from the other apps.
- A view from our IDE: we built MySites inside MySites. The site doubled as our cloud IDE, and every service was an app deployed onto it.
- A 3D cover-flow wall of your photos and videos, rendered client-side with no page reloads. In 2008.
- The built-in video player: ratings, comments, and sharing on every clip, because every item was a social object.
- Sharing out of the OS: public link, embed code, mobile, download. The walls were deliberately low.
- Telling the story at Mindtrek 2010: how MySites grew to 72 million monthly users. Archival footage.