August 27. It’s the last day of Koprol. Tomorrow Yahoo! will shut down the once popular location based service which it bought in May 2010 as part of the company’s proper entry into Indonesia and to establish an office in the country. None of the team members that built and ran Koprol are with the company anymore after the entire engineering and design division of Yahoo Indonesia was laid off in April and the remaining transition team left in June to build Ice House and Barito Labs.
As per the announcement in June, Koprol is being shut down and that Koprol’s founders have now retained the name and intellectual property rights relating to Koprol. While they are free to repurpose the name for anything they wish as long as it’s within the legal boundaries, they have yet to reveal what it is that they are building to continue the name, only that they want to keep the spirit alive with whatever it is they have in mind.
Those who have yet to export their data from Koprol has a few hours left to request the export and once that’s done, that will be the end of their journey with Koprol, nothing that they post since will be exportable anymore. Members who have requested to export their data will receive an email that contains a link to a cloud-hosted zip file of the user account’s entire history which can be loaded as a web page in the form of mobile Koprol.
Tomorrow, Koprol will end its three year journey. Koprol’s own final message on the service reads, “Thank you Yahoo! Thank you Koprollers. See you some other time. Next update on http://twitter.com/koprol“.
While the founders have said that they plan to deliver a new Koprol, there hasn’t been much of a hint as to what it will be and what form it will take. Koprol co-founder and CEO of Ice House Fajar Budiprasetyo said to DailySocial that they’re hoping that Koprol’s existing user base will welcome the new version of Koprol. One thing’s for sure, they’re not interested in bringing back what was going to be Koprol 2.0.
Whatever it is, we’ll be looking forward to see what the teams at Ice House and Barito Labs will come up with. Koprol is dead. Long live the new Koprol.
