Koprol, since 25 May 2010 called Yahoo Koprol, was an Indonesian social networking service, allowing users to connect based on location. Mobile users can use the site as a positioning service, without the need for a GPS receiver. Once logged in, users can see other members who were in nearby location. In Indonesia, this application has been released in Jakarta, Bali, Bandung, Surabaya, Surakarta, Sidoarjo, Yogyakarta, Semarang, Surakarta, Bengkulu, Medan, Banda Aceh, Palembang, Makassar, Balikpapan, Cirebon, Papua, as well as foreign countries such as Singapore, and USA. In late June 2012, Yahoo decided to close Koprol on August 28, 2012. However, in late July 2012, Yahoo! reached an agreement with Satya Witoelar, Fajar Budiprasetyo, and Daniel Armanto – the founders of Koprol – to return all the rights associated with the trademark and domain names.

Early establishment

Koprol development was started in July 2008 by PT SkyEight Indonesia. It was specifically created for mobile devices. It was released in February 2009, allowing users to post their present location and short status updates, and see other members in the same location. At that point, the location data was limited to Jakarta, with plans to expand it to other Indonesian cities such as Bandung,

Yogyakarta Yogyakarta (; jv, ꦔꦪꦺꦴꦒꦾꦏꦂꦠ ; pey, Jogjakarta) is the capital city of Special Region of Yogyakarta in Indonesia, in the south-central part of the island of Java. As the only Indonesian royal city still ruled by a monarchy, ...

, and

Denpasar Denpasar (; Balinese: ᬤᬾᬦ᭄ᬧᬲᬃ) is the capital of Bali and the main gateway to the island. The city is also a hub for other cities in the Lesser Sunda Islands. With the rapid growth of the tourism industry in Bali, Denpasar has e ...

. Founder Satya Witoelar states as he and co-developers Fajar Budiprasetyo, Leo Laksmana, and Daniel Armanto developed the site, they took inspiration from a variety of competing foreign social networks, including

Plurk Plurk () is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as plurks) through short messages or links, which can be up to 360 text characters in length (as of 2016). Updates are then shown ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, Lifestream, and

Brightkite Brightkite was a location-based social networking website. Users were able to "check in" at places by using text messaging or one of the mobile applications and they were able to see who is nearby and who has been there before. The service was cre ...

Features

Koprol allows users to post a 200 character status message, and attach their current location to the message. Beta features allow users to post other content, such as videos and photos. Koprol features integration with cell phones,

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

, and also a native

BlackBerry The blackberry is an edible fruit produced by many species in the genus ''Rubus'' in the family Rosaceae, hybrids among these species within the subgenus ''Rubus'', and hybrids between the subgenera ''Rubus'' and ''Idaeobatus''. The taxonomy ...

application. Since November 2009, users were able to log in using their Yahoo! account. On the back-end, Koprol uses the

Ubuntu operating system Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

, the Apache web server, Passenger, Ruby Enterprise Edition, Ruby on Rails, and MySQL 5.

Acquisition

On May 25, 2010, American company

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

announced that it had acquired Koprol for an undisclosed value. Yahoo had previously considered a US$100 million acquisition of Foursquare, a US-based location-based social network. Yahoo spokeswoman Rose Tsou stated that "Koprol was uniquely designed for mobile phones and within a year has already built a strong user base" and indicated that Yahoo plans to introduce the service in other markets. Koprol integrated Yahoo itself since before the Yahoo Open Hack Day event in 2009, Koprol became one of Yahoo's local partners using multiple technologies such as the Yahoo API: Yahoo Fire Eagle, Yahoo Login, and Yahoo Contacts.

Miscellaneous

''Koprol'' means

Somersault A somersault (also ''flip'', ''heli'', and in gymnastics ''salto'') is an acrobatic exercise in which a person's body rotates 360° around a horizontal axis with the feet passing over the head. A somersault can be performed forwards, backwards ...

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

. Indonesia is a former Dutch colony. Amongst Indonesian internet users, 'koprol' is slang for ‘an act of changing physical location or position’

References

{{Reflist

External links

koprol.com

Yahoo Indonesia
Indonesian social networking websites Defunct social networking services Yahoo! international Yahoo! acquisitions Internet properties established in 2008 Internet properties disestablished in 2012 Products and services discontinued in 2012 Discontinued Yahoo! services