Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech area. You know. The mess over
Speaker 1: at Twitter has prompted many a story in my news
Speaker 1: episodes lately, not to mention the equally interesting but different
Speaker 1: mess that meta slash Facebook has found itself in. And
Speaker 1: I thought I could use that as a sort of
Speaker 1: jumping off point to talk about social networks and blogging
Speaker 1: and micro blogging services that have emerged over the years
Speaker 1: and find out what's happened to them. Some of them
Speaker 1: are long gone, some of them were merged into other services,
Speaker 1: and if you actually still hold on to this day.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna sort of talk about the history of
Speaker 1: social networks in a way. And I'm going service by
Speaker 1: service as opposed to strictly chronologically, because if I went
Speaker 1: with just a chronological approach, I would have to jump
Speaker 1: back and forth between so many different companies that I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to keep things straight. This will also
Speaker 1: be a multi part episode. I'm hoping for just two parts,
Speaker 1: but I've only got this one written. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'll end up having enough where I'll need to write,
Speaker 1: you know, a third episode two. But there is a
Speaker 1: lot to talk about now. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: different attempts at making social networks, and spoiler alert, I
Speaker 1: don't even get all the way to my space in
Speaker 1: this one. That would have you know that launched in
Speaker 1: two thousand three. That tells you how many early attempts
Speaker 1: there were, and only a few of those would survive
Speaker 1: beyond a few years. But let's start off with a
Speaker 1: site that launched in the mid nineteen nineties. This would
Speaker 1: make it one of the first online social networks, perhaps
Speaker 1: the first one. It's hard when you start talking about
Speaker 1: first because it also depends on how do you define
Speaker 1: a social network. What are the features of a social
Speaker 1: network that make it a social network versus a community site,
Speaker 1: Because I would argue that there were message boards and
Speaker 1: such that had a lot of the features we would
Speaker 1: find later on in social networks kind of baked in,
Speaker 1: so there's not like a hard and fast rule here. Also,
Speaker 1: I should point out that there were obviously precursors to
Speaker 1: social networks before the Internet became a big thing for
Speaker 1: the average person. Nerds like me were spending a lot
Speaker 1: of time on bulletin board systems back in the eighties,
Speaker 1: where we would log into someone else's computer and we
Speaker 1: would have access to message boards and file sharing and
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff back in the eighties. So
Speaker 1: you had elements of social networks even around then. So
Speaker 1: I don't include those include bulletin board systems because one,
Speaker 1: there were hundreds of them around the world. Because these
Speaker 1: were largely local organizations. Right, it might just be someone
Speaker 1: who happens to have a computer with some phone lines
Speaker 1: going to it in their basement, and that was a
Speaker 1: bolting board system. Uh and too, it really would just
Speaker 1: be a lot of me saying. And this site also
Speaker 1: had these features. So the first one we're talking about
Speaker 1: is the Globe dot com. So this was an actual website,
Speaker 1: not a bolting board system. And it was founded by
Speaker 1: Todd Kerzelman and Stefan Pattern, whose names I'm probably butchering
Speaker 1: and I apologize for that. These were two students who
Speaker 1: were attending Cornell and they came up with this concept.
Speaker 1: They were used to the bulletin board systems. They saw
Speaker 1: how message boards were starting to grow on the web,
Speaker 1: and they thought about creating a community site a site
Speaker 1: that would allow users to join and form an online community,
Speaker 1: and it was really all about you know, chatting, uh,
Speaker 1: having news available, being able to play games, a lot
Speaker 1: of the same stuff that you would have found in
Speaker 1: an online service providers, services like America Online being the
Speaker 1: big example. OSPs Online service providers were kind of similar
Speaker 1: to bulletin board systems but bigger. They were kind of
Speaker 1: islands that existed unto themselves and then later would form
Speaker 1: connections to other networks. But originally OSPs were not really
Speaker 1: that wasn't really the Internet. It was a network, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't networked to other networks, so it wasn't the Internet.
Speaker 1: So the Globe was kind of taking those ideas and
Speaker 1: applying them to the Web, which was, you know, a
Speaker 1: pretty young thing in the mid nineties, Like the web
Speaker 1: really just emerged in the early nineties, so it hadn't
Speaker 1: been around for very long. Well, the idea was a hit,
Speaker 1: and by the company was prepping to go public, to
Speaker 1: hold its initial public offering, in other words, to go
Speaker 1: from being a privately held company to a publicly traded company,
Speaker 1: and boy howdy, did it have a whopper of a
Speaker 1: first day with shares of the of the site climbing
Speaker 1: six hundred six percent in prices, going six six percent
Speaker 1: above where they thought they are going to be. That
Speaker 1: is a heck of a first day, right That makes
Speaker 1: you go from you know, a scrappy little website two
Speaker 1: being a millionaire in an instant. Crazy Now, at its peak,
Speaker 1: the globe boasted around one point three million users. That
Speaker 1: is obviously chump change if you compare it to something
Speaker 1: like Facebook at its peak, where it's looking at like
Speaker 1: two billion users. One point three million is nothing. But
Speaker 1: we have to keep in mind this was in the nineties.
Speaker 1: This is when folks were still actually just learning what
Speaker 1: the web was and what the internet was, so your
Speaker 1: average household didn't necessarily have any access to the Internet.
Speaker 1: It would take a few years for that to catch
Speaker 1: on around the world. So for a site to get
Speaker 1: one point three million users when a lot of people
Speaker 1: still don't really know what the internet it is, that's
Speaker 1: pretty impressive. It really wouldn't be until the proliferation of
Speaker 1: consumer smartphones that we would see you know, web activity
Speaker 1: really explode. That's really where things would change dramatically. So
Speaker 1: we're looking at like two thousand seven, two thousand eight
Speaker 1: at that point so one point three million in the
Speaker 1: late nineties. Pretty impressive. Uh. Anyway back to the Globe,
Speaker 1: so co founder Stefan would be spotted dancing on a
Speaker 1: table in the club in Manhattan, wearing vinyl pants and
Speaker 1: declaring himself ready for a life of rampant consumerism and debauchery. Uh.
Speaker 1: This story became extremely popular. It went viral. The press
Speaker 1: would refer to Stefan as the CEO in the plastic pants.
Speaker 1: I only repeat that because I mean, I think it's funny.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it was one of those moments that Stefan
Speaker 1: really wishes he could just kind of take back, because
Speaker 1: it's not fun to have to live with that sort
Speaker 1: of moniker your whole life. So I feel a little
Speaker 1: sympathy for him. But at the same time, dude, to
Speaker 1: hit its super rich. It did not handle it super
Speaker 1: well anyway. So the Globe in some ways became the
Speaker 1: poster child for the new web economy. In the late nineties,
Speaker 1: we were headed toward the end of the dot com
Speaker 1: bubble inflationary period at this point, right you had all
Speaker 1: this money pouring into dot com companies like the Globe,
Speaker 1: and right around the corner was the Piper waiting to
Speaker 1: be paid. The Globe, like a lot of other web
Speaker 1: based companies in the late nineties, proved to be overvalued
Speaker 1: and under monetized. Now, at the very least, the Globe
Speaker 1: had a sort of revenue model in place that was
Speaker 1: tied to advertising. And that's more than I can say
Speaker 1: for a lot of other dot com companies of that
Speaker 1: era that had an interesting idea but no real way
Speaker 1: to capitalize on that idea it to actually make money
Speaker 1: from it. But anyway, the Internet dot com bubble bursts
Speaker 1: for lots of reasons that we don't need to go into,
Speaker 1: and the Globe, like a ton of other startups from
Speaker 1: the mid to late nineties, totally collapsed. The Stock Exchange
Speaker 1: delisted the company in two thousand one, and the Globe
Speaker 1: went Bye bye. Pattern not would go on to found
Speaker 1: a company called Slated. It's a crowdfunding site specifically for
Speaker 1: independent filmmakers. So the idea there's you pitch your project,
Speaker 1: you know, you list it, you try to get backing
Speaker 1: for it, financial backing, maybe you even network and you
Speaker 1: get distribution for your film. That kind of thing, And
Speaker 1: unlike the Globe, Slated has stuck around now a close
Speaker 1: cousin to the social network is the chat or instant
Speaker 1: messenger client. This is something else that was kind of
Speaker 1: evolving around the same time as the early concepts for
Speaker 1: social networks, and and a lot of social networks incorporate
Speaker 1: chat or instant messengers within them. Meta's messenger, for example,
Speaker 1: is incorporated into Facebook and also exists as its own
Speaker 1: separate app. Now, one very early example of an instant
Speaker 1: messenger was called pow Wow and just get this all
Speaker 1: the way early on, this intrigue contains stuff in it
Speaker 1: that I personally think steps way over the line of
Speaker 1: cultural appropriation. So I wanted to get that all the
Speaker 1: way all right. So this was the brainchild of John McAfee. Now,
Speaker 1: if that name is not familiar to you, he gads
Speaker 1: you are in for a wild ride. My friend John
Speaker 1: McFee worked for NASA in the late sixties. He hopped
Speaker 1: over to UNIVAC for a spell. He became an os
Speaker 1: architect or Xerox for a while, and he did some
Speaker 1: more career hops. He never really stayed in one place
Speaker 1: for more than just a few years is and then
Speaker 1: in the late eighties he went into business or himself.
Speaker 1: McAfee created anti virus software. Yeah, that's the McAfee. You
Speaker 1: have ever seen McAfee anti virus that came from this
Speaker 1: guy originally, So his anti virus program was one of,
Speaker 1: if not the first commercial anti virus programs on the market.
Speaker 1: Might have been the very first one. Again, it's hard
Speaker 1: to tell because these sort of things aren't super well documented.
Speaker 1: But from nineteen seven to nineteen McAfee either ran or
Speaker 1: worked for his company that created anti virus software, and
Speaker 1: he made a lot of money, like a lot a
Speaker 1: lot of money. And in ninety four he decided to
Speaker 1: cash out and he sold his stake in the company
Speaker 1: and he moved on. Now, around that same time, McAfee,
Speaker 1: who was the son of an American father and a
Speaker 1: British mother, founded a company called Tribal Voices. This is
Speaker 1: where that cultural appropriation stuff really starts up. The Tribal
Speaker 1: Voice website referred to itself as a Native American company,
Speaker 1: but I'm not sure how that actually played out. So anyway,
Speaker 1: this is around and the main thing this company produces
Speaker 1: is a Windows based Internet chat client called how Wow
Speaker 1: Now instant messaging clients. We're kind of a big deal.
Speaker 1: Before stable social networks became a thing. Lots of folks
Speaker 1: relied on instant messaging programs to stay in touch with
Speaker 1: one another, and a really big player in the space
Speaker 1: would be America Online of the AOL is. Also what
Speaker 1: was called a o l's client was the a o
Speaker 1: L Instant Messenger, better known as aim ai M, and
Speaker 1: one thing a lot of developers try to do was
Speaker 1: to make their own chat client interoperable with other chat clients,
Speaker 1: primarily aim. The messenger landscape was kind of fractured, so
Speaker 1: that might mean you might have some friends who use
Speaker 1: one instant messenger and other friends who use a different one,
Speaker 1: and it was a hassle trying to stay in contact
Speaker 1: with everyone because you had to have multiple clients open
Speaker 1: and who knew what was going on in which one.
Speaker 1: So one valuable thing that a lot of clients tried
Speaker 1: to do was to make it interoperable with other services
Speaker 1: so that you could have like one place where all
Speaker 1: your messages could come in. But those were kind of
Speaker 1: hard to do because anytime anyone updated their service, it
Speaker 1: could break interoperability. Moreover, some companies, like a O L
Speaker 1: didn't want interoperability in the first place. They wanted to
Speaker 1: push people to just use aim. So anyway, all L
Speaker 1: brought lawsuits against Tribal Voice, claiming that the company was
Speaker 1: copying its systems, and McAfee then brought in a new
Speaker 1: CEO for Tribal Voice. In the following year, a company
Speaker 1: called c mg I bought Tribal Voice. CMGI has its
Speaker 1: own bizarre history. Today it's got a different name. It's
Speaker 1: called steel Connect and it focuses on supply chain management.
Speaker 1: So things have definitely changed for that company. But back
Speaker 1: in the nineties, cmg I was purchasing internet startups because,
Speaker 1: as we all know, the Internet was going to be
Speaker 1: the next big thing. But cmg I didn't see the
Speaker 1: dot com bubble bursting, and anyway, Powell would become a
Speaker 1: casualty of the dot com bubble. In the office that
Speaker 1: used to be Tribal Voice was shut down in early
Speaker 1: two thousand one. At its peak, it was said to
Speaker 1: have around two million users. Okay, we've got a lot
Speaker 1: more to get through before we go on to any
Speaker 1: more of these social networks and their history. Let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. Okay, we're back, and next we actually
Speaker 1: have a site that's still around. You know, obviously pow
Speaker 1: Wow is gone, and uh, the globe is gone, but
Speaker 1: this next one you can still join. And I'm talking
Speaker 1: about classmates dot com. If you're of a certain age,
Speaker 1: you might remember some big news stories about how this
Speaker 1: site got into some trouble for various shenanigans, which we
Speaker 1: will touch on. But let's start at the beginning, which
Speaker 1: I am told is a very good place to start.
Speaker 1: So a guy named Randy Conrad's founded classmates dot com
Speaker 1: in nineteen again early days for the web, right, and
Speaker 1: the idea was simple. Users would create a profile on
Speaker 1: classmates dot com and they could fill out forms to
Speaker 1: list which schools they went to and what years they
Speaker 1: attended those schools, as well as things like if they
Speaker 1: served in the military, you know which branch, what years
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, uh, and even some employment information,
Speaker 1: you know what companies did they work at and what years.
Speaker 1: And this was also that it would be easier to
Speaker 1: reconnect with folks who also attended those schools, or were
Speaker 1: enlisted in the military, or were employed by those entities.
Speaker 1: So this was all about looking up people you knew
Speaker 1: in the real world in uh, in real life or
Speaker 1: I r L. And that just makes me feel ancient
Speaker 1: for saying that. And you could find them online, and
Speaker 1: you might think, huh, I wonder whatever happened to you know,
Speaker 1: the kids who sat with me at lunch every day
Speaker 1: for all of high school? Where are those guys at?
Speaker 1: And you might create an account on classmates dot com
Speaker 1: to list where and when you attended school, and then
Speaker 1: you could look to see if others did the same thing.
Speaker 1: Some cases, you might be the first one there, right,
Speaker 1: and you might think, well, maybe someone will make an
Speaker 1: account and I'll get reconnected with an old classmate. Sometimes
Speaker 1: would join in and find out that there was already
Speaker 1: a pretty hefty community building up around that particular school
Speaker 1: and that class Anyway, it was a neat idea. It
Speaker 1: connected people by linking them through commonly shared experiences in life,
Speaker 1: and it could really help folks who were in school
Speaker 1: in the days before the internet was a thing, you know,
Speaker 1: at least for that general population. Obviously, the internet has
Speaker 1: been a thing for a while, like well before the
Speaker 1: web came online. But there were some of us, I mean,
Speaker 1: those of you all who have grown up with an
Speaker 1: internet in place your whole lives have lots of ways
Speaker 1: to stay in touch with people if you want to.
Speaker 1: But some of us older relics. We didn't have those options, right, Like,
Speaker 1: the Internet was not a thing when I was in
Speaker 1: high school, at least not to the general public. So
Speaker 1: there were no email addresses to share, there was no
Speaker 1: social network profiles you could share. And so once we
Speaker 1: graduated and we went our separate ways, and that was
Speaker 1: kind of that you didn't really have a way to
Speaker 1: stay in touch unless you like gave someone an address
Speaker 1: then just kept up with it. So classmates dot com
Speaker 1: change things, but the company also would over time get
Speaker 1: into some hot water now and again for various reasons. Uh,
Speaker 1: there are two basic levels of membership for classmates dot com.
Speaker 1: There's a free level of membership, but that gives you
Speaker 1: really limited access to features, to the point where you
Speaker 1: could see that you have notifications in your messages and
Speaker 1: you can't read them because you don't have permission to
Speaker 1: do so until you become a paid member. So that
Speaker 1: was a big part of of the controversy around classmates
Speaker 1: dot com, not even controversy, just people grousing about it,
Speaker 1: right because it would lure you in with the promise
Speaker 1: of reconnecting with old friends, but in order to be
Speaker 1: able to really access all the features, you need to
Speaker 1: become a paid member. Now, honestly, I think that that's
Speaker 1: a valid business decision. It just rubbed some people the
Speaker 1: wrong way because they were starting to get used to
Speaker 1: the idea of if it's on the web, it's more
Speaker 1: or less free. So it was an effective way of
Speaker 1: generating revenue. But the the features that you've got access
Speaker 1: to included stuff like being able to see who had
Speaker 1: viewed your profile. That way, you could be alerted if say,
Speaker 1: like that creepy person you knew in school is still
Speaker 1: stalking you or whatever. Not exactly comforting, or maybe you're thinking, hey,
Speaker 1: maybe that that cute classmate of mine looked in on
Speaker 1: me and I wonder whatever happened to them, and maybe
Speaker 1: it's a misconnection kind of thing. Anyway, One of the
Speaker 1: issues classmates dot Com ran into you is that the
Speaker 1: company would send out these promotional emails to prospective users,
Speaker 1: like maybe it's someone who's registered for free, or maybe
Speaker 1: it's just someone who could potentially become a member of
Speaker 1: classmates dot com. And some of these emails had claims
Speaker 1: in them saying that someone had been searching for that
Speaker 1: person on the website. You know, you get a message saying, hey,
Speaker 1: someone's looking for you, and you're thinking, oh, an old
Speaker 1: friend of mine is trying to look me up. I
Speaker 1: want to see who that is. So you might want
Speaker 1: to actually join classmates dot com as a paid member
Speaker 1: so you can find out who the heck is looking
Speaker 1: for me. Maybe it's important, or maybe this is a
Speaker 1: chance to reconnect with an old friend that I haven't
Speaker 1: talked to in years. But it turned out that at
Speaker 1: least some of the time, those messages were alerting you
Speaker 1: to situations that didn't exist, that no person was actually
Speaker 1: searching for you, which, by the way, is I gotta
Speaker 1: feel awful right that you get an email saying, hey,
Speaker 1: someone's looking for you, and when you pay the fee
Speaker 1: so you can access the information, you find out, actually,
Speaker 1: no one has looked for you, no one's thought about
Speaker 1: you in years. You might as well not even exist
Speaker 1: to those people. I might be projecting it here anyway.
Speaker 1: Some users brought a class action lawsuit against classmates dot Com,
Speaker 1: and the company would eventually settle the lawsuit and paid
Speaker 1: out a couple of million dollars in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: It was a really big deal at the time, but
Speaker 1: another thing they got them a bad reputation is. The
Speaker 1: site uses an auto renewal process, so if you do
Speaker 1: get a paid membership, it automatically renews your membership at
Speaker 1: the end of you know, a year's service. And from
Speaker 1: what I understand, joining classmates dot Com as a paid
Speaker 1: member is kind of like when you join like a
Speaker 1: gym or a fitness center. It can be incredibly challenging
Speaker 1: to cancel your membership once you're in. It's like the mafia.
Speaker 1: Once you're in, you're in. At least that's how it
Speaker 1: used to be. I don't know if it still is,
Speaker 1: but PC World back in two thousand six had an
Speaker 1: article that was titled just canceled the bleep account. The
Speaker 1: bleep in this case at like just random symbols, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like Cubert cursing if you remember the Cubert
Speaker 1: video game I'm really dating myself in this episode anyway, Uh,
Speaker 1: the PC World said that that classmates dot Com counted
Speaker 1: as a quote unquote big hassle when you wanted to
Speaker 1: cancel your membership. Despite these and some other controversies, classmates
Speaker 1: dot Com is still active today. I don't know about you.
Speaker 1: Totally cool being persona non garratta to my high school classmates.
Speaker 1: For the most part, it's good old gen X. You know,
Speaker 1: we kind of cut ties once we left and didn't
Speaker 1: look back. I didn't even go to any of my
Speaker 1: high school reunions. I just skipped them all. But enough
Speaker 1: about me. Let's move on to a different social network, okay.
Speaker 1: Dan Pelson and Jane Mount create a site that would
Speaker 1: have many social network elements to it, including a message board,
Speaker 1: had intend messaging. It linked together different folks through common interests,
Speaker 1: and it would later go on to incorporate things like
Speaker 1: internet audio and video, so it would evolve over time
Speaker 1: and increase the features of the site. And this was
Speaker 1: called Bolt dot com and it had a relatively decent run.
Speaker 1: And remember this one also launched mid nineties before the
Speaker 1: dot com bubble burst, so for about a decade things
Speaker 1: ran fairly well at Bolt dot com. Despite the dot
Speaker 1: com bubble burst. It stuck around, it survived that calamity,
Speaker 1: and initially Bolt was targeting teenagers as its user base.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing, though, when people join a network and
Speaker 1: they like the network and they form relationships on that network,
Speaker 1: they tend to stick around and it becomes an age
Speaker 1: user base. So the users were getting older and older
Speaker 1: uh and continuing to use Bolt and Bolt was not
Speaker 1: being super effective at attracting new users. This is a
Speaker 1: message that we will here repeated with Meta and Facebook
Speaker 1: in particular right that Facebook is a social network that
Speaker 1: has an enormous user base but has a real problem
Speaker 1: of attracting new users to the service and the existing
Speaker 1: users are just continuing to age well. In two thousand five, Bolt,
Speaker 1: through its parent company which was called Bolt Media, got
Speaker 1: into the video sharing business, and the original Bolt site,
Speaker 1: the social networking version of Bolt, kind of was pushed aside.
Speaker 1: It was shifted over to a new u r L
Speaker 1: which was Bolt to dot com. Two is in the
Speaker 1: number two ms actual numeral too. The original u r
Speaker 1: L Bolt dot Com became the host for this video
Speaker 1: sharing site, which more and more frequently wasn't so much
Speaker 1: about user generated videos but was more about sharing other videos,
Speaker 1: either created by Bolt Media or stuff like music videos.
Speaker 1: But then various media companies got really litigious because companies
Speaker 1: like Bolt were sharing music videos without you know, paying
Speaker 1: licensing fees, and the companies were getting sued, including Bolt
Speaker 1: Media getting sued for copyright infringement. Things got really rough
Speaker 1: for Bolt Media. So then a company called go Fish
Speaker 1: initially decides that it's going to acquire Bolt Media and
Speaker 1: Bolt to, the original social networking element for the company,
Speaker 1: turned off the quote unquote lights. It's shut down in
Speaker 1: two thousand seven, on April six at noon Eastern time.
Speaker 1: We actually have a specific time for when that site
Speaker 1: shut down. Asked for the acquisition, Well, that never happened.
Speaker 1: Go Fish got cold feet or cold fins or something. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Go Fish swam the heck away from this acquisition and
Speaker 1: Bolt Media the company went into bankruptcy. Now, the original
Speaker 1: Bolt had a brief revival in two thousand eight when
Speaker 1: a company called fund Bolt had secured the rights to
Speaker 1: the I P and a site very similar to the
Speaker 1: original Bolt or what became Bolt Too launched. But unfortunately
Speaker 1: this was only up for a few months before it
Speaker 1: once again had to close up shop, this time for good. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it was one of those issues where the costs were
Speaker 1: greater than any revenue being brought in, so Bolt was
Speaker 1: once again dead. So that one no longer around. Okay,
Speaker 1: next up, we have yet another nineties startup. This one
Speaker 1: is six degrees dot com. Now, interestingly, this emerged after
Speaker 1: people started playing the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Speaker 1: It's actually just based off this idea that any two
Speaker 1: people are only six degrees of separation between them. The
Speaker 1: Kevin Bacon version obviously is about linking actors together. Uh
Speaker 1: you know, Kevin Bacon is an actor for those of
Speaker 1: you who don't know this name. He's also Peter Quill's
Speaker 1: Christmas present. According to the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special,
Speaker 1: which I watched recently and was delighted by. Anyway, Kevin
Speaker 1: Bacon has been in a ton of movies, and he's
Speaker 1: worked with a huge number of actors. So he's been
Speaker 1: around and worked with so many that it's possible to
Speaker 1: essentially link any two actors who have ever worked in
Speaker 1: Hollywood together, using Kevin Bacon as kind of the link
Speaker 1: king material between the two. If you move forward a
Speaker 1: couple of years into an entrepreneur named Andrew win Reich
Speaker 1: created a social network based off this idea that everyone
Speaker 1: is just six degrees of separation or less from everybody else,
Speaker 1: and that by mapping your social web, you can find
Speaker 1: connections to and between people that you never suspected, Like
Speaker 1: maybe you had that small world experience where you find
Speaker 1: out that two different friends you have happened to know
Speaker 1: each other. But the two friends you you know, they're
Speaker 1: in very different friends circles, right, Like maybe you know
Speaker 1: one from someplace you worked and one from a social circle,
Speaker 1: and it turns out these two people are also friends
Speaker 1: with each other, and you never knew that. You just
Speaker 1: have that strange experience. Well, that's the kind of thing
Speaker 1: that Winrich was kind of interested in exploring, and so
Speaker 1: he created six degrees dot com. And with six degrees,
Speaker 1: users would put in their information, and they would also
Speaker 1: include information about their contacts, right the people they knew,
Speaker 1: and users who listed one another would end up getting connected,
Speaker 1: and they could also put in folks who weren't on
Speaker 1: the network too, you know, as part of their connections.
Speaker 1: And then those folks would eventually get hounded by emails
Speaker 1: asking them to create a profile on six degrees dot
Speaker 1: com to build out the network further. This social web
Speaker 1: model would be kind of a foundation for future social
Speaker 1: networks like MySpace, which we will talk about in the
Speaker 1: next episode, and other ones like Facebook. Now, the original
Speaker 1: six degrees dot com was bought by another company in
Speaker 1: ninety five million dollars, and then we get to the
Speaker 1: old dot com bubble bursting, and like several of the
Speaker 1: other companies we've mentioned in this episode, the parent company
Speaker 1: for six degrees hit turbulence and didn't make it through,
Speaker 1: so the site shut down around two thousand. Now there
Speaker 1: is a six degrees dot com social network out there today.
Speaker 1: There is one that's active, but I have no idea
Speaker 1: who runs it at this point. I did some looking
Speaker 1: and didn't find a whole lot of information. The website
Speaker 1: has a copyright notice listed as so if that is
Speaker 1: when it was relaunched, it's pretty recent. I will say
Speaker 1: it is not an HTTPS link, so it's not secure.
Speaker 1: If you go to that site, it is not a
Speaker 1: secure site. I would say that means do not put
Speaker 1: identifiable information into that site, because anyone could be snooping
Speaker 1: and you wouldn't even know. I did check the contact
Speaker 1: us link to see if it would give me more information,
Speaker 1: but it just takes you to a little online form
Speaker 1: and it didn't have time to fill out something and
Speaker 1: get any information before this podcast. But I suspect that
Speaker 1: six degrees dot com of today has no common ground
Speaker 1: with the original incarnation, and it's just the general idea
Speaker 1: brought back around again. All right, we've got some more
Speaker 1: to cover before we finish out this particular episode. Before
Speaker 1: we do that, let's take another quick break. We're back okay.
Speaker 1: In and nine, we get a couple of online journal
Speaker 1: sites launching. Open Diary opened in and live Journals started
Speaker 1: journaling in nine. So these sites would allow users to
Speaker 1: create online journals and to share those journals, either publicly
Speaker 1: or with specific friends. They also introduced a feature that
Speaker 1: was really a Web two point oh idea. That was
Speaker 1: that they allowed other users to leave comments on posts,
Speaker 1: so your friends could actually comment on things you wrote. So,
Speaker 1: for example, I remember I used live journal once upon
Speaker 1: a time to post things like April Fool's jokes, and
Speaker 1: the comments would be uh. They would begin with people saying, Wow,
Speaker 1: that's incredible, and then with people saying, oh, I see
Speaker 1: what you did. And I would try to leave as
Speaker 1: many clues as possible that I was just joshing. But
Speaker 1: I eventually gave up April Fool's Jokes because I felt
Speaker 1: like I got too good at lying and I didn't
Speaker 1: like that. Anyway, The whole idea of leaving comments user
Speaker 1: generated comments on posts really became another foundational element in
Speaker 1: social networks moving forward, This is another basic building block
Speaker 1: that would be very important for social networks, and both
Speaker 1: open Diary and live journal would survive the dot com
Speaker 1: purge once the bubble bursts, so they both made it
Speaker 1: through that. Now an Open Diary case, the site would
Speaker 1: evolve over time. It introduced new features and new ways
Speaker 1: to interact with one another. But despite the fact that
Speaker 1: it was continuing to introduce these new features, the business
Speaker 1: side was really starting to struggle post two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: so the side actually shut down in February two fourteen.
Speaker 1: It had been struggling financially for a couple of years
Speaker 1: at that point, and it would remain offline until two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen. But in two thousand eighteen it relaunched, this
Speaker 1: time as a subscription based journaling service, so if you
Speaker 1: wanted to join, you could get like a month free,
Speaker 1: but then you had to become a paid subscriber to
Speaker 1: use the service. But one thing that was really nice
Speaker 1: was that former users could then access their old journal entries,
Speaker 1: which otherwise we have just been lost right because the
Speaker 1: site went down, and all of those journal entries, according
Speaker 1: to the company, had been preserved during the four years
Speaker 1: that it was offline, so that was kind of cool.
Speaker 1: So yes, open Diary still exists, just in a different
Speaker 1: form than it was up to through two thousand and fourteen.
Speaker 1: Live Journal has its own bumpy history. The site launched
Speaker 1: in the spring of nineteen, and as I've indicated, I
Speaker 1: was a fairly active member early on, but I drifted
Speaker 1: away from live journal as other social networks emerged and grew.
Speaker 1: A company called six Apart purchased live Journal in two
Speaker 1: thousand five from its creator, Brad Fitzpatrick, and a year
Speaker 1: later a Russian company called sup Media licensed the live
Speaker 1: journal brand and then outright purchased live Journal in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven. This move was seen as a pretty big
Speaker 1: blow to the live journal community, particularly the community that
Speaker 1: was in Russia. It was really popular in Russia, but
Speaker 1: with a Russian company purchasing the live journal brand, its
Speaker 1: signaled a possible crackdown on Russian users. There were fears
Speaker 1: that the company would impose censorship on users and it
Speaker 1: would bring live Journal in line with other Russian operated
Speaker 1: sites and services. The transition to Russia continued over the
Speaker 1: following years. The site moved to Russian based servers in
Speaker 1: two thousand sixteen, and it now operates in accordance with
Speaker 1: Russian law, which does put a bit of a damper
Speaker 1: on free expression. Now that being said, live journal, like
Speaker 1: open diary, is technically still online. You could create an
Speaker 1: account and journal on live journal, but it is in
Speaker 1: a very different form from the one I remember from
Speaker 1: the early two thousand's and again is burdened by the
Speaker 1: restrictions that the Russian government places on online communications. Really,
Speaker 1: anything that would be critical of the Russian government, the
Speaker 1: Russian Federation and is probably not going to stick around
Speaker 1: for very long on the platform. Okay, moving on. In
Speaker 1: two thousand two, a guy named Jonathan Abrams began working
Speaker 1: on a new social networking site that was building on
Speaker 1: the ideas that fueled services like six degrees dot com.
Speaker 1: This site was Friendster, which some of you may have used.
Speaker 1: Some of you probably have heard the name, but maybe
Speaker 1: never actually used it. It appeared to be leaning a
Speaker 1: little bit on the notoriety of the peer to peer
Speaker 1: service Napster. Napster made a huge name for itself because
Speaker 1: lots of people used it to pirate music, and it
Speaker 1: was nuked to oblivion by the music industry in legislation
Speaker 1: or rather court cases that I think you could only
Speaker 1: describe as being over the top, but I've done episodes
Speaker 1: about that in the past. Anyway, Friendster would allow users
Speaker 1: to create friend circles, and thus people could start to
Speaker 1: see connections between friends and ways, similar to what six
Speaker 1: degrees had been doing. But by this point six degrees
Speaker 1: had been shut down, right, so that was gone, so
Speaker 1: Friendster was able to kind of take its place. So
Speaker 1: Abraham's launched Friendster in two thousand three, and it got
Speaker 1: fairly popular pretty early on because it came out before
Speaker 1: MySpace and Facebook, and it wasn't bogged down by all
Speaker 1: the baggage of the dot com era the way earlier
Speaker 1: networks had been, because it came out after all of
Speaker 1: that dust had settled. Now, within the first year of launch,
Speaker 1: Friendster already had a suitor, and it was none other
Speaker 1: than our old friend Google. Now reportedly, Google's proposed acquisition
Speaker 1: would have been for thirty million dollars in Google stock, which,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, would mean that original deal would
Speaker 1: be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I think even
Speaker 1: more than a billion dollars at this point if people
Speaker 1: had just taken that deal and held onto the stock.
Speaker 1: Because of how google stocks value has grown you know,
Speaker 1: considerably since the early two thousand's, but Friendster turned down
Speaker 1: the office. It was all a moot point, and I
Speaker 1: suppose that for users of the site that was probably
Speaker 1: for the best at the time, because Google has a
Speaker 1: very long history of acquiring and then subsequently shutting down services. Anyway,
Speaker 1: in two thousand four, the board of directors for Friendster
Speaker 1: handed Jonathan Abrams his walking papers. They essentially fired him
Speaker 1: as CEO and replaced him. Uh. There was kind of
Speaker 1: a revolving door for the leadership of Friendster for a
Speaker 1: little while, and a few years later, Friendster was losing
Speaker 1: most of its American user base as people were migrating
Speaker 1: to other service is, namely Facebook. The site continued to
Speaker 1: enjoy popularity in Asia, however, so while America was seeing
Speaker 1: you know, flagging results, Asia was doing much better. In
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, a Malaysian company called m O L
Speaker 1: Global acquired Friendster, or at least some of Friendster's technology.
Speaker 1: Facebook would end up buying the rest of Friendster's i
Speaker 1: P and a couple of years later, Friendster transformed into
Speaker 1: a social gaming service and all the stuff that made
Speaker 1: it a pure social network was ditched. The whole site
Speaker 1: would go dark in two thousand and fifteen. We'll hear
Speaker 1: similar stories about this as we go on. In two
Speaker 1: thousand three, we also saw the launch of a social
Speaker 1: network geared toward professionals, you know, employers and people seeking employment.
Speaker 1: And I am, of course referencing linked In, which i've
Speaker 1: lee is another site that survives to this day, and
Speaker 1: I am reminded of that pretty much daily because I
Speaker 1: get emails alerting me to the fact that folks have
Speaker 1: apparently visited my profile, which has to be really disappointing
Speaker 1: for them because I have not kept up with it
Speaker 1: for years. Anyway, LinkedIn really puts the network in social
Speaker 1: networks because it's primarily intended to be a networking tool,
Speaker 1: and it can be a really effective one. You know,
Speaker 1: it can help you get connected with the right people,
Speaker 1: or you know, if you're really bad at social media,
Speaker 1: it's really great at convincing folks you are absolutely not
Speaker 1: the person they should hire. So a little word of
Speaker 1: advice if you use LinkedIn, don't post photos of your
Speaker 1: wild night in Vegas on the site. That seems like
Speaker 1: that would be a no brainer, but there's always someone
Speaker 1: who does it. LinkedIn had connections with PayPal founders. You
Speaker 1: know that also makes sense the folks who were saying,
Speaker 1: how can we create financial transactions online? How can we
Speaker 1: illitate that having the same idea of how can we
Speaker 1: facilitate networking like professional networking online? Makes sense. So it
Speaker 1: operated as a private company until two thousand eleven. That's
Speaker 1: when it held its initial public offering when transformed into
Speaker 1: a publicly traded company, and it would continue as a
Speaker 1: publicly traded company on its own until two thousand sixteen,
Speaker 1: when Microsoft proposed a twenty six billion dollar acquisition. The
Speaker 1: company was offering almost two hundred dollars a share, and
Speaker 1: the shareholders of LinkedIn said yes please. Now, as I mentioned,
Speaker 1: LinkedIn is still very much alive. It is a Microsoft
Speaker 1: owned service to this day. You can create an account,
Speaker 1: you can fill out your education and employment history. You
Speaker 1: can network with colleagues and perspective employers or employees. And
Speaker 1: I see a lot of my peers getting a ton
Speaker 1: out of using it, like former co workers of mine
Speaker 1: are really leveraging LinkedIn. Well, I probably should be using it,
Speaker 1: but y'all, I hit social network fatigue hard a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago, and I have not recovered yet and
Speaker 1: here's another one, another site that is technically still around
Speaker 1: kind of so let me explain. We're gonna conclude on
Speaker 1: this one for this episode. This social network is called
Speaker 1: high five spelled h I and then the numeral five,
Speaker 1: and it originally launched in two thousand three, shortly before
Speaker 1: my Space would take the stage. Ramu Yala Manschi is
Speaker 1: the founder of high five. He earned a degree in
Speaker 1: computer science at the University of Illinois, and then he
Speaker 1: worked in different capacities at several different tech companies, including
Speaker 1: one that got acquired by our old friend c mg
Speaker 1: I before cmg I became that supply chain company. Now,
Speaker 1: the original High five was similar in many ways to
Speaker 1: my Space. Users would create profiles, they would seek out
Speaker 1: connections with other users. There was a focus on reconnecting
Speaker 1: with people you already knew. I r L again, I
Speaker 1: feel ancient saying that. Anyway, according to Yellomanchi, the site
Speaker 1: was profitable within its first year. Now, if that's true,
Speaker 1: that's incredible. I don't know if it's true, because the
Speaker 1: site would continue seeking out investment rounds moving forward, and
Speaker 1: I don't know what their method was to generate revenue.
Speaker 1: I assume it was advertising, but there's very little information
Speaker 1: available for the original incarnation of High five. Yellomanchi emphasized
Speaker 1: growing his user base beyond the United States, which was
Speaker 1: probably a good idea because there was a lot less
Speaker 1: competition outside the US. In time, people in Latin American
Speaker 1: countries really became loyal High five users. That became like
Speaker 1: the real ground swell of the user base was in
Speaker 1: Latin America, and it propelled High five to a dominent
Speaker 1: spot among social networks, or at least a little while. Now.
Speaker 1: I might one day need to do a full episode
Speaker 1: to really look into what happened at high five, because
Speaker 1: if you look at most articles mentioning the company, things
Speaker 1: changed really really fast, and in a way that that
Speaker 1: brings up questions and I don't have the answers to them. Supposedly,
Speaker 1: High five was a top social networking site in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, second only to my Space. So my
Speaker 1: Space is number one, despite the fact that it came
Speaker 1: out after High five. Then you have High five, you
Speaker 1: get to two thousand eight, things have changed already. It's
Speaker 1: now in third place because Facebook was really gaining traction
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight. But still you would think
Speaker 1: that a social networking site, one that has a strong
Speaker 1: base in Latin America and is ranked third behind two
Speaker 1: of the Juggernauts, would still more or less be okay. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: this is a company that supposedly was profitable in its
Speaker 1: first hear it should be fine, but apparently it wasn't.
Speaker 1: So in two thousand nine, the company gets a new
Speaker 1: CEO and it switches focus. It drops the social network stuff,
Speaker 1: it gets out of the social network game. It turns
Speaker 1: into a social gaming company. Which you know, it's not
Speaker 1: the first time we've heard that, right, We already heard
Speaker 1: that before. The third largest social network company would no
Speaker 1: longer be a social network company, but it did stick around,
Speaker 1: so High five was still a thing. But in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven things would change again. Tagged, which is a
Speaker 1: different social network company that I'll talk about in the
Speaker 1: next episode, acquired High fives assets. Some of the High
Speaker 1: five team then apparently went on to found a different
Speaker 1: social gaming site, but that one lasted less than a year,
Speaker 1: so social gaming was just a no go anyway. Tags
Speaker 1: version of High five would change a little bit. Initially,
Speaker 1: they just stripped the games that High five would run
Speaker 1: on its social gaming site and replace them with games
Speaker 1: that were developed by Tagged members. But there's always a
Speaker 1: bigger fish. So then Tagged gets scooped up by another
Speaker 1: company called the Meat Group m e et, not the
Speaker 1: Meat group like sausages and stuff, but meet like let's
Speaker 1: meet anyway. I'm sure I'll mention that again in the
Speaker 1: next episode when we talk more about Tagged itself. But anyway,
Speaker 1: high fives still stuck around. In fact, it's around today,
Speaker 1: but it's not a social gaming site, and it's not
Speaker 1: as much of a social network site either. It's really
Speaker 1: more about meeting new people with kind of an emphasis
Speaker 1: on online dating and flirting. That seems to be where
Speaker 1: the focus is now, So I think of it kind
Speaker 1: of more like Tender or Grinder, but as a social
Speaker 1: network as opposed to just strictly about meeting and king up.
Speaker 1: So it's less about reconnecting with folks you already know
Speaker 1: and more about meeting new people. So while the site
Speaker 1: is still around, it has a very different approach to
Speaker 1: the service that launched way back in two thousand three.
Speaker 1: And that wraps up this first part of kind of
Speaker 1: a history of social networks. It's not an exhaustive history.
Speaker 1: There are others that I have not touched on, some
Speaker 1: of which were popular in other parts of the world briefly,
Speaker 1: but I am gonna continue to cover the big ones
Speaker 1: and talk about what happened and how things unfolded. You know,
Speaker 1: we're starting to get into the years where we get
Speaker 1: the big names like my Space and Facebook and whatnot.
Speaker 1: But we'll pick up with that in our next episode,
Speaker 1: and until then, if you have suggestions for me reach
Speaker 1: out let me know. You can do so by downloading
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download and use.
Speaker 1: You can navigate over to tech Stuff in the search field.
Speaker 1: There's a little microphone icon. You can leave a voice
Speaker 1: message up to thirty seconds in length that way, or
Speaker 1: if you prefer, drop me a message on Twitter while
Speaker 1: it's still a thing. The handle for the show is
Speaker 1: text Stuff hs W. I'll have alternatives lined up in
Speaker 1: the near future if you don't want to be on
Speaker 1: Twitter anymore. But that's it for this episode and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Y tech Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.