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: job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and how the tech are you. We are continuing
Speaker 1: our series of episodes about the history of social networks.
Speaker 1: This one will be the fourth one in that series.
Speaker 1: So in our first episode, we covered some of the
Speaker 1: really early examples of social networks like six degrees, dot
Speaker 1: com and high five. In episode two, we talked about
Speaker 1: how my Space became the dominant player in social networks
Speaker 1: until Facebook swept up from behind and overtook it. And
Speaker 1: then in the third episode we talked about Google's early
Speaker 1: attempt at a social network, a Orchid, and we also
Speaker 1: talked about Bibo, and I covered some networks that are
Speaker 1: related to social networks but maybe not a full social
Speaker 1: network on their own, like YouTube and Reddit, and just
Speaker 1: as a reminder, I am tackling these kind of one
Speaker 1: network at a time. So while the episodes are organized
Speaker 1: chronologically in regards to when these networks were founded, I'm
Speaker 1: not going like year by year. This isn't like and
Speaker 1: now we're covering two thousand ten to two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: because you would have to jump back and forth across
Speaker 1: so many different stories would be impossible to keep them
Speaker 1: all sorted. It would be Madness or Sparta, or you know,
Speaker 1: one of those two. Anyway, we're up to two thousand six,
Speaker 1: and that year would see the birth of a microblogging
Speaker 1: service that would be founded early on uh and then
Speaker 1: launch publicly in the summer. And this microblogging service would
Speaker 1: end up taking advantage of the technology of things like
Speaker 1: short messaging system that kind of thing. And I am,
Speaker 1: of course talking about jaiqu got you didn't I maybe anyway,
Speaker 1: it might have sounded like I was talking about Twitter,
Speaker 1: you know, being founded in two thousand six and launching
Speaker 1: publicly in that summer. But technically a couple of engineers
Speaker 1: in Finland founded Jaiku one month before Twitter would emerge.
Speaker 1: As to who was working on what first, I don't know,
Speaker 1: but they weren't aware of each other at the time.
Speaker 1: They couldn't have been, because Twitter was not a publicly
Speaker 1: known entity yet at the finished team built their tool
Speaker 1: with a specific phone operating system in mind, the Symbian
Speaker 1: operating system specifically on the Nakia S sixty platform. Now
Speaker 1: keep in mind two thousand six is still a year
Speaker 1: before the iPhone would launch, and while smartphones would take
Speaker 1: time to get some traction here in the US, over
Speaker 1: in Finland, Nokia and the simian Os already had a
Speaker 1: leg up. Jaiku's creators figured that young people were starting
Speaker 1: to do this crazy thing called texting, and they had
Speaker 1: also taken up the practice of journaling online using blogs,
Speaker 1: So why not combine the two and build an application
Speaker 1: that would allow for really concise blog posts microblogging in
Speaker 1: other words, and it would work on mobile devices so
Speaker 1: that you could post your thoughts right when you had
Speaker 1: them and maybe have no filter. Many of the same
Speaker 1: concepts that Twitter would embrace were also present in Jaiku.
Speaker 1: Now there was also a web based components, so you
Speaker 1: could go to the Jaiku web page and access your
Speaker 1: account there rather than using the phone interface if you preferred.
Speaker 1: And I suspect that because the service launched overseas, it
Speaker 1: didn't really get as much attention here in the United
Speaker 1: States as Twitter would. Also, the engineers would later say
Speaker 1: that the s sixty platform was quote impossible to develop
Speaker 1: for end quote. It did still an attention, however, and
Speaker 1: the folks who heard about Jaiku got into it pretty
Speaker 1: quickly and used it a lot. And while the team
Speaker 1: had been hoping for this kind of success, the rapid
Speaker 1: adoption created some new challenges for the small group of
Speaker 1: engineers because now they had to figure out how to
Speaker 1: scale the service to meet demand, and they were having
Speaker 1: lots of performance issues as a result, because it's expensive.
Speaker 1: It's something that's really hard for a small team to do,
Speaker 1: and it soon became clear that they were going to
Speaker 1: be completely overwhelmed. And that's what when something that appeared
Speaker 1: to be a lifeline showed up. In the long run,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a lifeline, but at the time it seemed
Speaker 1: that way. So in late two thousand seven, Google bought Jaiku,
Speaker 1: perhaps sensing that maybe the company Google could push Jaiku
Speaker 1: to greater heights and challenge the now trendy Twitter, which
Speaker 1: we will talk about in a second, because by two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, Twitter was quite the phenomenon now. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 1: same thing happened with Jaiku that we've seen happen in
Speaker 1: countless other examples of Google acquired companies and services. Google
Speaker 1: didn't really know how to promote Jaiku or to develop Jaiku,
Speaker 1: and it failed to gain any real traction. While Twitter
Speaker 1: continued to grow in popularity. In two thousand nine, Google
Speaker 1: decided to stop actively developing Jaiku as a company, but
Speaker 1: turned it into an open source project. But even that
Speaker 1: move only kept Jaiku around for a couple more years.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eleven, Google announced it was going to
Speaker 1: kill off Jaiku at the start of the following year,
Speaker 1: and in January, Jaiku guessed its last breadths and then
Speaker 1: was heard no more, as was predicted by the Mayan
Speaker 1: Long Count calendar. Yes, that's what the two twelve stuff was. No,
Speaker 1: not really, I'm being asias obviously, but yeah, it was gone.
Speaker 1: Jaiku did not stand the test of time. But let's
Speaker 1: get back to two thousand six, because that is also
Speaker 1: the year that Twitter would launch. As I said a
Speaker 1: little bit earlier, it launched a month after Jaiku did
Speaker 1: well after Jaiku was founded. Technically, Jaiku didn't launch publicly
Speaker 1: until July, which was after Twitter had its public launch.
Speaker 1: So I've talked a lot about Twitter's history over the years,
Speaker 1: especially this year. So we're gonna keep this really bare
Speaker 1: bones and relatively fast. I mean, you know me, nothing
Speaker 1: is fast but as fast as I go. Anyway, So,
Speaker 1: once upon a time there was a company called Odio,
Speaker 1: and this company developed directories for stuff like podcasts. The
Speaker 1: idea was, how can we make podcasts easier to discover
Speaker 1: and to subscribe to because early, early, early on in
Speaker 1: the days of podcasts, you kind of had to hunt
Speaker 1: down our ss feed and subscribe to it. There was
Speaker 1: not like a whole lot of easy options for you know,
Speaker 1: doing this without hunting and pecking. Of course, this isn't
Speaker 1: the very very early days of podcasts now. The brief
Speaker 1: story of Odio is a pretty interesting one. It's complete
Speaker 1: with drama around who started the company versus who got
Speaker 1: you know, the credit for being a founder, and lots
Speaker 1: of things like that. But that's for another time. But
Speaker 1: by two thousand and six, Odeo was struggling to be relevant.
Speaker 1: The main problem was that shortly after Odio became a thing,
Speaker 1: Apple began to support podcasts and incorporate podcast subscriptions into iTunes,
Speaker 1: and you know, we even call them podcasts because of
Speaker 1: the Apple iPod. That kind of gives you an idea
Speaker 1: of how dominant Apple was in the space and still
Speaker 1: is to a great extent. So Odio quickly found itself
Speaker 1: looking for ways to keep investors on board because the
Speaker 1: company was really struggling with its main product. Now a
Speaker 1: side project in Odeo was also developing. This project was
Speaker 1: to create a messaging service that would let one person
Speaker 1: post a short message via SMS or short messaging service
Speaker 1: to their own timeline of posts, and it would also
Speaker 1: send it out to their contacts or followers, and it
Speaker 1: became a form of microblogging, journaling in very short character messages.
Speaker 1: That character limit was because the limitations of SMS itself.
Speaker 1: The project leaders, among them Noah Glass, decided to call
Speaker 1: the service Twitter, but there were no vowels. It was
Speaker 1: t W T t R. Now, of course this would
Speaker 1: become Twitter t w I T t e R, and
Speaker 1: it launched in March two thousand six. Jack Dorrisey created
Speaker 1: the first profile on the platform and sent out the
Speaker 1: first tweet, which read, just set up my Twitter, and
Speaker 1: he spelled it the the no vowels way. So worlds
Speaker 1: are turned on such tweets. So that's Marched two thousand six, right,
Speaker 1: But Twitter would launch to the public a few months
Speaker 1: later in July. Actually, July is the same month that
Speaker 1: Jaiku would launch to the public too, so both services
Speaker 1: hit the public at the same time. But to keep
Speaker 1: in mind. Jaiku is launching in Finland and didn't get
Speaker 1: nearly the same amount of coverage as Twitter did here
Speaker 1: in the United States. Ev Williams, biz Stone and Jack
Speaker 1: Dorsey decided to purchase up most of odio in October
Speaker 1: of two thousand six. They bought it back from the
Speaker 1: various stakeholders and investors, and we're consolidating ownership and pivoting
Speaker 1: the business away from podcasting where clearly Apple was going
Speaker 1: to dominate, and instead they were going to focus on
Speaker 1: this new kind of social network and messaging service. The
Speaker 1: service grew over the course of two thousand six, but
Speaker 1: it really began to take off the following March in
Speaker 1: two thousand seven, So essentially a year after Dorsey sent
Speaker 1: out that first tweet, Twitter itself would become famous. It
Speaker 1: was the year that Twitter had gone to south By
Speaker 1: Southwest in Austin, Texas. It's a big festival. It's got
Speaker 1: lots of different components to it, like there's a film
Speaker 1: component and a music component, but there's also a tech
Speaker 1: or interactive component in south By and south By is
Speaker 1: how some people refer to it. I always feel weird
Speaker 1: calling it south By. I don't think I'm cool enough.
Speaker 1: That's the problem is that really cool people can call
Speaker 1: it south By and sound like, you know, they're not
Speaker 1: total dweebs. But if I try and say cool things,
Speaker 1: my dweet bishness comes to the surface and it's undeniable.
Speaker 1: And I'm cool with that. By the way, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm not upset. I just know who I am. Anyway, Uh,
Speaker 1: it was seen as sort of the cool conference in
Speaker 1: the tech space. You know, it's where the young startups
Speaker 1: would show off what they could do while rubbing elbows
Speaker 1: with you know, the mon e and Uh. South By
Speaker 1: was leaning more towards trendy and fashionable, much more than
Speaker 1: larger tech industry conferences like ce S, which were still important,
Speaker 1: but they weren't seen as being like, again, you're gonna
Speaker 1: think I'm terrible because I'm gonna use terrible, antiquated language.
Speaker 1: But you know, they didn't seem hip anyway. The Twitter
Speaker 1: teams set up displays around south By Southwest that showed
Speaker 1: the latest tweets that were sent across the microblogging service.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure you know this. Folks really like it
Speaker 1: when they see themselves or their words up on screens.
Speaker 1: Gives them a real kick. So for more proof of that,
Speaker 1: just go to any big sporting event in the United
Speaker 1: States and watches the jumbo tron shows video of fans
Speaker 1: in the stands. They go bonkers for that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So Twitter was declared the best startup at south By
Speaker 1: Southwest and thousands of people signed on. Moreover, the people
Speaker 1: who attend south By south West tend to fall into
Speaker 1: the category of influencer, so these folks had their own
Speaker 1: fan bases, which also began to join the platform. Twitter
Speaker 1: proved to be really popular as it seemed to give
Speaker 1: folks a more personal insight into the lives of folks
Speaker 1: that they liked, whether those folks were close friends or
Speaker 1: you know, like a celebrity crush. Twitter spun off to
Speaker 1: become its own company in two thousand seven, and Jack
Speaker 1: Dorsey was the first CEO. Dorsey would serve as CEO
Speaker 1: another time later on in Twitter's history actually, but in
Speaker 1: the summer of two thousand seven, Twitter began to see
Speaker 1: some emergent behavior that would become foundational for the service.
Speaker 1: And I'm talking about the hashtag. So that's the pound sign,
Speaker 1: that little cross hatch sign. The hashtag when used in
Speaker 1: front of a name or a keyword would make it
Speaker 1: easier to search Twitter for that specific topic to see
Speaker 1: what folks were saying about it. Because Twitter wasn't really
Speaker 1: designed to make large conversations a possibility, right, Like, it's
Speaker 1: hard to participate in a conversation on Twitter beyond back
Speaker 1: and forth with just two people. So some users came
Speaker 1: up with this idea of using a hashtag in front
Speaker 1: of a keyword, like what the conversation is actually about,
Speaker 1: so that people could do a search for that hashtag
Speaker 1: word and pull up the actual relevant tweets. Tweets that
Speaker 1: did not have the hashtag in front of the word,
Speaker 1: those wouldn't get tagged, right, Those wouldn't get pulled up
Speaker 1: in search results. So this made it easier to look
Speaker 1: for specific kinds of content. And again, this was just
Speaker 1: something that emerged through user behavior, but over time Twitter
Speaker 1: would adopt that and some other user behaviors and incorporate
Speaker 1: those as features. In two thousand eight, Jack Dorsey stepped
Speaker 1: down as Twitter's CEO and co founder Evan Williams would
Speaker 1: take a turn. But don't worry, we'll be back with
Speaker 1: Jack Dorsey in a little it. Before we can do that, though,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break, Okay, we're back. In two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, Twitter got the first account to hit one
Speaker 1: million followers. That actually was a kind of a race.
Speaker 1: The account belonged to Ashton Kutcher, the celebrity who campaigned
Speaker 1: hard to be the first to hit one million, because
Speaker 1: CNN was closed again on a million followers right around
Speaker 1: the same time. These days, you can find lots of
Speaker 1: accounts that have many millions of followers. But keep in mind,
Speaker 1: you know, this event where we hit the first one
Speaker 1: million followed account was in two thousand nine. It was
Speaker 1: just a few years after launch, and really folks outside
Speaker 1: of the text space hadn't really found out much about
Speaker 1: Twitter at all, Like they didn't know that it was
Speaker 1: a thing. It was really the tech space that was
Speaker 1: aware of it, and in a few folks on the
Speaker 1: periphery of tech. This would change when Oprah set up
Speaker 1: her own Twitter account on an episode of her daytime
Speaker 1: talk show, which led to thousands more people signing up.
Speaker 1: I should also add Twitter in the United States is
Speaker 1: seen as a pretty big deal, but it's not as
Speaker 1: big in other regions. There are other social networks that
Speaker 1: actually are used more frequently than Twitter. In those cases,
Speaker 1: I say this because even as someone who is on Twitter,
Speaker 1: I often forget that it's not as widely used as
Speaker 1: you might think. And while you might feel that that
Speaker 1: certain sentiments that are really popular on Twitter, uh have
Speaker 1: widespread appeal, you're really looking at a kind of slice
Speaker 1: of the overall population. I say this because it means
Speaker 1: that if you spend a lot of time on Twitter,
Speaker 1: your perspective could be skewed so that you think that
Speaker 1: more people think a specific way, and that's not necessarily
Speaker 1: the case. I know I've been guilty of falling into
Speaker 1: that trap myself, so I just thought I would mention
Speaker 1: that here now. It's also good to remember that Twitter's
Speaker 1: early years coincided with the growth of the consumer smartphone.
Speaker 1: Like I said, smartphones have been kind of a thing
Speaker 1: in certain parts of the world, but here in the
Speaker 1: United States, they just were not the domain of the
Speaker 1: general consumer. It was pretty much your executive on the
Speaker 1: go who had a smartphone, and that was it until
Speaker 1: Apple debuted the iPhone and made smartphones sexy, and then
Speaker 1: they had a really disruptive effect on the web. In general,
Speaker 1: services like Twitter could be repackaged as an app, and
Speaker 1: this really helped boost user numbers as well. Now, in
Speaker 1: these early years, Twitter didn't really have a means to
Speaker 1: generate revenue. Uh, it was dependent upon influxes of cash
Speaker 1: from investors. But in two the company introduced promoted tweets,
Speaker 1: so then an account could pay a to have a
Speaker 1: message promoted so that it would show up on the
Speaker 1: feeds of hundreds of thousands of Twitter users. Even if
Speaker 1: those users didn't follow that specific account, they would see
Speaker 1: the tweet. We started seeing more brands engage with Twitter
Speaker 1: as a way to promote themselves and their products as
Speaker 1: well as to interact with customers. And we also saw
Speaker 1: the beginning of folks using Twitter as a way to
Speaker 1: fast track issues to get them resolved with customer service
Speaker 1: of various companies. I saw so many tweets directed at airlines.
Speaker 1: Oh and those early years would also be when we
Speaker 1: would see the famous fail whale a lot. So This
Speaker 1: image created by artist Kooney a k a k a
Speaker 1: Dash ninety two has the official title of Lifting a
Speaker 1: Dreamer and it shows a flock of little birds holding
Speaker 1: onto strings that serve as a kind of harness for
Speaker 1: a happy whale. This was the image that greeted users
Speaker 1: when Twitter services were put which happened frequently enough that
Speaker 1: if you were using Twitter back in those days, you
Speaker 1: undoubtedly saw the fail whale at some point or another.
Speaker 1: Twitter users would sometimes push Twitter beyond capacity, particularly during
Speaker 1: really popular live events where everyone was trying to give
Speaker 1: their hot take on what was going on at the
Speaker 1: same time. In Evan Williams stepped down as CEO in
Speaker 1: order to focus more on product development. He would leave
Speaker 1: the company no several years later. He actually completely divorced
Speaker 1: himself from Twitter by like twenty seventeen, so in his place,
Speaker 1: Dick Costolo became the new CEO. In two thousands thirteen,
Speaker 1: Twitter would transition from being a private company to a
Speaker 1: publicly traded one, and so it held its I p
Speaker 1: O or initial public offering on November. Uh, well, in
Speaker 1: November of two thousand thirteen, I don't have the specific
Speaker 1: date in front of me, but not everything was going
Speaker 1: super smoothly for Twitter even as it was making this transition.
Speaker 1: For one thing, the platform was starting to get a
Speaker 1: reputation for abusive users. People were complaining that Twitter failed
Speaker 1: to handle abuse properly. Like it it wasn't responding quickly enough.
Speaker 1: In fact, a little bit later it was it got
Speaker 1: so bad that the CEO copped to it. In an
Speaker 1: internal memo. Costolo said that Twitter had failed to handle
Speaker 1: trolls and abuse and as a result, had lost users
Speaker 1: in the process. Now, this was around the time of
Speaker 1: gamer Gate, which was really a harassment campaign conducted mainly
Speaker 1: online but also in other ways. And while Twitter would
Speaker 1: see quite a bit of action during gamer Gate, the
Speaker 1: real battles were being fought elsewhere online in the real world.
Speaker 1: But lots of folks in the gaming industry, particularly women
Speaker 1: who dared to be so bold as to work professionally
Speaker 1: in the field, found themselves the targets of abuse. In
Speaker 1: the summer of Dick Costolo stepped down as CEO, and hey,
Speaker 1: Jack Dorsey came back as CEO, you know, the first
Speaker 1: CEO of Twitter, one of the code founders, and Dorsey
Speaker 1: remained in charge of Twitter until the fall of when
Speaker 1: he would resign and the former c t O, Parague
Speaker 1: Agraval would take over and Agrival would lead the company
Speaker 1: until a certain tech billionaire would really shake things up.
Speaker 1: That tech billionaire was, of course, Elon Musk. He made
Speaker 1: waves in the spring of So it feels like it
Speaker 1: was an eternity ago at this point by announcing his
Speaker 1: intention to acquire Twitter. First, he purchased a significant percentage
Speaker 1: of shares in the company. Then he declined an invitation
Speaker 1: to join the company's board of directors because he learned
Speaker 1: that if he did that it would prevent him from
Speaker 1: being able to acquire even more stake in the company.
Speaker 1: Then he said he wanted to buy the company, and
Speaker 1: he started going about to secure the funding for it.
Speaker 1: Then reconsidered and decided he wanted out of the deal,
Speaker 1: but at that point he had already committed to it.
Speaker 1: There was no easy way to back out. Twitter went
Speaker 1: to court to force Musk to go through with the
Speaker 1: acquisition bias gosh darn it, you're legally bound to And finally,
Speaker 1: in the fall of Musk actually did purchase Twitter. Then
Speaker 1: Musk fired like all the leadership at Twitter and half
Speaker 1: of the employees. Then another quarter of the employees left
Speaker 1: the company. And that's kind of where Twitter is today.
Speaker 1: Musk is aiming to transform Twitter into what he calls
Speaker 1: Twitter two point oh. And obviously that's a super fast,
Speaker 1: super high level treatment of Twitter. We could talk about
Speaker 1: so much more, but honestly, we kind of have, particularly
Speaker 1: throughout this year, so I thought I would leave this
Speaker 1: here for now, but if people want me to do
Speaker 1: like an honest to goodness deep dive on the history,
Speaker 1: the evolution, the influence of Twitter, let me know, um
Speaker 1: and I guess I can do that. But that'll that's
Speaker 1: almost a mini series on its own because it's just Twitter.
Speaker 1: While again, while it's reach is not as big as
Speaker 1: the way a lot of people think has been incredibly important,
Speaker 1: particularly here in the United States, but also in other
Speaker 1: parts of the world, like in in Egypt. But we'll
Speaker 1: save that for some other time. If y'all want me
Speaker 1: to talk more about it, some of you are probably
Speaker 1: sick of hearing about Twitter, so hey, why don't we
Speaker 1: talk about something else. So that same year that that
Speaker 1: Twitter in Jaiku launched in two thousand and six, saw
Speaker 1: the launch of yet another social networking slash microblogging site,
Speaker 1: but this one was called Tumbler. I mean it launched
Speaker 1: in private beta towards the end of two thousand six.
Speaker 1: It would become a publicly accessible social network the following
Speaker 1: year in two thousand seven. David carp who turned twenty
Speaker 1: in two thousand six, dude, anyway, he was behind Tumbler.
Speaker 1: He had already established himself as a web developer and
Speaker 1: tech enthusiasts by then, Like when I looked into his background,
Speaker 1: because I really didn't know much about David carp. I
Speaker 1: know much about Tumbler apart from being somewhat familiar with
Speaker 1: it as a platform, but I looked into his background,
Speaker 1: I was just so astonished and humbled, because holy cow,
Speaker 1: this guy, by the time he was twinning, had accomplished
Speaker 1: so much. So he creates this site along with Marco Armett.
Speaker 1: I don't mean to diminish Marco's contributions. And the whole
Speaker 1: idea was to give a place where users could create
Speaker 1: profiles and write what we're called tumble logs. So these
Speaker 1: are short, warm blogs, sometimes longer than tweets, but shorter
Speaker 1: than what you would typically find in a regular blog.
Speaker 1: And Tumbler gave tools to users to let them incorporate
Speaker 1: all kinds of multimedia stuff like photos and audio clips
Speaker 1: and videos and even things like chat logs. You could
Speaker 1: just post those directly into a Tumbler feed, right from
Speaker 1: the user interface. So it was really streamlining that process
Speaker 1: so that you could create a really engaging and interesting
Speaker 1: tumble log about whatever it is that you wanted to
Speaker 1: write about. You know, maybe it's a journal about your
Speaker 1: own experiences, maybe it's about something you really are passionate about,
Speaker 1: whatever the case may be. So users had a few
Speaker 1: options when it came to designing the look of their feed.
Speaker 1: They had a lot of default options, or they could
Speaker 1: actually shell out some real world money to purchase a
Speaker 1: pre made theme from Tumbler, kind of like a you know,
Speaker 1: a premier theme. And like Twitter, Tumbler let users follow
Speaker 1: accounts that they found interesting, so that each user had
Speaker 1: a curated experience based upon their own preferences. Now, one
Speaker 1: thing was very different with Tumbler, and that was that
Speaker 1: Tumbler posts didn't feature a comment section, so you could
Speaker 1: not comment on someone else's post. Carpet had seen how
Speaker 1: comments could become a breeding ground for abuse and he
Speaker 1: really wanted to avoid that, so users were not given
Speaker 1: the option to comment on posts. Alternatively, however, they could
Speaker 1: choose to reblog someone else's post, and in the reblog
Speaker 1: they could include their own commentary. So while you might
Speaker 1: not be able to leave a comment on one of
Speaker 1: my posts and write you're a jerk face, you could
Speaker 1: reblog one of my posts and write, this guy is
Speaker 1: a jerk face as your commentary that would work words
Speaker 1: can hurt. Tumbler's emphasis on multimedia really kind of set
Speaker 1: it apart from other platforms at the time, and it
Speaker 1: became a place where fandoms would coalesce around various pieces
Speaker 1: of pop culture, very active communities around fan fiction and
Speaker 1: fan theory and things that are in that realm. Like really,
Speaker 1: when you use the word fan you know, it's short
Speaker 1: for fanatic. Fanaticism really was playing out on Tumbler. You
Speaker 1: would see like entire communities grow up around specific theories
Speaker 1: and wish fulfillment for certain characters in pop culture to
Speaker 1: get together. That kind of thing. The whole browny culture,
Speaker 1: which was a male identifying people who are fans of
Speaker 1: My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. That all started on Tumbler.
Speaker 1: So you had these kind of micro communities that were
Speaker 1: really passionate about their specific area of focus. Humbler was
Speaker 1: pretty popular when in Yahoo came a callin and we've
Speaker 1: talked about Yahoo already in this series because that's the
Speaker 1: same company that came around and acquired Flicker a few
Speaker 1: years earlier. Yahoo shelled out a cool billion dollars for Tumbler.
Speaker 1: That's billion with a B. David carp stayed on as
Speaker 1: CEO for the time being. But unfortunately for Yahoo and
Speaker 1: for Tumbler, that popularity didn't really translate into profitability, and
Speaker 1: in two thousand and sixteen, Yaho actually did a write
Speaker 1: down of that acquisition of more than seven hundred million dollars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's essentially Yahoo's saying, yeah, we paid way too much
Speaker 1: for this asset. When Verizon bought Yahoo in tween, Because
Speaker 1: as quigon Jin reminds us, there's always a bigger fish, Tumbler,
Speaker 1: like Flicker, was shuffled underneath a parent company called Oath
Speaker 1: O A t H. In two thousand eighteen, Tumbler made
Speaker 1: a change that had a dramatic effect. See I talked
Speaker 1: about fandoms and stuff, but one thing I did not
Speaker 1: mention is that Tumbler was also a really popular site
Speaker 1: for posting material of a more adult nature, whether it
Speaker 1: was fan fiction, illustrations, photographs, videos. Some users relied on
Speaker 1: Tumbler to share material that was a bit too hot
Speaker 1: for Oath. So Tumbler would make a change that would
Speaker 1: have an enormous impact on the site and its followers.
Speaker 1: But before we get into that, let's take another quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I'm sure all of you could at least guess
Speaker 1: where this was going if you didn't know already. Tumbler
Speaker 1: when faced with this issue of adult content proliferating across
Speaker 1: the site, which by the way, made it very hard
Speaker 1: to work with advertisers, right because advertisers don't want their
Speaker 1: ants showing up next to illustrations that depict a raw
Speaker 1: adic liaisons between Captain Kirk and Darth Vader or whatever.
Speaker 1: So Tumbler passed a new policy banning adult content on
Speaker 1: the site, and usage plummeted by about thirty percent. That's
Speaker 1: a lot. When you say, hey, no more porn and
Speaker 1: you lose a third of your traffic, that definitely tells
Speaker 1: you something about how your users were using your platform.
Speaker 1: Now that brings us up to two thousand nineteen. So
Speaker 1: at this point Tumbler is wallowing under Oath, which, now
Speaker 1: that I actually think about it, that that came out
Speaker 1: away that was different from what I intended. Not wallowing
Speaker 1: under Oath, but wallowing under the company called Oath. And
Speaker 1: it continued to struggle, and at this point David carp
Speaker 1: had already left the company. He actually did that in
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen, and Oath ended up selling Tumbler off
Speaker 1: to another company called Automatic, which in turn is kind
Speaker 1: of connected to WordPress, the publishing platform. And the price
Speaker 1: tag of Tumbler when it was sold in two thousand
Speaker 1: nineteen was three million dollars. Y'all, if you've been following
Speaker 1: this series, you know, like there have been some notable
Speaker 1: cases where companies were bought for massive amounts and sold
Speaker 1: for a tiny percentage afterwards, Like my Space was something
Speaker 1: like five million dollars, that Newscore bought it four and
Speaker 1: then sold it for like thirty five million, And you know,
Speaker 1: we've had other examples where something was bought for like
Speaker 1: nine million and then sold for ten million. But this
Speaker 1: was bought for a billion dollars and then sold off
Speaker 1: for three million. Yikes, huge drop in value. But importantly,
Speaker 1: Tumbler did not die. It also didn't change that much.
Speaker 1: Leadership decided to really focus on how Tumbler allows users
Speaker 1: to choose how they post and how they consume content,
Speaker 1: and users began to return to the platform, though there's
Speaker 1: still a ban on adult content there, so not all
Speaker 1: of them did. Something else that sets Tumbler apart from
Speaker 1: its competitors is that The site follows a chronological ordering
Speaker 1: system for posts, with the most recent posts being at
Speaker 1: the top. You do not get an algorithm shuffling everything
Speaker 1: around so that you see what the algorithm thinks will
Speaker 1: keep you there longer. That is different from Twitter. It's
Speaker 1: different from Facebook, and you might notice, if you've ever
Speaker 1: been on Facebook or Twitter that the posts you're looking
Speaker 1: at are all out of order chronologically. Tumbler passed on
Speaker 1: that particular approach, which I certainly appreciate. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of users much prefer having a reverse chronological ordering
Speaker 1: of content and you just keep on scrolling down until
Speaker 1: you reach the point where you're like, oh, I've seen
Speaker 1: this before, now I'm all caught up. Tumbler is also
Speaker 1: not as dominated by brands and influencers as a Facebook
Speaker 1: and Instagram and Twitter are. It has more of a
Speaker 1: community feel to it than other platforms. Now, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying Tumbler is perfect. In fact, I haven't really used
Speaker 1: Tumbler very much myself at all, but I do think
Speaker 1: it is a breath of fresh air if you felt
Speaker 1: lost in a sea of influencers, algorithms, brands promoting themselves
Speaker 1: and that kind of thing. But if you're tired of drama,
Speaker 1: Tumbler might not be a solution to that. Funny little
Speaker 1: side note, I actually decided to log into Tumbler for
Speaker 1: the first time in years while writing this, and one
Speaker 1: of the top things to populate in the trending tab,
Speaker 1: which is where it dumped me. I didn't realize that
Speaker 1: at first. I'm looking at like, I don't recognize any
Speaker 1: of these accounts. Did I follow all of these back
Speaker 1: when I was actually on Tumbler years and years ago?
Speaker 1: But one of the things I saw was a post
Speaker 1: about safety tips for new witches, which I thought was funny.
Speaker 1: Several of my friends consider themselves to be witches. That
Speaker 1: actually really tickled me to see this. I was like,
Speaker 1: does Tumbler know who my friends aren't? But then I realized,
Speaker 1: oh no, I'm in the trending tab. Once I popped
Speaker 1: over to the four you tabu, the posts were fewer
Speaker 1: and further between, and they were all very techy, so
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, okay, no, this is this is
Speaker 1: where I left off, all right. Next up, we got
Speaker 1: a company created by some ex Googlers. So Brett Taylor
Speaker 1: and Jim Norris had worked on Google Maps before they
Speaker 1: struck out on their own to work on their own
Speaker 1: idea at a Finchure capital firm called Benchmark Capital, which
Speaker 1: had its own kind of incubator program. So their idea
Speaker 1: was to bring together in one place all the different
Speaker 1: social network activity of a single user, so that you
Speaker 1: could catch up on a person's activities no matter where
Speaker 1: they were posting. Two other ex Googlers, Sanjeev Singh and
Speaker 1: Paul bou Kite, whose name I'm sure I have completely mispronounced,
Speaker 1: so I apologized for that. They helped build Gmail back
Speaker 1: in the day. Well, they ended up joining on this
Speaker 1: project as well, and the tool became friend Feed. It
Speaker 1: could aggregate social network activity across more than twenty different
Speaker 1: platforms when it launched, and even more as time went on.
Speaker 1: So that included stuff like Facebook and Twitter, but it
Speaker 1: also included stuff like Netflix and YouTube and last Fm
Speaker 1: and read It and things like that nature. So on
Speaker 1: friend Feed users could like posts and they could leave comments,
Speaker 1: much as you would on Facebook later on, but you
Speaker 1: could also see activity across all these different things. If
Speaker 1: if a user activated all these platforms on their their feed,
Speaker 1: anytime they would post at any of those sites, friend
Speaker 1: feed would aggregate it and pull it into that feed
Speaker 1: as well, so you'd have like this consolidated feed, which
Speaker 1: made it interesting for folks like me where I would
Speaker 1: post variations of the same thing on different platforms, and
Speaker 1: so on friend feed, you would get like multiple versions
Speaker 1: of essentially the same message, but it would be tailored
Speaker 1: to whatever platform I was going to. So, for example,
Speaker 1: I might make a longer post on Facebook to promote say,
Speaker 1: podcast episode, but on Twitter it would be a much
Speaker 1: shorter message. Meanwhile, friend feed you'd be like, Jonathan, just
Speaker 1: can't shut up about this podcast episode you did. But
Speaker 1: let's say you've got a friend who's really active on
Speaker 1: numerous social networks. So instead of having to go place
Speaker 1: to place to keep up with this friend, you know,
Speaker 1: all right, well have they posted new YouTube videos? Have
Speaker 1: they been active on Reddit? You would just subscribe to
Speaker 1: friend feed and you would get kind of a fire
Speaker 1: hose of all the content they were posting at different places,
Speaker 1: assuming that they enabled those platforms when they were joining
Speaker 1: friend Feed. So the number of supported services grew and
Speaker 1: it became a really impressive from that kind of perspective,
Speaker 1: But the problem was it didn't really fit in anywhere.
Speaker 1: The UI felt kind of like a hybrid between Twitter
Speaker 1: and Facebook, it never quite took off. Plus, in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, Facebook itself decided to acquire friend Feed. Facebook
Speaker 1: would continue to operate friend Feed for several more years,
Speaker 1: but in two thousand and fifteen it officially pulled the
Speaker 1: plug and the aggregator went dark. All right, let's go
Speaker 1: back to our timeline. In two thousand and eight, we
Speaker 1: got Plerk. So at this point, Twitter and Jaiku had
Speaker 1: both been out for a couple of years, and Plurk
Speaker 1: was another one character limit microblogging service that later would
Speaker 1: expand up to two characters. But clerks Ui was different.
Speaker 1: You know, Twitter and a lot of other social networks
Speaker 1: would arrange their messages vertically in roughly reverse chronological order,
Speaker 1: although as we've said, algorithms would change the order quite
Speaker 1: a bit depending upon what was being used at the time.
Speaker 1: But on the plerk website, messages are organized horizontally along
Speaker 1: a timeline, and the leftmost plurics represent the most recent messages,
Speaker 1: and as you go to the right you get to
Speaker 1: the older and older messages. This company was founded in
Speaker 1: Toronto with co founders Danny Lynn and Alvin Woon. Now
Speaker 1: the name Plurk has a few different meanings. One is
Speaker 1: a combination of the words people and lurk plerk. Another
Speaker 1: is the combination of play and work, and yet another
Speaker 1: is an acronym which is peace, love, unity, respect and karma.
Speaker 1: Plurk like other services I'm pluric. You can follow other
Speaker 1: people and you can read their timelines. You can upload photos,
Speaker 1: you can share links, you can import YouTube videos, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. For a while, Plurk had something called Qualifiers,
Speaker 1: which was sort of like a menu of words that
Speaker 1: would let you quickly use them those words to make
Speaker 1: a message. So you could use a word like loves
Speaker 1: or hates or likes or wishes, and you could do
Speaker 1: this to craft a message. And those words had highlight
Speaker 1: to them, so like the word loves obviously was associated
Speaker 1: with the color red, hates was associated with the color black.
Speaker 1: So you would very quickly be able to just glance
Speaker 1: at a message and you would see one of these
Speaker 1: highlighted words and you think, oh, I get the just
Speaker 1: Jonathan's mad about something again, I'm not even gonna bother
Speaker 1: reading this, which I think was a very useful tool
Speaker 1: for people who followed me. Not that different from how
Speaker 1: Facebook would incorporate moods like you would see that on
Speaker 1: Facebook posts for a while. I don't know if people
Speaker 1: still use it. I haven't been on Facebook and ages,
Speaker 1: so I don't know if people still use moods or not,
Speaker 1: or if it even is still a thing. Anyway, users
Speaker 1: could also respond to Clark messages. They could leave comments
Speaker 1: on a post, and it was way easier to follow
Speaker 1: a conversation on Plerk than it was at Twitter at
Speaker 1: the time. Anyway, Twitter had really yet to introduce threaded messages,
Speaker 1: and it was not easy to follow along and read
Speaker 1: responses to tweets, so it would be really tough to
Speaker 1: kind of figure out where a conversation was going on
Speaker 1: Twitter if you were not a direct part of it.
Speaker 1: But I'm plerk, it was way easier. You would just
Speaker 1: click on the relevant comment and then or or plerk
Speaker 1: and you would see all the comments below, so you
Speaker 1: could just follow the conversation and take part of it. Uh.
Speaker 1: That way, it was really easy. Clerk also introduced karma,
Speaker 1: so folks could award karma they saw stuff they liked doing.
Speaker 1: Certain actions would get you karma, like if you added
Speaker 1: a photo to your profile that got you karma and
Speaker 1: receiving karma meant that you would be able to do,
Speaker 1: you know, to access certain features like special emoticons that
Speaker 1: otherwise we're not available, you know, or being able to
Speaker 1: assign a title to your timeline if you had enough
Speaker 1: karma around. Alvin Woon relocated to Taiwan. He took Pork
Speaker 1: with him. The service never got a ton of love
Speaker 1: here in the West. Like you know, there are people
Speaker 1: who used it, but it really wasn't popular. But it
Speaker 1: did have a steady user base over in Asia and
Speaker 1: particularly in Taiwan. So the company got a round of
Speaker 1: Series A funding in as well, and it is still
Speaker 1: around today. You can actually go to pluric dot com
Speaker 1: and make yourself an account if you like, actually have one.
Speaker 1: I've posted maybe like a dozen times since I first
Speaker 1: made the account way back in I don't know ten
Speaker 1: or something like that. I don't know when I made
Speaker 1: my Plark account, but I haven't posted to it very much.
Speaker 1: It didn't stick with me the way Twitter did for
Speaker 1: a very long time. Okay, that's enough for it today.
Speaker 1: I don't want to go super long with this episode.
Speaker 1: We've got a few more we're going to cover before
Speaker 1: we conclude the history of social networks, We've got some
Speaker 1: ones that we need to chat about, like Google Plus.
Speaker 1: I think it's an important one to talk about because
Speaker 1: it really kind of illustrate some mistakes that Google made
Speaker 1: in the process of trying to create another social network.
Speaker 1: And there are a few other examples that we can
Speaker 1: talk about. But obviously, like we've hit most of the
Speaker 1: really big ones, at least the big ones in the West,
Speaker 1: there are some that are really big in other parts
Speaker 1: of the world, like in China and in Russia. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure I have listeners in places where they're thinking, hey,
Speaker 1: you're not really covering the ones that are popular here,
Speaker 1: and to that I apologize, Um, but you know, I
Speaker 1: just I just drew the line to the ones that
Speaker 1: were really big or known at least here in the West,
Speaker 1: and not you know, the ones that that people had
Speaker 1: less contact with over here. Maybe in the future I'll
Speaker 1: do an episode where I focus on some of these
Speaker 1: other social networks that are almost unknown here in the
Speaker 1: United States. But I have already four episodes into this series,
Speaker 1: and if I kept on doing it, it it would probably
Speaker 1: be like eight episodes long. And uh, I still have
Speaker 1: to do my end of the year wrap up, folks.
Speaker 1: So yeah, to that end, if you have suggestions for
Speaker 1: topics I should cover on tech Stuff, including any big
Speaker 1: news tech news items from two that you think should
Speaker 1: be included in my end of the year wrap up,
Speaker 1: please get in touch with me. You've got a couple
Speaker 1: of ways of doing that. One as you can download
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download, it's
Speaker 1: free to use. Navigate over to tech Stuff. You just
Speaker 1: put tech Stuff in the little search field pop up
Speaker 1: over to the podcast. Over on the podcast page, you'll
Speaker 1: see there's a little microphone icon. If you click on that,
Speaker 1: you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds
Speaker 1: in length, and if you even like, you can let
Speaker 1: me know and I can play it in a future episode.
Speaker 1: But I won't do it unless you tell me too,
Speaker 1: or if you prefer, you can use Twitter. The handle
Speaker 1: for the show is tech Stuff H s W and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.