Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works in Dieheart Radio and I love all
Speaker 1: things tech. And as I record this episode, it's still
Speaker 1: pretty early in two thousand nineteen. It's February two thou nineteen,
Speaker 1: and the social networking site Facebook has been in the
Speaker 1: news frequently for several reasons over the last many months,
Speaker 1: mostly to the company's constern nation. These have not been
Speaker 1: positive news stories for the company. Mark Zuckerberg himself said
Speaker 1: that perhaps the social networking industry in particular might require regulation.
Speaker 1: And I've seen a few calls from lots of different
Speaker 1: people that Facebook should either divest itself of some of
Speaker 1: its properties like Instagram or else maybe the government should
Speaker 1: come in and do it for them and bust it up,
Speaker 1: kind of like busting up the old telephone monopolies back
Speaker 1: in the day before they kind of reformed. That's a
Speaker 1: different story. Facebook is one of a few enormous companies
Speaker 1: Amazon and Google would be two others that has so
Speaker 1: much access to our personal information that it's always going
Speaker 1: to be a potential threat, and it could be a
Speaker 1: potential threat either through internal company decisions, things that Facebook
Speaker 1: itself does, or there's the possibility of external interference, such
Speaker 1: as during the presidential election in the United States. It's
Speaker 1: a powerful tool that could be used positively or negatively.
Speaker 1: Facebook was largely able to grow to this size by
Speaker 1: outperforming numerous other social networking sites, all of which aim
Speaker 1: to make a business out of connecting people online. So
Speaker 1: in this episode, I want to talk about a few
Speaker 1: of the social networking sites that attempted to carve out
Speaker 1: a place online. Some of them even predated Facebook. But
Speaker 1: this is just a small selection I'm going to give
Speaker 1: you in this episode, because there have been lots of
Speaker 1: different attempts to do this, and some of them are
Speaker 1: really localized to specific countries or two specific interests, so
Speaker 1: I couldn't cover them all, uh, and some of them
Speaker 1: didn't even make it past the early development stages. Also,
Speaker 1: I do not plan to cover my Space in any
Speaker 1: sort of detail, because I've done an entire episode, actually
Speaker 1: multiple episodes, dedicated to my Space, and technically it's still around,
Speaker 1: though it's not anything like what it was originally. So
Speaker 1: some people would argue that my Space itself is no
Speaker 1: longer a thing, at least not as it was originally intended.
Speaker 1: So anyway, here's a selection of social networking sites that
Speaker 1: ultimately failed, and a little bit about each of them.
Speaker 1: And I figured it might be a good idea to
Speaker 1: start off with a couple of examples from truly huge companies,
Speaker 1: because that helps illustrate how hard it can be to
Speaker 1: establish a social networking service that people actually want to use.
Speaker 1: So if Google and Apple can't do it, these huge
Speaker 1: companies that have billions of dollars of support behind them,
Speaker 1: it's got to be hard to do, right. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna start off with Google Plus, keeping in mind that
Speaker 1: Google will pop up again and again in this episode
Speaker 1: because of their involvement in trying to establish social networks.
Speaker 1: But Google Plus is a pretty recent one and one
Speaker 1: that has some more news coming up very shortly. And
Speaker 1: you know, Google Plus tried a lot. It tried hard
Speaker 1: for many years to become a true social network destination,
Speaker 1: but as of April twenty nineteen, it's going to be
Speaker 1: shut down for good. And honestly, it probably could have
Speaker 1: closed up shop a few years ago and the world
Speaker 1: in general wouldn't have noticed. Instead, it took a massive
Speaker 1: data breach, or at least the possibility of one, for
Speaker 1: Google to close the door on Google Plus. So let
Speaker 1: me talk a little bit about it. So Google Plus
Speaker 1: wasn't the Internet uh companies first foray into social networking.
Speaker 1: As I had mentioned, there had also been Google Buzz,
Speaker 1: which was a tool that was integrated directly into Gmail,
Speaker 1: but was discontinued when the company prepared to launch Google Plus.
Speaker 1: There was also Google friend Connect, which lasted from two
Speaker 1: thousand eight to two thousand and twelve for all non
Speaker 1: blogger sites. As in Google Blogger sites, even the blogger
Speaker 1: sites had to say goodbye to it. In Google Plus
Speaker 1: was supposed to take the best ideas from both of
Speaker 1: those earlier efforts and add more innovation when it would
Speaker 1: launch in And there's some other social networks that relate
Speaker 1: back to Google that we'll talk about later in this episode.
Speaker 1: So Google Plus would let you organize the people in
Speaker 1: your online social circle into circles. That's what it called
Speaker 1: the different groups. You had circles, and you could drag
Speaker 1: a person's picture into circles to sort them. So you
Speaker 1: could name circles whatever you wanted, and you could create
Speaker 1: lots of them in order to sort people out into
Speaker 1: specific groups. So you could create circles like friends, family, coworkers,
Speaker 1: or you could create people who really like that one
Speaker 1: joke I tell. In my case, I had a circle
Speaker 1: just for people that worked with me at the Georgia
Speaker 1: Renaissance Festival because there were a few of them on
Speaker 1: Google Plus back in the day. Then when you posted
Speaker 1: on the social networking platform, you could choose which circles
Speaker 1: could see your post. You might want the whole world
Speaker 1: to be able to view it, in which case you
Speaker 1: would just make it public. But let's say that you
Speaker 1: wanted to address one group and leave out everybody else,
Speaker 1: like maybe you're asking your friends about recommendations for a
Speaker 1: job search, in which case you probably don't want your
Speaker 1: coworkers to see that post. Then you would select your friends,
Speaker 1: you would leave out your coworkers, and that would be
Speaker 1: that you know, you would just post in The only
Speaker 1: people who would see it were the ones that you
Speaker 1: had authorized to see it. That was the basic idea,
Speaker 1: and the platform had all the features that you would
Speaker 1: expect to find on social networks. You could post updates,
Speaker 1: you could share links, you can share photos, you can
Speaker 1: make new friends, you can join groups. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of integration with Google's other services like YouTube. But apart
Speaker 1: from the initial excitement when the platform first opened, fueled
Speaker 1: in large part by the fact that when it was
Speaker 1: first open, Google held an invitation only closed beta, so
Speaker 1: the only way you could get an account was if
Speaker 1: you've got to invite. It gave the platform some exclusivity,
Speaker 1: which made people want to be part of it more. Now.
Speaker 1: I know because I was part of that first group
Speaker 1: and I was invited to participate, and it was kind
Speaker 1: of fun because it was still a very small group
Speaker 1: of people, generally speaking, who were online, and they were
Speaker 1: almost all business leaders or tech journalists. So I got
Speaker 1: the chance to catch up with friends of mine who
Speaker 1: also got in on that closed beta. Once it opened up,
Speaker 1: and after I had that initial rush of everyone adding
Speaker 1: in their accounts, it had trouble catching on. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't just the design that didn't really grab people's interests.
Speaker 1: It was some of the policies that Google had put
Speaker 1: into place. So this was around the same time that
Speaker 1: Google had decided to make a single log in for
Speaker 1: all its services, including stuff like YouTube, and they wanted
Speaker 1: to link each account to the account owner's real name,
Speaker 1: so they wanted to make sure that the name of
Speaker 1: the account was the same as the person who created
Speaker 1: that account. Never mind if you have an online following
Speaker 1: that knows you by a stage name or a brand.
Speaker 1: The intent was to create accountability, so I would say
Speaker 1: the intentions were honorable. Google figured people would behave better
Speaker 1: if their actions online could be traced back to their
Speaker 1: real identities. If you can't hide behind anonymity, ne're less
Speaker 1: likely to be a jerk face on line. That was
Speaker 1: the logic, but there was an intense backlash from the
Speaker 1: online community due to this policy, and there were legitimate
Speaker 1: objections to it. It wasn't just people saying I don't
Speaker 1: want to have my name on the internet. Some were
Speaker 1: worried that they could be targeted if their identities were revealed.
Speaker 1: Maybe they use online social networks as a way of
Speaker 1: expressing opinions about an oppressive government. You know, they might
Speaker 1: not live in a place where such things are are
Speaker 1: tolerated and might even be actively punished. They don't want
Speaker 1: to have their identity traced directly back to them, but
Speaker 1: they still want to be able to share those views
Speaker 1: with the wider world. Some people had undergone extremely personal changes,
Speaker 1: like maybe there was someone who had had a sex
Speaker 1: change operation and literally they were no longer the person
Speaker 1: they used to be. They have transformed into a new identity.
Speaker 1: They did not want their online presence to reflect someone
Speaker 1: who no longer existed. Google eventually backed off this policy,
Speaker 1: but the platform never really recovered from that. In fact,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of animosity, not just on Google Plus,
Speaker 1: but particularly on YouTube related to all of this. Now,
Speaker 1: in first glance, the platform seemed to be doing fairly well.
Speaker 1: If you were just looking at numbers and you weren't
Speaker 1: looking too hard, it looked like things were going pretty smoothly,
Speaker 1: or at least there was an encouraging trend, because in
Speaker 1: six there were around three million registered accounts that were
Speaker 1: listed as active. Now that's not like the billion of
Speaker 1: accounts that Facebook was boasting, but still it's almost half
Speaker 1: a billion. You're getting close to half a billion. That's
Speaker 1: a respectable population. Except cent of those accounts had nothing
Speaker 1: in them. They were empty. They had someone who had
Speaker 1: created them, but they weren't posting anything. The nail in
Speaker 1: the coffin would be that data breach I had mentioned,
Speaker 1: or really it was more of a vulnerability the design
Speaker 1: Google Plus would potentially allow a third party app developer
Speaker 1: to get far more data access than was intended. So
Speaker 1: let's say that you have a Google Plus account and
Speaker 1: you want to enable an app that will work on
Speaker 1: top of Google Plus. You could give that app access
Speaker 1: to your information on your profile. Maybe it's just the
Speaker 1: public information, and you could also give access to the
Speaker 1: public profile information of your of your friends, so but
Speaker 1: it's not anything that was listed privately. It would just
Speaker 1: be the same sort of stuff you would see on
Speaker 1: your friends profile if you were a total stranger and
Speaker 1: you just navigated to that person's profile. So anything they
Speaker 1: chose that was public this app could see a security probe. However,
Speaker 1: discovered that the app developers could also get access to
Speaker 1: information stored in fields that were not tagged as public,
Speaker 1: so that meant that there this vulnerability would allow a
Speaker 1: third party developer to see all sorts of information someone
Speaker 1: had voluntarily put into their profile but had not chosen
Speaker 1: to reveal publicly. That can include stuff like real names,
Speaker 1: email addresses, uh, the occupations. These are mostly optional fields,
Speaker 1: not ones that you had to fill out. But even
Speaker 1: if you had filled them out and told Google Plus
Speaker 1: that you wanted them to be private unless you sorted
Speaker 1: someone into a friend bucket for example, or circle. I
Speaker 1: should say that these apps could get access to that information.
Speaker 1: So Google posted a message that said it had independently
Speaker 1: discovered this vulnerability. It wasn't brought to their attention from
Speaker 1: a breach, but rather while investigating Google Plus, they discovered
Speaker 1: it and according to Google, according to their their experience,
Speaker 1: they didn't see any evidence the developer had ever discovered
Speaker 1: or exploited it, and at least that's what they said.
Speaker 1: So the company patched the vulnerability in March two thousand eighteen.
Speaker 1: But the message was clear. Google Plus was actually more
Speaker 1: trouble than it was worth to keep around, and so
Speaker 1: there will be no more Google Plus after April nineteen.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't make sense to keep uh expending energy
Speaker 1: and money and resources on a product that very few
Speaker 1: people are using. But what about Apple? I mentioned Apple
Speaker 1: as well as one of the other big companies that
Speaker 1: attempted to create a social network and failed. Well. They
Speaker 1: tried to integrate a social network like feature into the
Speaker 1: Juggernaut program, iTunes. So Apple launched iTunes way back in
Speaker 1: two thousand one. They announced it at the Macworld Expo
Speaker 1: that year and revealed to the world an enormous digital
Speaker 1: music online storefront, which would end up changing the way
Speaker 1: people bought music and and would even change the way
Speaker 1: that music would be recorded. The album experience became less
Speaker 1: important than the single experience became way more important, and
Speaker 1: then it would go on to support the creation of
Speaker 1: a burgeoning art form called the podcast. But nine years later,
Speaker 1: in upon the release of iTunes version ten, Apple would
Speaker 1: introduce Ping. Ping was a music centric social networking platform.
Speaker 1: So with your profile on iTunes, you could follow other
Speaker 1: users or music artists. You could choose bands or musicians
Speaker 1: to follow, and you could search out their concert listings.
Speaker 1: You could also use paying to indicate that you are
Speaker 1: attending one of those concerts, you know, kind of be
Speaker 1: one of those super cool people, almost almost a social
Speaker 1: status sort of thing, like, Yeah, I'm gonna be at
Speaker 1: the concert in Brooklyn of this band that four people
Speaker 1: know about, but don't worry, you'll all know about it
Speaker 1: in two years. Or you could create or peru's song
Speaker 1: lists or album charts. You could see the photos and
Speaker 1: the videos that your favorite musicians were sharing, and ideally
Speaker 1: it allow for easier music discovery, something that is pretty tricky,
Speaker 1: but Ping did not get much traction, and one possible
Speaker 1: reason for that was that upon launch, there was no
Speaker 1: way to integrate Paying's features into Facebook profiles. According to
Speaker 1: The Verge, that wasn't necessarily Apple's choice. The Verge reported
Speaker 1: that there were rumors at the very least that Apple
Speaker 1: had intended to integrate Facebook Support and Paying, but they
Speaker 1: had to pull it out at the last minute for
Speaker 1: unsaid reasons. I have no idea what the reasoning was. Now,
Speaker 1: despite an early rush of users making profiles, just like
Speaker 1: with Google Plus, Ping didn't really catch on. Apple chose
Speaker 1: to shut down the service just two years later in
Speaker 1: twent Both Google Plus and Paying were latecomers to the
Speaker 1: social networking party. Though after the break, I'll talk about
Speaker 1: a site that actually debuted before Facebook and MySpace. But
Speaker 1: first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand two, three developers named Peter Chen,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Abrams, and Dave Lee wanted to create an online
Speaker 1: tool that would make it easy for people to connect
Speaker 1: with one another on the Internet. You would be able
Speaker 1: to link up with folks you already knew, and you
Speaker 1: would be able to make new friends over this great
Speaker 1: communications tool. No longer would your real world environment limit
Speaker 1: who you could befriend. So these three got together and
Speaker 1: they began to develop this tool one of the earlier
Speaker 1: social networking sites. Sometimes people refer to it as the
Speaker 1: first real social network, or at least the first real
Speaker 1: one to enjoy mainstream success. It was called Friendster, but
Speaker 1: I want to be clear, this was two thousand two.
Speaker 1: There were sites that I would call social network sites
Speaker 1: that predated friends Ster. I do agree that Friendster was
Speaker 1: the first one to be really successful. So they were
Speaker 1: able to launch a prototype of this Friendster site in
Speaker 1: the spring of two thousand two, and within a few
Speaker 1: months they had more than three million users, which is
Speaker 1: not bad when you remember that this was a pretty
Speaker 1: early idea. Still, even though there had been a couple
Speaker 1: of other attempts at creating social networks, that was at
Speaker 1: a time when there were very few people online at all.
Speaker 1: So this is still a new concept for a lot
Speaker 1: of people. So you had to explain to people what
Speaker 1: this was all about in the first place before you
Speaker 1: could even get them to decide whether or not they
Speaker 1: wanted to join. And Friendster tried to turn everyone into
Speaker 1: Kevin Bacon, and by that I mean Friendster would show
Speaker 1: you how you were connected to strangers through a network
Speaker 1: of mutual friends. So you might discover that someone you
Speaker 1: have never met, someone you do not know, is actually
Speaker 1: very good friends with a couple of people you do know,
Speaker 1: and maybe those people you know are actually in totally
Speaker 1: different social circles. Like otherwise, you wouldn't realize that these
Speaker 1: two people had anything in common. Uh. The example I
Speaker 1: would give is, say, let's say that I found out
Speaker 1: that someone I knew from my work at the Georgia
Speaker 1: Renaissance Festival was friends with someone uh that was also
Speaker 1: friends with a coworker, And I would have thought, well,
Speaker 1: I didn't expect those two worlds to cross because I've
Speaker 1: never seen seen them interact. But now here's this third
Speaker 1: person or fourth person. Really, because I'm counting myself in
Speaker 1: here too, this fourth person who is a connection both
Speaker 1: to my co workers and to the folks that I
Speaker 1: work with at the Georgia Renaissance Festival. Maybe I would
Speaker 1: like to be friends with that person too, because chances
Speaker 1: are I share more than a few common interests with them.
Speaker 1: That was the theory. It was a very compelling concept.
Speaker 1: This idea that you could meet people that you would
Speaker 1: very much be friends with, you just hadn't had the
Speaker 1: opportunity yet, you hadn't met them yet, and this would
Speaker 1: be a way to meet them. Unless I'd be remiss,
Speaker 1: I have to mention this was not a new idea,
Speaker 1: even for online social networks. Back in the mid nineties,
Speaker 1: there was a sort of proto social network site called
Speaker 1: six degrees and it was built on that very premise. However,
Speaker 1: it appeared online at that time I was talking about
Speaker 1: when there weren't that many people on the World Wide Web.
Speaker 1: Very few people were aware of what the web was
Speaker 1: or had any experience with it, so there weren't a
Speaker 1: whole lot of people to sign up for it, and
Speaker 1: it eventually kind of faded away. Not many people remember it, however,
Speaker 1: I will say the site did return years later, and
Speaker 1: if you have an account, if you if you had
Speaker 1: made an account for six degrees back in the mid nineties,
Speaker 1: then you could still log in to that old account. Um,
Speaker 1: so it does technically exist, but there's fewer than like
Speaker 1: a quarter million people on there these days. In two
Speaker 1: thousand three, the developers of Friendster were able to secure
Speaker 1: twelve million dollars in funding from an investment firm. But
Speaker 1: while that was a really good shot in the arm,
Speaker 1: the site was finding it difficult to handle its rapidly
Speaker 1: expanding popularity. There were more people joining the site than
Speaker 1: they could accommodate, and so they were always trying to
Speaker 1: play catch up, trying to build out enough capacity to
Speaker 1: handle the people who wanted to use the service. There
Speaker 1: were glitches and server issues, the site would load slowly
Speaker 1: and users would become frustrated it had grown too quickly
Speaker 1: for the company to manage. My Space, which launched in
Speaker 1: August two thousand three, also began to get popular and
Speaker 1: siphon away users, and Friendster never really recovered from that.
Speaker 1: The site continued on for a few more years. While
Speaker 1: it's popularity declined in the States, it did remain strong
Speaker 1: in Asia, so it wasn't like it was going obsolete everywhere.
Speaker 1: But then Facebook emerged and started to gain in popularity,
Speaker 1: and Friendster would continue its decline in the United States,
Speaker 1: and two thousand nine, the company launched a read as sign,
Speaker 1: attempting to position itself as the cool social network. In fact,
Speaker 1: it actually tried to leverage the fact the more people
Speaker 1: were on MySpace and Facebook. It was essentially saying, why
Speaker 1: do you want to be where everybody else is? Why
Speaker 1: do you want to be mainstream? Man? It's very hipster
Speaker 1: kind of mentality, like let's let's go someplace that not
Speaker 1: everyone's already at. Later, in two thousand nine, a company
Speaker 1: called m OL Global acquired Friendster for around forty million dollars,
Speaker 1: although when you subtract all the debts and everything, it
Speaker 1: was closer to twenty six million, so most most sites
Speaker 1: list the actual purchase price at twenty six point four
Speaker 1: million dollars um. That's deducting stuff like Friendster's secured debt
Speaker 1: or payouts to Friendster executives. This wasn't great news for
Speaker 1: the company in two thousand nine because way back in
Speaker 1: two thousand three, Google had offered to acquire the company
Speaker 1: for around thirty million dollars, before all that debt was
Speaker 1: accrued and before all those executive payments would be necessary,
Speaker 1: so this was actually a step down. Six years later,
Speaker 1: Friendster continue to operate as designed for a short while,
Speaker 1: but m OL would go back to the drawing board
Speaker 1: and relaunch Friendster as a gaming social networking site. But
Speaker 1: even that effort failed, and in June two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: the site shut down and has remained that way ever since. Now,
Speaker 1: jumping back to Google for a second, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about or Cut, another early social networking site, Ork.
Speaker 1: It would debut after Friendster and MySpace. It was one
Speaker 1: of the famed twenty percent projects so over at Google
Speaker 1: back in the day. I don't know if this is
Speaker 1: still the case, but Google part of its reputation was
Speaker 1: that it had a common practice to allow employees to
Speaker 1: dedicate up to twenty of their work time to personal projects,
Speaker 1: as long as those personal projects were aligned with Google's goals.
Speaker 1: So whatever your normal job was N five at Google,
Speaker 1: you would do that for eight percent of your time,
Speaker 1: and then for twenty of your time you could work
Speaker 1: on something else. Sometimes those projects would grow into something
Speaker 1: more than that. They might evolve into a feature or
Speaker 1: even a fully fledged product at Google. And one of
Speaker 1: those was or Kit, which was named after its creator,
Speaker 1: a Turkish developer named Orcit Bouya Cockton or Could joined
Speaker 1: Google or At the man joined Google after graduating from Stanford.
Speaker 1: He built a social network and called it Eden, but
Speaker 1: then discovered they wouldn't be able to secure the domain
Speaker 1: Eden dot com so they needed to go back to
Speaker 1: the drawing board for the name, and ultimately he was
Speaker 1: told that he should really name it after himself and
Speaker 1: call it or Kit or kitt and Turkish means happy city,
Speaker 1: so it seemed like a good fit. Or Kit would
Speaker 1: become a social networking site and became popular pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: It actually overtook Friendster in popularity, and by two thousand
Speaker 1: and six it was the second most popular social network
Speaker 1: on the Internet. Number one at that time was my Space,
Speaker 1: and the majority of orchits users were in Brazil. Se
Speaker 1: of the users of orch at were in Brazil, and
Speaker 1: in fact the site would maintain a dominant position in
Speaker 1: India and Brazil for several years, but would eventually lose
Speaker 1: ground to Facebook, to all other domains in the United States,
Speaker 1: in India, and in two thousand twelve, they finally lost
Speaker 1: to Facebook in Brazil. Facebook would displace it and never
Speaker 1: look back. Google would continue to support orch at dot
Speaker 1: com until two thousand fourteen. Orc At, the man by
Speaker 1: then had already left the orchid team. In fact, he
Speaker 1: had left the orch At team in two thousand eight
Speaker 1: and became a product manager at Google, but then he
Speaker 1: left Google entirely. In the same year that the social
Speaker 1: networking site went offline, he would go on to found
Speaker 1: another social network called Hello, which still exists. It initially
Speaker 1: launched in Brazil and it expanded from there, so that
Speaker 1: one's still around. You could join Hello today if you
Speaker 1: wanted to. Now there have been a lot of social
Speaker 1: networks that have also been aimed at niche audiences, not
Speaker 1: just the mainstream general Internet audience. There's actually an Early
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff episode dedicated to these niche social networks, and
Speaker 1: it included stuff like Ravelry, which is a social network
Speaker 1: site dedicated to knitting. This, by the way, isn't me
Speaker 1: dismissing knitting. As far as I'm concerned, Knitting is a
Speaker 1: pretty awesome creative hobby. But it surprised me at the
Speaker 1: time that there was a social network dedicated to it. Eventually,
Speaker 1: my horizons expanded. My wife started knitting, and then I
Speaker 1: realized exactly how social and activity it can be. She
Speaker 1: does knitting circles and so of course it makes sense
Speaker 1: to have a social network dedicated to it. But at
Speaker 1: the time I just thought that's just weird. Anyway, Ravelry
Speaker 1: is not what I really wanted to talk about. The
Speaker 1: social network that I wanted to mention escaped my attention
Speaker 1: until I started looking into this episode. I didn't know
Speaker 1: about it, or if I had heard about it, I
Speaker 1: didn't remember it. It was called eons e O N
Speaker 1: s Now. Part of the reason of not knowing about
Speaker 1: it was because I'm not in the generation that was
Speaker 1: targeted by that social network. It was aimed at baby boomers,
Speaker 1: people who were at least forty, although most reports at
Speaker 1: the time said it was aiming at the fifty plus
Speaker 1: crowd when the site launched back in two thousand six.
Speaker 1: And while a certain former tech Stuff co host would
Speaker 1: take great joy in pointing out how old I am,
Speaker 1: I was not in my forties back in two thousand six. Heck,
Speaker 1: I wasn't even working for how Stuff works in two
Speaker 1: thousand six, So maybe I can be forgiven for being
Speaker 1: ignorant of this particular social network. Jeff Taylor, who was
Speaker 1: the founder of the site Monster dot com, also was
Speaker 1: the founder of eons dot com. He created it to
Speaker 1: target this market of baby boomers, the fifty plus crowd.
Speaker 1: He felt that they were under served in the social
Speaker 1: network space, and I'm inclined to agree with that assessment.
Speaker 1: Social network sites when they first launch, or at least
Speaker 1: when they first catch on, tend to do so within
Speaker 1: a certain generation band of users, a certain age range.
Speaker 1: In general, there's always going to be exceptions, but you'll
Speaker 1: see that the majority of your users tend to fall
Speaker 1: within a certain range, and unless the network is able
Speaker 1: to adapt over time, that generation band remains pretty much
Speaker 1: the same it ages as the the demographic of the
Speaker 1: the audience. Ages and younger generations tend to opt for
Speaker 1: alternatives because, among many reasons, there are a quote too
Speaker 1: many old people end quote on that other site. Eons
Speaker 1: dot com was supposed to be a site dedicated to
Speaker 1: those quote unquote old people now. The site aimed for
Speaker 1: a clean, easy to navigate interface. They wanted to get
Speaker 1: rid of a lot of the things that would clutter
Speaker 1: up the profiles on competing social network sites. It had
Speaker 1: a simplified search engine, and it also boasted get ready
Speaker 1: for it, the world's largest obituary database. The goal was
Speaker 1: to aim at boomer's interests while keeping the features as
Speaker 1: easy to understand and to use as possible for those
Speaker 1: who lacked computer savvy. In two thousand eleven, a company
Speaker 1: called Crew Media purchased the site from Jeff Taylor for
Speaker 1: an undisclosed amount. At the time, the site had about
Speaker 1: eight hundred thousand registered users, very small number compared to
Speaker 1: other social network sites, but you're also talking about people
Speaker 1: who have probably a lot of a lot of revenue,
Speaker 1: who a love income they could they could use on
Speaker 1: various advertising if if you were so inclined. The following year,
Speaker 1: in you Jers became concerned because the site went offline
Speaker 1: without any warning, and after about a week, executive said
Speaker 1: the problem was that the server company they were working
Speaker 1: with had some sort of error and that this was
Speaker 1: all getting fixed behind the scenes. But after a little
Speaker 1: more time it turned out that there was a bit
Speaker 1: more to it than that, and in June two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: the Eons team posted to the site's Facebook page the boy,
Speaker 1: isn't that fun that a social network site had its
Speaker 1: own page on another social network? Anyway, they explained that
Speaker 1: the sites service provider was asking for a financial commitment
Speaker 1: that the company could not meet, and in return, the
Speaker 1: the service would end up fixing this problem and getting
Speaker 1: the eons dot com site back up online, But because
Speaker 1: they said they couldn't meet that financial commitment, they couldn't
Speaker 1: pay to have the site fixed, and so it remained down.
Speaker 1: The executive said they hoped they could get the site
Speaker 1: back up and running, but that never happened. Users were
Speaker 1: told that their information would remain locked away and safe.
Speaker 1: It wasn't going to be sold off or shared with anyone.
Speaker 1: But as of this date, the site has remained dark.
Speaker 1: I've got a couple more networks I want to mention,
Speaker 1: but before I get to those, let's take another quick
Speaker 1: break to thank our sponsor. Hey, it's been a minute.
Speaker 1: How about we pop back over to Google, you know,
Speaker 1: the giant social network killing machine. Now. Sadly, for Google,
Speaker 1: the social networks it has slain haven't been competitors. Instead,
Speaker 1: they've been the company's own properties. Not all of them, however,
Speaker 1: were developed within Google. Some of them came through acquisitions,
Speaker 1: like jaiqu or if you prefer Haiku, that's with a J,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call it Jaiku. So Jaiku was a service
Speaker 1: launched by a couple finished developers whose names I would
Speaker 1: absolutely butcher if I tried to say them, and I
Speaker 1: already did that to poor or cut, so let's just
Speaker 1: move on. The crux of Jaiku was essentially the same
Speaker 1: as Twitter. It was founded as an SMS messaging service.
Speaker 1: Kind of add on, it was called a micro blogging service,
Speaker 1: and you were limited to one forty characters for your posts,
Speaker 1: the same as Twitter's original limit. Now, the reason for
Speaker 1: that had to do with the limitations of the SMS format,
Speaker 1: which could carry one hundred sixty characters. Some of those
Speaker 1: characters needed to be set aside for user names, so
Speaker 1: the limit for the actual message length was one forty characters.
Speaker 1: Users could choose to make their Jaiku stream public or
Speaker 1: private and thus invitation only, so in other words, it
Speaker 1: was really similar to Twitter, though in those early days,
Speaker 1: early adopters said that Jaiku's implementation was slightly better, largely
Speaker 1: to a dedicated mobile app that allowed users to leave
Speaker 1: comments on other people's messages, almost like a Facebook post,
Speaker 1: as opposed to the at reply method that Twitter relied on.
Speaker 1: And keep in mind this was before the smartphone revolution,
Speaker 1: so this is in the old symbian operating system days.
Speaker 1: Google purchased Jaiku in two thousand seven, which made some
Speaker 1: users nervous. Google had a bad reputation for this. They
Speaker 1: had already purchased a service called Dodgeball, which was an
Speaker 1: early check in service, you know, one of those where
Speaker 1: you go someplace in real life and you open up
Speaker 1: your phone and you open up an app, and then
Speaker 1: you check into that place, so it lets other people
Speaker 1: know where you are. Well. The founders of Dodgeball would
Speaker 1: go on to later create four Square, which would kind
Speaker 1: of take that same same idea and run with it,
Speaker 1: at least for a while. I'll have to do another
Speaker 1: episode about four Square at some point, because that's an
Speaker 1: interesting story too, about how that service changed dramatically over time. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it turned out that the Jaiku fans had good reason
Speaker 1: to be nervous because Google did very very little with Jiku,
Speaker 1: or if it did do very much with it, it
Speaker 1: was never publicly disclosed. They did shut down the service
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, just two years after purchasing it. That
Speaker 1: was around the same time that Google also shut down Dodgeball,
Speaker 1: So if you were to try and visit the U
Speaker 1: r L to Jiku dot com, you would get a
Speaker 1: Google four oh four error. Sad story. A similar micro
Speaker 1: blogging service called Pounce stuck around a little bit longer,
Speaker 1: but ultimately it also bowed to Twitter's dominance in the field.
Speaker 1: The founders of Pounds were Daniel Berka, Leah Culver, and
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose had co founded Revision three and
Speaker 1: Dig Daniel Burka. Burka was a creative director over a dig.
Speaker 1: Leah Culver was fresh out of grad school, and they
Speaker 1: launched Pounds in two thousand seven. The service had more
Speaker 1: cheers than Twitter, including the ability to share stuff like
Speaker 1: photos or videos or MP three's you could embed them
Speaker 1: in messages. That was something that would take a while
Speaker 1: to get implemented into Twitter. Even so, the service just
Speaker 1: wasn't attracting users at the same rate that Twitter was.
Speaker 1: It got launched just a little too late, I think,
Speaker 1: to take advantage of that, and one year after being founded,
Speaker 1: a company called six Apart approach the founders and offered
Speaker 1: to buy Pounds off of them, and they agreed, so
Speaker 1: six Apart purchase Pounds and then they announced that the
Speaker 1: service was going to get shut down in just a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks. So you might say, well, why would
Speaker 1: a company come in and buy something just to shut
Speaker 1: it off, And typically the answer to that question is
Speaker 1: the company isn't interested in the product. The company is
Speaker 1: interested in the people who made the product. Not necessarily
Speaker 1: the founders but the actual developers. So it's quite possible
Speaker 1: that that was the whole reason why, apart when after
Speaker 1: Pounds in the first place. Either way, Pounds was no
Speaker 1: more just a short time after it had been founded. Now,
Speaker 1: it's important to remember that for most social network sites,
Speaker 1: the users are in fact the product. It's we gotta remember,
Speaker 1: you know, you always asked if if a service is free,
Speaker 1: that really means that you are the thing that's being sold.
Speaker 1: Social networks tend to make money through advertising, and they
Speaker 1: attract advertisers because those social networks are privy two tons
Speaker 1: of private information about users, and advertisers would kill for
Speaker 1: that sort of granular demographic information. I say that because
Speaker 1: the next social network I want to mention came from
Speaker 1: a behemoth in the retail space that was actually launched
Speaker 1: by the company Walmart, and a lot of people dismissed
Speaker 1: it immediately as a crass attempt to cash in on
Speaker 1: the social network trend, and honestly, it's hard to dis
Speaker 1: missed those criticisms. However, I would argue that Walmart was
Speaker 1: just more blatant in its motivations than other social networks.
Speaker 1: A lot of social networks out there were just equally
Speaker 1: as concerned with leveraging a social network in order to
Speaker 1: make money. They just it just wasn't as obvious. So
Speaker 1: while it's easy to to cast dispersions, I think we
Speaker 1: need to cast them equally across the field. Anyway, let's
Speaker 1: talk about the Hub. So Walmart created the Hub in
Speaker 1: two thousand six. And part of the reason why I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people criticize this is because of
Speaker 1: the target demographic. It wasn't meant for adults. It was
Speaker 1: actually targeted toward teens. Now, according to the company, the
Speaker 1: purpose of the site was so that teens could quote
Speaker 1: express their individuality end quote. But this expression wasn't exactly
Speaker 1: free expression. It actually came with some very strict limitations.
Speaker 1: For one thing, it would notify a user's parents that
Speaker 1: the user had joined the service. So you know, you
Speaker 1: had to provide email, I address I assume of your
Speaker 1: your parents, and as part of that, the parents would
Speaker 1: get a notification saying, Hey, your kids trying to join
Speaker 1: the social networking service. Thought you should know just in case.
Speaker 1: Users were not allowed to send messages to one another
Speaker 1: privately on the platform, so you couldn't send emails or
Speaker 1: anything like that to each other um. It screened all
Speaker 1: the content that was coming through the site, and it
Speaker 1: was largely geared towards the commerce side of social networking.
Speaker 1: So it was a restrictive platform that was obviously self serving,
Speaker 1: and it didn't work. It did not attract users the
Speaker 1: way Walmart had hoped, and after just three months, Walmart
Speaker 1: pulled the plug on the site and the hub went flat. Now,
Speaker 1: my last entry of all these failed social networks is
Speaker 1: just kind of sort of social network. It's it's social
Speaker 1: network adjacent, and that would be Yahoo Buzz. This one's
Speaker 1: also a weird for me to talk about because while
Speaker 1: I cannot remember which article it was, I remember distinctly
Speaker 1: early in my career. It was shortly after we started
Speaker 1: adding more staff writers for how Stuff Works dot com,
Speaker 1: So this would be in the era when Josh and
Speaker 1: Chuck of Stuff you Should Know had joined and a
Speaker 1: few others were just fresh on the staff. Yahoo Buzz
Speaker 1: started to really get a big push behind it, even
Speaker 1: though it had been around for several years at that point,
Speaker 1: and one of my articles got featured on Yahoo Buzz
Speaker 1: early on in this in this push, and as a result,
Speaker 1: the numbers for that article skyrocketed. It became one of
Speaker 1: the most visited articles on the house stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com site, and it was mine, which is fantastic. It's
Speaker 1: a great feeling to see one of your articles just
Speaker 1: go viral like this. Now, as it turns out, manufacturing
Speaker 1: that kind of thing is pretty darn hard to do,
Speaker 1: and people can typically suss out when you're trying to
Speaker 1: do it and they just dismiss it. So these days
Speaker 1: I just focus on trying to do a good job
Speaker 1: and create good content and not worry about whether or
Speaker 1: not it goes viral, because I figure that's up to
Speaker 1: other people. That's not up to me. Anyway. Let's get
Speaker 1: back to Buzz. So technically, Buzz was a community news
Speaker 1: site where users could share articles they had seen online
Speaker 1: with each other. You could have your own news feed
Speaker 1: of curated articles that you found interesting, and other people
Speaker 1: could visit your profile and read the articles that you
Speaker 1: had curated. It was pretty darn similar to what dig
Speaker 1: was already doing and what Reddit would go on to
Speaker 1: do in the future. Yeah who. Buzz originally launched in
Speaker 1: two thousand and Yahoo would sunset the service in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, along with several other social media and blog services,
Speaker 1: all At the same time, the company had come to
Speaker 1: the conclusion that Buzz and its companions were too challenging
Speaker 1: to monetize effectively, and so it made more sense to
Speaker 1: drop those services and focus on strategies that did generate revenue.
Speaker 1: So along with Buzz, my blog log, Yahoo picks, and
Speaker 1: Yahoo bookmarks all got the acts and it all ended. Now,
Speaker 1: these are all the social networks that for one reason
Speaker 1: or another went out of business, got shuttered, got shut down.
Speaker 1: But there are lots of other ones that are technically
Speaker 1: still around but have very little activity around them or
Speaker 1: a very small population where they don't get very much coverage.
Speaker 1: They don't they aren't able to emerge from beneath the
Speaker 1: shadow of the giants of Facebook and Twitter. For example,
Speaker 1: there's plerk, which is a Twitter alternative that a lot
Speaker 1: of people loved when it first came out. It still exists.
Speaker 1: There's l O E l l O that was pitched
Speaker 1: as an ad free social network experience and these days
Speaker 1: is largely populated by artists and creative types, so it
Speaker 1: still exists. It's much more stripped down simple. Uh. Some
Speaker 1: people would say it's too simple, but uh, it's one
Speaker 1: that a lot of artists are using these days rather
Speaker 1: than Facebook. So there's still a few dozen smaller social
Speaker 1: network sites that don't have the attention or influence of
Speaker 1: the big guys, and some people tend to put those
Speaker 1: on the same lists as as the defunct ones I've mentioned.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's entirely fair because the ones I'm
Speaker 1: talking about literally they don't exist anymore, or at least
Speaker 1: they don't exist as their own separate entity. If they
Speaker 1: exist at all, they exist in the form of features
Speaker 1: that have been implemented into other social networks. Um. One
Speaker 1: person suggested, I do uh Diaspora as an example, but
Speaker 1: that one technically is still going. It's uh not incredibly popular,
Speaker 1: there's not a huge number of people using it, but
Speaker 1: it hasn't gone away yet. So there are more that
Speaker 1: I could talk about that are are still going. They
Speaker 1: still have a passionate base in some cases at least,
Speaker 1: but they don't, you know, they don't even have a
Speaker 1: metric to compare against the big ones. I guess the
Speaker 1: point of all this is that maybe it is time
Speaker 1: to go in and break up Facebook a bit. It's
Speaker 1: essentially a monopoly when it comes to the social network space,
Speaker 1: especially now that, you know, Google Plus. Google Plus probably
Speaker 1: had a decent chance if it had been implemented in
Speaker 1: a better way, and if it hadn't had that data
Speaker 1: breach problem to have really challenged Facebook, but it never
Speaker 1: quite had the cool factor beyond that exclusivity when it
Speaker 1: first launched. Uh, no one else has really come close. However,
Speaker 1: we said the same thing about my Space back in
Speaker 1: the day, and then Facebook was able to turn all
Speaker 1: that around. So it may just mean that somebody has
Speaker 1: to come up with a very compelling approach to social networks,
Speaker 1: possibly one that appeals to a younger audience, and maybe
Speaker 1: then they could topple face it that way. But honestly,
Speaker 1: at the rate the company is going right now, they're
Speaker 1: doing a pretty good job toppling themselves, or at least
Speaker 1: sticking their corporate foot into their corporate mouth. But that
Speaker 1: wraps up this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If
Speaker 1: you have any suggestions for future topics of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: why not send me a quick message. The email address
Speaker 1: for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com or dropped by our website that's tech Stuff
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. You'll find other ways to contact me there.
Speaker 1: You'll find the archives of the show. There. Go check
Speaker 1: that out, and don't forget to visit our store that's
Speaker 1: over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. Remember,
Speaker 1: every purchase you make goes to help the show, and
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