WEBVTT - The History of Social Networks: Flickr to Reddit 0:00:04.400 --> 0:00:07.800 Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. 0:00:11.840 --> 0:00:14.960 Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, 0:00:15.120 --> 0:00:18.000 Jonathan Strickland. I am an executive producer with I Heart 0:00:18.079 --> 0:00:23.319 Radio and how the Tech Area. We are back with 0:00:23.400 --> 0:00:26.880 our series of episodes that are covering the history of 0:00:27.240 --> 0:00:30.960 social networks, So this one would be the third episode 0:00:31.480 --> 0:00:34.840 on this particular subject. In the last episode in this series, 0:00:34.880 --> 0:00:39.360 we focused exclusively on my Space and Facebook, two networks 0:00:39.400 --> 0:00:42.360 that launched a year apart from one another, and how 0:00:42.400 --> 0:00:45.360 my Space dominated the landscape for a few years, but 0:00:45.640 --> 0:00:49.159 due to lots of reasons, gave up the lead to 0:00:49.200 --> 0:00:52.960 Facebook and ultimately faded from view for a couple of years. 0:00:53.640 --> 0:00:57.560 It did eventually return as a music discovery platform and 0:00:57.760 --> 0:01:00.560 less of a social network, and that it's kind of 0:01:00.600 --> 0:01:03.480 what it is today. And of course we all know 0:01:03.680 --> 0:01:08.360 how Facebook the company turned into meta and the various 0:01:08.400 --> 0:01:12.160 issues that this company currently faces. So let's get back 0:01:12.200 --> 0:01:16.120 to our timeline and see what's next, because now we're 0:01:16.160 --> 0:01:19.720 in the era of social networks where things got really 0:01:19.840 --> 0:01:23.759 crowded for a while. In fact, it got so crowded 0:01:23.880 --> 0:01:28.320 that an analyst named Clay Shirkey created a new acronym 0:01:28.560 --> 0:01:32.360 to describe what was going on at the time. That 0:01:32.480 --> 0:01:38.559 acronym was y A S N S yasn's it actually 0:01:38.560 --> 0:01:43.360 stands for yet another social networking service. So you know, 0:01:43.720 --> 0:01:47.240 when folks start bandying about acronyms like that, that you're 0:01:47.280 --> 0:01:51.200 flirting with over saturation. That everyone saw social networks as 0:01:51.240 --> 0:01:55.240 being kind of the next phase of the web, and 0:01:55.280 --> 0:01:57.440 so everyone was trying to get in on it. But 0:01:57.600 --> 0:02:00.200 we're still in two thousand and four. Because even though 0:02:00.240 --> 0:02:03.200 I and I've said this in the previous episodes, even 0:02:03.240 --> 0:02:06.520 though I go through kind of the the an overview 0:02:06.520 --> 0:02:08.480 of the history of each company as we get to it, 0:02:09.280 --> 0:02:12.040 I keep going back to the timeline. It just wouldn't 0:02:12.080 --> 0:02:15.240 make sense to strictly stick year by year because so 0:02:15.360 --> 0:02:18.640 much is happening at so many different places. Now, my 0:02:18.720 --> 0:02:22.400 Space would rise to dominate the social networking space, and 0:02:22.480 --> 0:02:25.200 Facebook was not that far behind, but there was still 0:02:25.240 --> 0:02:29.639 some room in the environment, and some services like linked In, 0:02:30.160 --> 0:02:33.040 which had launched earlier in two thousand three, were really 0:02:33.080 --> 0:02:35.600 able to carve out a space by focusing on a 0:02:35.720 --> 0:02:40.359 niche in social networking, with LinkedIn's example being a social 0:02:40.400 --> 0:02:45.960 network for professional networking that allowed linked In to flourish 0:02:46.080 --> 0:02:50.440 in that specific arena and continue to this day. There 0:02:50.440 --> 0:02:53.680 would be several other niche social networks that would achieve 0:02:53.760 --> 0:02:58.120 varying degrees of popularity among slices of users, such as 0:02:58.200 --> 0:03:01.480 pet owners with sites like Dogster. I'm not going to 0:03:01.639 --> 0:03:05.160 dive into those really, because they get to be so 0:03:05.320 --> 0:03:09.400 specific and so relatively small that there's not much point 0:03:09.480 --> 0:03:13.280 in diving into them. I should also mention that even 0:03:13.320 --> 0:03:16.040 early on, there were issues with people trying to game 0:03:16.480 --> 0:03:20.359 the systems, which isn't really that big of a surprise, 0:03:20.520 --> 0:03:22.480 I suppose, because if you have a system, someone's going 0:03:22.520 --> 0:03:25.280 to figure out how to exploit it. So, for example, 0:03:25.720 --> 0:03:29.440 on Friendster, which we covered in a previous episode, the 0:03:29.520 --> 0:03:33.639 administrators decided to limit how far out from your connections 0:03:34.080 --> 0:03:36.800 you could explore on the site. So the idea was, 0:03:37.640 --> 0:03:40.080 if there was a profile that was more than four 0:03:40.120 --> 0:03:43.440 degrees of separation from your profile, you wouldn't be able 0:03:43.480 --> 0:03:45.120 to view it. You wouldn't be able to go and 0:03:45.120 --> 0:03:48.160 look at that profile because you wouldn't be close enough 0:03:48.160 --> 0:03:52.960 connections to merit it. So some people just wanted to 0:03:53.040 --> 0:03:56.480 amass as many friends as possible to expand their network 0:03:56.480 --> 0:03:59.320 out and essentially make it impossible for anyone to have 0:03:59.360 --> 0:04:01.760 a profile they couldn't look at. It was kind of 0:04:01.800 --> 0:04:04.520 like a game. The number of friends you accumulated would 0:04:04.520 --> 0:04:07.480 be analogous to the points you could amass in a 0:04:07.600 --> 0:04:10.640 video game. To that end, people were doing stuff like 0:04:10.720 --> 0:04:14.120 sending friend requests to distant degrees of separation, you know, 0:04:14.160 --> 0:04:17.800 folks they didn't know or had never been aware of before, 0:04:18.480 --> 0:04:22.719 just to see more potential friends being opened up. Some 0:04:22.760 --> 0:04:26.799 folks would make fake profiles, either of like a fictional 0:04:26.920 --> 0:04:30.880 character or maybe a celebrity, solely for the purposes of 0:04:31.040 --> 0:04:34.479 gathering more friends. The abuse of the platform caused some 0:04:34.600 --> 0:04:38.400 real cultural problems for the site, and we would see 0:04:39.000 --> 0:04:44.320 similar behaviors emerge on other platforms, not exactly the same thing, necessarily, 0:04:44.960 --> 0:04:49.400 but more examples of people saying, oh, it works this way, 0:04:49.440 --> 0:04:52.520 but what if I use it this other way, which 0:04:52.560 --> 0:04:54.840 is a real hacker mentality, And I don't mean that 0:04:54.920 --> 0:04:59.080 in a bad way. Now. Whether it was because users 0:04:59.080 --> 0:05:03.120 wanted to feel popular or they were simply finding value 0:05:03.120 --> 0:05:06.560 in the network beyond its intended purpose, the activities on 0:05:06.640 --> 0:05:10.479 Friendster often led to the platform itself losing value, and 0:05:10.600 --> 0:05:13.840 that the folks who were not game gaming the system 0:05:13.880 --> 0:05:16.240 who were just there to use it as it was intended. 0:05:17.000 --> 0:05:20.480 We're finding it harder to navigate the networks and to 0:05:20.520 --> 0:05:23.600 be sure that the people they were befriending were actually 0:05:23.600 --> 0:05:25.680 who they thought they were. All right, let's get back 0:05:25.680 --> 0:05:30.479 to two thousand four. Uh, Katerina Fake and Stuart Butterfield, 0:05:30.480 --> 0:05:33.880 who at the time were married. They later would separate. 0:05:34.360 --> 0:05:37.960 We're working on an m m O RPG. That's massive 0:05:38.080 --> 0:05:42.960 multiplayer online role playing game. The game's name was Game 0:05:43.120 --> 0:05:47.159 Never Ending, should have been Game Never Starting because the 0:05:47.160 --> 0:05:50.760 game would never actually launch. But but within that game, 0:05:51.000 --> 0:05:54.080 there was a feature in which users wouldn't be able 0:05:54.080 --> 0:05:57.600 to upload photos that ended up being spun off into 0:05:57.640 --> 0:06:00.880 a fully fledged service of its own, and service became 0:06:00.920 --> 0:06:06.080 known as Flicker f l I c k R. By 0:06:06.080 --> 0:06:09.559 the way, there was this also this era of web 0:06:09.600 --> 0:06:13.680 based companies where it became trendy to not include certain 0:06:13.760 --> 0:06:16.520 vowels in your name. Twitter, which we will talk about 0:06:16.520 --> 0:06:20.280 in the next episode of this series, was at one 0:06:20.320 --> 0:06:23.640 point just called t W T t R with no 0:06:23.800 --> 0:06:27.400 eye and no E in it. But anyway, Flicker was 0:06:27.440 --> 0:06:32.440 not the first online photo sharing service. There were others 0:06:32.480 --> 0:06:35.120 like photo Bucket, and there was an early version of 0:06:35.120 --> 0:06:38.760 Picasa that kind of had elements of that. There was 0:06:38.800 --> 0:06:42.359 also smug Mug, which was really more for photographers, but 0:06:42.440 --> 0:06:46.480 it did introduce something really useful. So it wasn't first 0:06:46.480 --> 0:06:48.960 it allowing you to upload your photos to an album, 0:06:49.440 --> 0:06:52.680 but it did allow you to do meta tagging, and 0:06:52.760 --> 0:06:55.960 so you could tag photos with any kind of metadata 0:06:56.000 --> 0:06:58.880 you liked, not just photos you uploaded, but also photos 0:06:58.960 --> 0:07:04.040 that you viewed, and that made these photos searchable by keyword. 0:07:04.560 --> 0:07:08.120 So let's say you're an avid diver and a photographer 0:07:08.440 --> 0:07:13.320 and you upload photos of some of your dives and 0:07:13.440 --> 0:07:16.800 use relevant keywords, and you use the same keywords to 0:07:16.800 --> 0:07:19.880 search for other photos from other divers like you. Maybe 0:07:19.880 --> 0:07:23.240 you find a community of of diver photographers that you 0:07:23.280 --> 0:07:25.840 didn't know about and you would connect with them. So 0:07:25.960 --> 0:07:31.320 Flicker effectively outsourced the taxonomy of the photographs that were 0:07:31.360 --> 0:07:34.880 on its site to the community, and the community eagerly 0:07:34.920 --> 0:07:37.520 took up the task. And this just made Flicker a 0:07:37.560 --> 0:07:40.280 more valuable tool because you could find photos on just 0:07:40.360 --> 0:07:42.840 about anything. If you just started searching for certain keywords, 0:07:43.520 --> 0:07:48.280 Flicker would become really famous pretty quickly. Fake and Butterfield 0:07:48.400 --> 0:07:51.760 founded it in February two four and just a year 0:07:51.840 --> 0:07:55.880 later in early two thousand five, Internet giant at the time, 0:07:56.280 --> 0:08:00.840 Yahoo would come a column. Now, Flicker was still in 0:08:00.880 --> 0:08:05.520 the early stages of receiving influxes of cash from angel investors, 0:08:06.200 --> 0:08:09.360 and it was very early days to consider selling to 0:08:09.440 --> 0:08:12.200 a bigger company, and this was not an easy decision. 0:08:12.840 --> 0:08:16.160 Should you play the long game and try to build 0:08:16.280 --> 0:08:19.800 value in your company, which would in turn push up 0:08:19.840 --> 0:08:23.559 the price tag. Alternatively, you could try and just stay 0:08:23.840 --> 0:08:27.200 a solvent, standalone company on your own and not sell 0:08:27.320 --> 0:08:31.560 to anybody. Or should you cash out when the opportunity arises. 0:08:31.720 --> 0:08:35.520 This is a very tough thing to consider because keep 0:08:35.559 --> 0:08:38.600 in mind, this is two thousand five, it was not 0:08:38.840 --> 0:08:42.600 that far removed from the dot com crash, and that 0:08:42.640 --> 0:08:47.040 crash illustrated that nothing is ever a sure thing. So 0:08:47.920 --> 0:08:50.559 sometimes when that opportunity comes around, you may not get 0:08:50.640 --> 0:08:54.480 another one. So there's a lot of pressure. Not the 0:08:54.520 --> 0:08:56.959 same time, flickers star was on the rise. I mean, 0:08:57.000 --> 0:09:00.960 even other services like Blogger were meaning on Flicker to 0:09:01.000 --> 0:09:05.800 power image uploads, so Flicker was becoming more influential in 0:09:05.880 --> 0:09:11.000 the web in general. Ultimately, the founders made the decision 0:09:11.080 --> 0:09:16.160 to accept Yahoo's deal, which was reportedly in the neighborhood 0:09:16.160 --> 0:09:19.920 of thirty five million bucks, though some sources say that 0:09:19.960 --> 0:09:22.520 it's actually maybe as low as twenty two million. It 0:09:22.600 --> 0:09:25.320 just depends upon which one you're looking at. As we 0:09:25.360 --> 0:09:29.080 will see over and over again in this episode, these 0:09:29.160 --> 0:09:33.000 acquisition deals, they're typically not public. Because you're talking about 0:09:33.000 --> 0:09:36.319 a private company being purchased, you don't often know how 0:09:36.400 --> 0:09:40.120 much was actually paid for it, so we hear everything 0:09:40.160 --> 0:09:43.199 from twenty to thirty five million dollars. Now, later on, 0:09:43.360 --> 0:09:45.760 as social network sites were being bought and sold in 0:09:45.840 --> 0:09:49.640 the hundreds of millions of dollars range, it would appear 0:09:49.640 --> 0:09:53.000 in retrospect like this could have been the wrong call, right, 0:09:53.880 --> 0:09:57.880 that Flicker should have held on to itself and just 0:09:58.000 --> 0:10:00.120 waited a little bit longer, and it probably could have 0:10:00.200 --> 0:10:04.120 sold for way more money, But at the time that 0:10:04.200 --> 0:10:06.840 was impossible to say. You just couldn't be sure of it. 0:10:07.679 --> 0:10:11.280 As for Flicker, under Yahoo, it would grow substantially. It 0:10:11.360 --> 0:10:14.000 went from a quarter million users to more than two 0:10:14.040 --> 0:10:17.480 million in less than a year, and it also increased 0:10:17.480 --> 0:10:20.080 in features, included one that I thought was super cool 0:10:20.160 --> 0:10:23.640 where you could look at a map and click on 0:10:23.720 --> 0:10:27.120 locations of the map, and it would pull up photographs 0:10:27.280 --> 0:10:29.880 of that location, so you could actually click around on 0:10:29.920 --> 0:10:32.760 a map and see photos of those sites. And I 0:10:32.800 --> 0:10:35.040 thought that was really cool. It was a great way 0:10:35.080 --> 0:10:40.559 to contextualize photographs. Butterfield and Fake stuck around with Flicker 0:10:40.679 --> 0:10:43.440 until around two thousand eight, and they left the company 0:10:43.480 --> 0:10:45.840 at that point. At that point they had also split 0:10:45.920 --> 0:10:48.440 as a married couple as well. They would each go 0:10:48.480 --> 0:10:51.240 on to found other companies. Butterfield would actually co found 0:10:51.280 --> 0:10:54.920 one that's a really big deal today, that being Slack. 0:10:55.400 --> 0:10:58.079 So yeah, one of the founders of Flicker would then 0:10:58.120 --> 0:11:02.040 go on to co found Slack. Flicker gave users a 0:11:02.040 --> 0:11:06.240 lot of storage space to play with in ten yahoo. 0:11:06.840 --> 0:11:09.400 I mean, this was crazy. They gave users an entire 0:11:09.640 --> 0:11:15.160 terrabyte of free storage for their photos. That was unfathomable 0:11:15.600 --> 0:11:18.600 at that time. It's still pretty crazy today, but I mean, really, 0:11:18.640 --> 0:11:22.560 at that time, that was nuts. Flicker Pro users who 0:11:22.679 --> 0:11:26.319 were paying a subscription fee for their their pro account 0:11:26.679 --> 0:11:30.439 would actually get to what amounted to be unlimited storage. 0:11:31.040 --> 0:11:34.280 But by this point, Flicker was already facing competition from 0:11:34.320 --> 0:11:39.600 services like Instagram and Facebook, and users didn't have the 0:11:39.640 --> 0:11:43.520 same storage at those services. They couldn't put in nearly 0:11:43.559 --> 0:11:47.320 as many photos there, nor did they enjoy the same 0:11:47.360 --> 0:11:51.160 extensive meta tagging features that you had on Flicker. But 0:11:51.240 --> 0:11:55.840 the tighter social integration on those platforms one out. So 0:11:55.920 --> 0:12:02.520 while Flicker undoubtedly had incredible teachers and great benefits in 0:12:02.559 --> 0:12:05.959 the form of storage, it's just you know, people were 0:12:06.000 --> 0:12:08.680 being more active on these other social networks, and so 0:12:08.760 --> 0:12:13.200 flickers importance began to fade a bit. Moreover, there were 0:12:13.520 --> 0:12:17.520 real serious problems going on at the parent company of Yahoo. 0:12:17.679 --> 0:12:19.880 It was kind of teetering on the edge of a 0:12:19.920 --> 0:12:23.880 free fall death spiral for a while. I've done episodes 0:12:23.960 --> 0:12:27.920 about Yahoo and what went on over there. I may 0:12:27.960 --> 0:12:30.440 have to revisit that topic at some point and give 0:12:30.920 --> 0:12:33.280 kind of a new take, or at least an update 0:12:33.320 --> 0:12:37.080 on that, because so much has happened at Yahoo. But 0:12:37.440 --> 0:12:42.720 Verizon acquired Yahoo in and then put Yahoo under a 0:12:42.760 --> 0:12:47.760 subsidiary company called Oath, and then the following year smug Mug, 0:12:48.160 --> 0:12:51.200 you know, an old photo competitor that had launched in 0:12:51.240 --> 0:12:54.880 two thousand two but had kind of eschewed the social 0:12:54.920 --> 0:12:58.240 network approach. It was really just purely about, you know, 0:12:58.440 --> 0:13:02.200 being a place to store for potos. It acquired Flicker 0:13:02.480 --> 0:13:07.280 from Oath, so Flicker ultimately was acquired by an old competitor. 0:13:07.760 --> 0:13:11.280 In two thousand eighteen, Flicker announced that the it was 0:13:11.320 --> 0:13:15.200 bringing an end to that terrabyte of storage. Users would 0:13:15.200 --> 0:13:18.000 then have a cap of just one thousand photos and 0:13:18.040 --> 0:13:21.719 that anything beyond that would start to see photos deleted 0:13:21.800 --> 0:13:24.200 from the service, and that led to a bit of 0:13:24.200 --> 0:13:26.800 a scramble at least among some parts of the Internet 0:13:26.920 --> 0:13:30.320 to preserve information. But in many ways, this is kind 0:13:30.320 --> 0:13:33.360 of like having a physical photo album and then misplacing it, 0:13:33.480 --> 0:13:35.720 you know, losing it, and if it's out of your mind, 0:13:35.800 --> 0:13:37.680 you probably don't even miss it. It's just when you 0:13:37.720 --> 0:13:39.680 think about it that you're like, oh, yeah, whatever happened 0:13:39.679 --> 0:13:43.679 to that now. Flickers fate also reminds us that online 0:13:43.720 --> 0:13:47.679 storage is not necessarily for forever. It might seem like 0:13:47.760 --> 0:13:50.720 that because these are really big companies, they have a 0:13:50.720 --> 0:13:53.760 lot of redundancy built into them. You know. It's one 0:13:53.800 --> 0:13:56.559 of those things where like, if you store your pictures 0:13:56.880 --> 0:13:59.760 locally and something happens to your home, you might lose 0:13:59.800 --> 0:14:02.480 all the pictures. But if you store them in the cloud, 0:14:02.760 --> 0:14:06.280 then something happens to a server in the cloud. Those 0:14:06.720 --> 0:14:10.000 photos are more likely than not stored on multiple other 0:14:10.080 --> 0:14:12.640 servers so you don't lose them. So we don't often 0:14:12.720 --> 0:14:15.559 think of things stored in the cloud as being temporary, 0:14:15.679 --> 0:14:17.319 but they can be, you know, if the company goes 0:14:17.360 --> 0:14:19.880 out of business, or it's acquired by another company or whatever. 0:14:20.080 --> 0:14:23.280 It can happen. Ultimately, there's no completely safe way to 0:14:23.320 --> 0:14:26.440 store your digital information, whether it's local or on the cloud, 0:14:26.960 --> 0:14:29.760 though hopefully most cloud systems will at least give signs 0:14:29.840 --> 0:14:35.640 that you should migrate stuff elsewhere before they go belly up. Okay, 0:14:35.680 --> 0:14:38.760 that's Flicker. When we come back, we're gonna talk more 0:14:38.840 --> 0:14:42.040 about a social network that we mentioned in the first 0:14:42.080 --> 0:14:44.680 episode in this series but didn't really go into. But 0:14:44.840 --> 0:14:57.560 first this quick break. Okay, we talked about Flicker. Now 0:14:57.640 --> 0:15:00.560 let's move on to Tagged and A and we tugged 0:15:00.560 --> 0:15:03.240 a little bit about Tagged in the first episode because 0:15:03.280 --> 0:15:07.520 Tagged ultimately acquired High five in two thousand eleven, and 0:15:07.560 --> 0:15:10.480 we mentioned High five early on in this series. But 0:15:10.600 --> 0:15:13.240 Tagged had its beginnings in two thousand four when co 0:15:13.360 --> 0:15:18.880 founders Gregg Singh and Johann Schleier Smith launched a site 0:15:18.960 --> 0:15:23.800 intended for the under eighteen crowd. Like the team at Facebook, 0:15:23.960 --> 0:15:27.680 this project started at Harvard University, but while Facebook was 0:15:27.720 --> 0:15:30.880 aimed at college students, Tagged was very much looking at 0:15:30.960 --> 0:15:34.400 kids in middle and high school ages. Now. To that end, 0:15:34.880 --> 0:15:38.000 the creators set about making an environment that would emphasize 0:15:38.040 --> 0:15:42.320 security and privacy, which was absolutely critical considering the ages 0:15:42.400 --> 0:15:45.840 of the users. So users who were thirteen or fourteen 0:15:45.920 --> 0:15:49.600 years old, their profiles were restricted so that the public 0:15:49.640 --> 0:15:51.840 would not be able to view them, nor would anyone 0:15:52.000 --> 0:15:54.240 on the platform who was over the age of sixteen. 0:15:54.680 --> 0:15:56.720 They wouldn't be able to see the thirteen or fourteen 0:15:56.800 --> 0:16:00.600 year old profiles either. Likewise, users who or fifteen or 0:16:00.640 --> 0:16:05.080 sixteen their profiles were not viewable by the public. So 0:16:05.320 --> 0:16:08.320 these restrictions remained in place when in two thousand and six, 0:16:08.680 --> 0:16:12.320 Tagged opened up to users over the age of eighteen. 0:16:12.760 --> 0:16:16.840 So initially Tagged looks at people eighteen and younger. Then 0:16:16.880 --> 0:16:18.480 they say, all right, we're opening it up for people 0:16:18.520 --> 0:16:21.040 who are older than eighteen. You might wonder why, Well, 0:16:21.040 --> 0:16:25.640 one reason why you would do that is because your age, 0:16:26.040 --> 0:16:28.560 you're the age of your users is going to continue 0:16:28.600 --> 0:16:31.480 to creep up. Right, Like if you attract someone to 0:16:31.600 --> 0:16:35.600 your site when they're fifteen. Four years later, that person's nineteen, 0:16:36.040 --> 0:16:37.960 and if your site no longer allows them to be 0:16:38.040 --> 0:16:41.400 on there and kicks them off, well that is a problem. Right, So, 0:16:41.760 --> 0:16:45.200 anytime you see a site that's aimed at younger users, 0:16:45.240 --> 0:16:48.120 there's a chance for it to evolve to also cater 0:16:48.200 --> 0:16:51.880 to older ones. Tagged made a pivot fairly early on. 0:16:52.080 --> 0:16:56.200 As my Space and Facebook we're dominating social networking, Tagged 0:16:56.200 --> 0:16:59.000 found out from its users that the people who are 0:16:59.080 --> 0:17:03.360 using Tagged, we're doing it for social discovery. By that, 0:17:03.480 --> 0:17:07.360 I mean finding and forming new friendships as opposed to 0:17:07.880 --> 0:17:10.840 finding your existing friends from real life and connecting to 0:17:10.880 --> 0:17:13.800 them on there. So that's what Facebook and my Space 0:17:13.880 --> 0:17:17.560 were being used for. Tagged was used to find new folks, 0:17:17.960 --> 0:17:20.960 and so Tagged evolved into becoming more of a discovery 0:17:21.000 --> 0:17:24.719 platform than your traditional social network, and it served as 0:17:24.800 --> 0:17:28.320 kind of a compliment to the growing networks rather than 0:17:28.480 --> 0:17:32.160 as a competitor, which made it a little bit more 0:17:32.240 --> 0:17:35.720 secure than some of its fellow social networks that were 0:17:35.760 --> 0:17:38.200 coming out around this time. Now, that's not to say 0:17:38.280 --> 0:17:41.239 that Tagged didn't have its own share of downsides, at 0:17:41.320 --> 0:17:43.920 least from the perspective of a non user who wasn't 0:17:43.960 --> 0:17:48.400 interested in the service, because when you signed up for Tagged, 0:17:48.440 --> 0:17:51.000 when you made an account for Tagged, the site would 0:17:51.040 --> 0:17:54.919 encourage you to share your email address book with the site. 0:17:55.480 --> 0:17:58.160 Then the site would go on to blast out emails 0:17:58.160 --> 0:18:00.960 to all your contacts in an effort to get them 0:18:00.960 --> 0:18:04.639 to come and join Tagged two. Now, at some points 0:18:04.720 --> 0:18:07.760 during the company's history, some of those emails would suggest 0:18:07.800 --> 0:18:10.879 that users had been tagged in posts, or rather that 0:18:10.960 --> 0:18:13.080 you had been tagged in a post by a user, 0:18:13.800 --> 0:18:17.680 or maybe that this this person had personally invited you 0:18:17.760 --> 0:18:21.480 to join Tagged, and that wasn't necessarily true. It was 0:18:21.520 --> 0:18:25.520 just part of these blast email approaches to try and 0:18:25.840 --> 0:18:29.399 get more users onto the service. All of that kind 0:18:29.440 --> 0:18:33.639 of somewhat shady behavior led to a lawsuit in two 0:18:33.680 --> 0:18:36.679 thousand nine, and ultimately the company would settle out of 0:18:36.720 --> 0:18:40.520 court and agree to not be quite so aggressive in 0:18:40.600 --> 0:18:44.640 its marketing approach. Now, as I said earlier, Tagged acquired 0:18:44.760 --> 0:18:48.040 High Fives i p in two thousand eleven. It was 0:18:48.080 --> 0:18:51.399 scheduled to hold its own i p O initial public 0:18:51.480 --> 0:18:54.440 offering and thus become a publicly traded company in two 0:18:54.480 --> 0:18:59.800 thousand fourteen, but Tagged scrubbed those plans because user be 0:19:00.000 --> 0:19:05.600 saviors were shifting away from desktops, so people were not 0:19:06.000 --> 0:19:10.000 accessing Tagged using their computers the way they had been, 0:19:10.520 --> 0:19:15.080 which was affecting Tag's revenue model. This was all part 0:19:15.200 --> 0:19:17.960 of a general move as people were starting to rely 0:19:18.119 --> 0:19:22.119 more on mobile devices, particularly smartphones, to access the web. 0:19:22.920 --> 0:19:25.800 And as I've said in numerous episodes on on lots 0:19:25.800 --> 0:19:31.200 of different topics, it cannot be overstressed how big an 0:19:31.200 --> 0:19:35.880 impact the smartphone revolution had on web content. You had 0:19:36.600 --> 0:19:41.920 entire companies that were dedicated two figuring out how best 0:19:41.960 --> 0:19:47.000 to package material for mobile because everyone was using mobile 0:19:47.000 --> 0:19:51.439 devices to access the web, and if your content was 0:19:51.520 --> 0:19:54.680 not mobile friendly, then you were losing out on tons 0:19:54.680 --> 0:19:56.880 of traffic. Well that's kind of what Tagged was going 0:19:56.920 --> 0:19:59.800 through at this point, and I also mentioned this in 0:19:59.840 --> 0:20:03.280 the High five entry in the series. But the Meat Group, 0:20:03.560 --> 0:20:09.359 that's M E E. T. Meat Group acquired Tagged and 0:20:09.680 --> 0:20:14.080 subsequently High five in two thousand and seventeen. Tagged still 0:20:14.119 --> 0:20:17.680 exists today. You can make a profile and you can 0:20:17.800 --> 0:20:21.440 use it to meet new friends. I haven't, but that's 0:20:21.480 --> 0:20:25.919 because I am old and I am grouchy. There have 0:20:26.000 --> 0:20:30.879 been a few massively effective Internet startup killers in the 0:20:31.040 --> 0:20:34.560 short history of the web. There was the dot com 0:20:34.560 --> 0:20:38.679 bubble bursts that killed lots of startups. It laid waste 0:20:38.760 --> 0:20:40.800 to tons of them, though to be fair, some of 0:20:40.800 --> 0:20:43.760 those companies were probably on thin ice to begin with. 0:20:44.200 --> 0:20:47.440 It was just that the dot com crash was definitely 0:20:47.440 --> 0:20:49.440 too much for them to make it through. But yeah, 0:20:49.480 --> 0:20:52.520 there there were plenty of early web startups where if 0:20:52.520 --> 0:20:54.480 you took a good look at their business plan or 0:20:54.520 --> 0:20:57.720 in some cases lack thereof, you'd say, yeah, of course, 0:20:57.760 --> 0:21:00.159 as didn't last the test of time. But there have 0:21:00.200 --> 0:21:03.200 been also various economic downturns, like one in two thousand 0:21:03.320 --> 0:21:06.040 eight that a lot of companies were unable to push through. 0:21:06.960 --> 0:21:11.000 But there's one killer who has been consistently effective in 0:21:11.040 --> 0:21:16.400 this startup world and then terrifying, and that would be Google. 0:21:16.760 --> 0:21:20.520 Google is the company that never launched or acquired an 0:21:20.520 --> 0:21:24.400 application that it could not subsequently kill off later on. 0:21:25.160 --> 0:21:30.120 The company's infamous for launching or acquiring and then shutting 0:21:30.160 --> 0:21:34.840 down various services and features, or sometimes incorporating parts of 0:21:34.880 --> 0:21:39.360 them into other products. So there are some Frankenstein monster 0:21:39.560 --> 0:21:43.840 style Google products out there that are the sum of 0:21:43.880 --> 0:21:47.080 a bunch of parts that came from other startups and 0:21:47.119 --> 0:21:51.320 services over the years. And there will be other examples 0:21:51.400 --> 0:21:54.320 of social networks that were later killed by Google as 0:21:54.320 --> 0:21:56.240 we go on, But right now we're going to talk 0:21:56.280 --> 0:21:59.720 about or Cut, which was not acquired by Google, it 0:21:59.840 --> 0:22:03.639 was incubated there. The social network was named after a 0:22:03.680 --> 0:22:06.480 software engineer, so Or cult Is his name is a 0:22:06.480 --> 0:22:11.320 Turkish software engineer, and this particular project grew out of 0:22:11.400 --> 0:22:16.760 Google's then policy of allowing employees twenty percent time to 0:22:16.840 --> 0:22:20.000 work on their own projects. So what this meant was 0:22:20.040 --> 0:22:23.359 you could spend one five of every week working on 0:22:23.400 --> 0:22:26.159 projects that are outside of your official duties. So you 0:22:26.160 --> 0:22:28.439 still had to do your job right, you had, you 0:22:28.480 --> 0:22:31.399 had things you had to do as whatever your role was, 0:22:31.920 --> 0:22:33.920 but twenty percent of your time could also be spent 0:22:34.040 --> 0:22:38.200 on other projects. And the idea was that engineers would 0:22:38.240 --> 0:22:42.920 create interesting tools and services and features or technologies that 0:22:43.000 --> 0:22:47.119 Google could later incorporate or adopt in the future. And 0:22:47.320 --> 0:22:50.639 or Cult the social network started out as just that 0:22:50.760 --> 0:22:54.879 kind of a project. Now, Google had previously attempted to 0:22:55.080 --> 0:23:01.000 acquire Friendster, but that effort fizzled out. Friendster lined the 0:23:01.080 --> 0:23:06.000 offer and or cut would be kind of, uh, a 0:23:06.119 --> 0:23:10.160 next step in Google's attempts to kind of tap into 0:23:10.200 --> 0:23:14.640 social networks. It launched fairly quietly. It was initially an 0:23:14.640 --> 0:23:19.000 invitation only service. That's actually a tactic Google has used 0:23:19.000 --> 0:23:21.680 a few times with its products. That used it with Gmail. 0:23:21.880 --> 0:23:24.120 They used it with Google Plus, which we'll talk about 0:23:24.200 --> 0:23:27.080 in a future episode. And let me tell you, nothing 0:23:27.160 --> 0:23:29.679 works quite so well for driving up interest in a 0:23:29.760 --> 0:23:33.840 product as making it somewhat exclusive, because everyone wants to 0:23:33.840 --> 0:23:37.320 be important enough to get into the club, particularly when 0:23:37.400 --> 0:23:39.639 you know that other people are not going to be 0:23:39.720 --> 0:23:43.080 allowed in. But just a few months after the social 0:23:43.119 --> 0:23:46.720 network launched, it became clear that users in a couple 0:23:46.760 --> 0:23:51.400 of regions were responding to it way more enthusiastically than 0:23:51.440 --> 0:23:57.520 in others. For example, users in Brazil were particularly attracted 0:23:57.520 --> 0:24:01.119 to ork it. They outnumbered North American users two to 0:24:01.200 --> 0:24:05.440 one just six months after orc It launched. Over time, 0:24:05.560 --> 0:24:09.239 India would become another huge market for orch it, And 0:24:09.240 --> 0:24:12.280 in both of these places you were seeing a similar 0:24:12.359 --> 0:24:15.159 trend in that more and more people were just starting 0:24:15.200 --> 0:24:18.480 to get access to the Internet, and orch it was 0:24:18.520 --> 0:24:21.639 looking like an on ramp for social networks. For these 0:24:21.800 --> 0:24:26.480 folks where they might otherwise be intimidated or not feel 0:24:26.560 --> 0:24:30.000 like other social networks were quite as friendly to them 0:24:30.119 --> 0:24:34.439 because they were already dominated by English speaking people in 0:24:34.560 --> 0:24:39.159 North America and other places in the world. So it 0:24:39.200 --> 0:24:43.280 didn't see that much traction outside of Brazil and India. 0:24:43.320 --> 0:24:45.960