Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I am an executive producer with I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and how the Tech Area. We are back with
Speaker 1: our series of episodes that are covering the history of
Speaker 1: social networks, So this one would be the third episode
Speaker 1: on this particular subject. In the last episode in this series,
Speaker 1: we focused exclusively on my Space and Facebook, two networks
Speaker 1: that launched a year apart from one another, and how
Speaker 1: my Space dominated the landscape for a few years, but
Speaker 1: due to lots of reasons, gave up the lead to
Speaker 1: Facebook and ultimately faded from view for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: It did eventually return as a music discovery platform and
Speaker 1: less of a social network, and that it's kind of
Speaker 1: what it is today. And of course we all know
Speaker 1: how Facebook the company turned into meta and the various
Speaker 1: issues that this company currently faces. So let's get back
Speaker 1: to our timeline and see what's next, because now we're
Speaker 1: in the era of social networks where things got really
Speaker 1: crowded for a while. In fact, it got so crowded
Speaker 1: that an analyst named Clay Shirkey created a new acronym
Speaker 1: to describe what was going on at the time. That
Speaker 1: acronym was y A S N S yasn's it actually
Speaker 1: stands for yet another social networking service. So you know,
Speaker 1: when folks start bandying about acronyms like that, that you're
Speaker 1: flirting with over saturation. That everyone saw social networks as
Speaker 1: being kind of the next phase of the web, and
Speaker 1: so everyone was trying to get in on it. But
Speaker 1: we're still in two thousand and four. Because even though
Speaker 1: I and I've said this in the previous episodes, even
Speaker 1: though I go through kind of the the an overview
Speaker 1: of the history of each company as we get to it,
Speaker 1: I keep going back to the timeline. It just wouldn't
Speaker 1: make sense to strictly stick year by year because so
Speaker 1: much is happening at so many different places. Now, my
Speaker 1: Space would rise to dominate the social networking space, and
Speaker 1: Facebook was not that far behind, but there was still
Speaker 1: some room in the environment, and some services like linked In,
Speaker 1: which had launched earlier in two thousand three, were really
Speaker 1: able to carve out a space by focusing on a
Speaker 1: niche in social networking, with LinkedIn's example being a social
Speaker 1: network for professional networking that allowed linked In to flourish
Speaker 1: in that specific arena and continue to this day. There
Speaker 1: would be several other niche social networks that would achieve
Speaker 1: varying degrees of popularity among slices of users, such as
Speaker 1: pet owners with sites like Dogster. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: dive into those really, because they get to be so
Speaker 1: specific and so relatively small that there's not much point
Speaker 1: in diving into them. I should also mention that even
Speaker 1: early on, there were issues with people trying to game
Speaker 1: the systems, which isn't really that big of a surprise,
Speaker 1: I suppose, because if you have a system, someone's going
Speaker 1: to figure out how to exploit it. So, for example,
Speaker 1: on Friendster, which we covered in a previous episode, the
Speaker 1: administrators decided to limit how far out from your connections
Speaker 1: you could explore on the site. So the idea was,
Speaker 1: if there was a profile that was more than four
Speaker 1: degrees of separation from your profile, you wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to view it. You wouldn't be able to go and
Speaker 1: look at that profile because you wouldn't be close enough
Speaker 1: connections to merit it. So some people just wanted to
Speaker 1: amass as many friends as possible to expand their network
Speaker 1: out and essentially make it impossible for anyone to have
Speaker 1: a profile they couldn't look at. It was kind of
Speaker 1: like a game. The number of friends you accumulated would
Speaker 1: be analogous to the points you could amass in a
Speaker 1: video game. To that end, people were doing stuff like
Speaker 1: sending friend requests to distant degrees of separation, you know,
Speaker 1: folks they didn't know or had never been aware of before,
Speaker 1: just to see more potential friends being opened up. Some
Speaker 1: folks would make fake profiles, either of like a fictional
Speaker 1: character or maybe a celebrity, solely for the purposes of
Speaker 1: gathering more friends. The abuse of the platform caused some
Speaker 1: real cultural problems for the site, and we would see
Speaker 1: similar behaviors emerge on other platforms, not exactly the same thing, necessarily,
Speaker 1: but more examples of people saying, oh, it works this way,
Speaker 1: but what if I use it this other way, which
Speaker 1: is a real hacker mentality, And I don't mean that
Speaker 1: in a bad way. Now. Whether it was because users
Speaker 1: wanted to feel popular or they were simply finding value
Speaker 1: in the network beyond its intended purpose, the activities on
Speaker 1: Friendster often led to the platform itself losing value, and
Speaker 1: that the folks who were not game gaming the system
Speaker 1: who were just there to use it as it was intended.
Speaker 1: We're finding it harder to navigate the networks and to
Speaker 1: be sure that the people they were befriending were actually
Speaker 1: who they thought they were. All right, let's get back
Speaker 1: to two thousand four. Uh, Katerina Fake and Stuart Butterfield,
Speaker 1: who at the time were married. They later would separate.
Speaker 1: We're working on an m m O RPG. That's massive
Speaker 1: multiplayer online role playing game. The game's name was Game
Speaker 1: Never Ending, should have been Game Never Starting because the
Speaker 1: game would never actually launch. But but within that game,
Speaker 1: there was a feature in which users wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to upload photos that ended up being spun off into
Speaker 1: a fully fledged service of its own, and service became
Speaker 1: known as Flicker f l I c k R. By
Speaker 1: the way, there was this also this era of web
Speaker 1: based companies where it became trendy to not include certain
Speaker 1: vowels in your name. Twitter, which we will talk about
Speaker 1: in the next episode of this series, was at one
Speaker 1: point just called t W T t R with no
Speaker 1: eye and no E in it. But anyway, Flicker was
Speaker 1: not the first online photo sharing service. There were others
Speaker 1: like photo Bucket, and there was an early version of
Speaker 1: Picasa that kind of had elements of that. There was
Speaker 1: also smug Mug, which was really more for photographers, but
Speaker 1: it did introduce something really useful. So it wasn't first
Speaker 1: it allowing you to upload your photos to an album,
Speaker 1: but it did allow you to do meta tagging, and
Speaker 1: so you could tag photos with any kind of metadata
Speaker 1: you liked, not just photos you uploaded, but also photos
Speaker 1: that you viewed, and that made these photos searchable by keyword.
Speaker 1: So let's say you're an avid diver and a photographer
Speaker 1: and you upload photos of some of your dives and
Speaker 1: use relevant keywords, and you use the same keywords to
Speaker 1: search for other photos from other divers like you. Maybe
Speaker 1: you find a community of of diver photographers that you
Speaker 1: didn't know about and you would connect with them. So
Speaker 1: Flicker effectively outsourced the taxonomy of the photographs that were
Speaker 1: on its site to the community, and the community eagerly
Speaker 1: took up the task. And this just made Flicker a
Speaker 1: more valuable tool because you could find photos on just
Speaker 1: about anything. If you just started searching for certain keywords,
Speaker 1: Flicker would become really famous pretty quickly. Fake and Butterfield
Speaker 1: founded it in February two four and just a year
Speaker 1: later in early two thousand five, Internet giant at the time,
Speaker 1: Yahoo would come a column. Now, Flicker was still in
Speaker 1: the early stages of receiving influxes of cash from angel investors,
Speaker 1: and it was very early days to consider selling to
Speaker 1: a bigger company, and this was not an easy decision.
Speaker 1: Should you play the long game and try to build
Speaker 1: value in your company, which would in turn push up
Speaker 1: the price tag. Alternatively, you could try and just stay
Speaker 1: a solvent, standalone company on your own and not sell
Speaker 1: to anybody. Or should you cash out when the opportunity arises.
Speaker 1: This is a very tough thing to consider because keep
Speaker 1: in mind, this is two thousand five, it was not
Speaker 1: that far removed from the dot com crash, and that
Speaker 1: crash illustrated that nothing is ever a sure thing. So
Speaker 1: sometimes when that opportunity comes around, you may not get
Speaker 1: another one. So there's a lot of pressure. Not the
Speaker 1: same time, flickers star was on the rise. I mean,
Speaker 1: even other services like Blogger were meaning on Flicker to
Speaker 1: power image uploads, so Flicker was becoming more influential in
Speaker 1: the web in general. Ultimately, the founders made the decision
Speaker 1: to accept Yahoo's deal, which was reportedly in the neighborhood
Speaker 1: of thirty five million bucks, though some sources say that
Speaker 1: it's actually maybe as low as twenty two million. It
Speaker 1: just depends upon which one you're looking at. As we
Speaker 1: will see over and over again in this episode, these
Speaker 1: acquisition deals, they're typically not public. Because you're talking about
Speaker 1: a private company being purchased, you don't often know how
Speaker 1: much was actually paid for it, so we hear everything
Speaker 1: from twenty to thirty five million dollars. Now, later on,
Speaker 1: as social network sites were being bought and sold in
Speaker 1: the hundreds of millions of dollars range, it would appear
Speaker 1: in retrospect like this could have been the wrong call, right,
Speaker 1: that Flicker should have held on to itself and just
Speaker 1: waited a little bit longer, and it probably could have
Speaker 1: sold for way more money, But at the time that
Speaker 1: was impossible to say. You just couldn't be sure of it.
Speaker 1: As for Flicker, under Yahoo, it would grow substantially. It
Speaker 1: went from a quarter million users to more than two
Speaker 1: million in less than a year, and it also increased
Speaker 1: in features, included one that I thought was super cool
Speaker 1: where you could look at a map and click on
Speaker 1: locations of the map, and it would pull up photographs
Speaker 1: of that location, so you could actually click around on
Speaker 1: a map and see photos of those sites. And I
Speaker 1: thought that was really cool. It was a great way
Speaker 1: to contextualize photographs. Butterfield and Fake stuck around with Flicker
Speaker 1: until around two thousand eight, and they left the company
Speaker 1: at that point. At that point they had also split
Speaker 1: as a married couple as well. They would each go
Speaker 1: on to found other companies. Butterfield would actually co found
Speaker 1: one that's a really big deal today, that being Slack.
Speaker 1: So yeah, one of the founders of Flicker would then
Speaker 1: go on to co found Slack. Flicker gave users a
Speaker 1: lot of storage space to play with in ten yahoo.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was crazy. They gave users an entire
Speaker 1: terrabyte of free storage for their photos. That was unfathomable
Speaker 1: at that time. It's still pretty crazy today, but I mean, really,
Speaker 1: at that time, that was nuts. Flicker Pro users who
Speaker 1: were paying a subscription fee for their their pro account
Speaker 1: would actually get to what amounted to be unlimited storage.
Speaker 1: But by this point, Flicker was already facing competition from
Speaker 1: services like Instagram and Facebook, and users didn't have the
Speaker 1: same storage at those services. They couldn't put in nearly
Speaker 1: as many photos there, nor did they enjoy the same
Speaker 1: extensive meta tagging features that you had on Flicker. But
Speaker 1: the tighter social integration on those platforms one out. So
Speaker 1: while Flicker undoubtedly had incredible teachers and great benefits in
Speaker 1: the form of storage, it's just you know, people were
Speaker 1: being more active on these other social networks, and so
Speaker 1: flickers importance began to fade a bit. Moreover, there were
Speaker 1: real serious problems going on at the parent company of Yahoo.
Speaker 1: It was kind of teetering on the edge of a
Speaker 1: free fall death spiral for a while. I've done episodes
Speaker 1: about Yahoo and what went on over there. I may
Speaker 1: have to revisit that topic at some point and give
Speaker 1: kind of a new take, or at least an update
Speaker 1: on that, because so much has happened at Yahoo. But
Speaker 1: Verizon acquired Yahoo in and then put Yahoo under a
Speaker 1: subsidiary company called Oath, and then the following year smug Mug,
Speaker 1: you know, an old photo competitor that had launched in
Speaker 1: two thousand two but had kind of eschewed the social
Speaker 1: network approach. It was really just purely about, you know,
Speaker 1: being a place to store for potos. It acquired Flicker
Speaker 1: from Oath, so Flicker ultimately was acquired by an old competitor.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eighteen, Flicker announced that the it was
Speaker 1: bringing an end to that terrabyte of storage. Users would
Speaker 1: then have a cap of just one thousand photos and
Speaker 1: that anything beyond that would start to see photos deleted
Speaker 1: from the service, and that led to a bit of
Speaker 1: a scramble at least among some parts of the Internet
Speaker 1: to preserve information. But in many ways, this is kind
Speaker 1: of like having a physical photo album and then misplacing it,
Speaker 1: you know, losing it, and if it's out of your mind,
Speaker 1: you probably don't even miss it. It's just when you
Speaker 1: think about it that you're like, oh, yeah, whatever happened
Speaker 1: to that now. Flickers fate also reminds us that online
Speaker 1: storage is not necessarily for forever. It might seem like
Speaker 1: that because these are really big companies, they have a
Speaker 1: lot of redundancy built into them. You know. It's one
Speaker 1: of those things where like, if you store your pictures
Speaker 1: locally and something happens to your home, you might lose
Speaker 1: all the pictures. But if you store them in the cloud,
Speaker 1: then something happens to a server in the cloud. Those
Speaker 1: photos are more likely than not stored on multiple other
Speaker 1: servers so you don't lose them. So we don't often
Speaker 1: think of things stored in the cloud as being temporary,
Speaker 1: but they can be, you know, if the company goes
Speaker 1: out of business, or it's acquired by another company or whatever.
Speaker 1: It can happen. Ultimately, there's no completely safe way to
Speaker 1: store your digital information, whether it's local or on the cloud,
Speaker 1: though hopefully most cloud systems will at least give signs
Speaker 1: that you should migrate stuff elsewhere before they go belly up. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's Flicker. When we come back, we're gonna talk more
Speaker 1: about a social network that we mentioned in the first
Speaker 1: episode in this series but didn't really go into. But
Speaker 1: first this quick break. Okay, we talked about Flicker. Now
Speaker 1: let's move on to Tagged and A and we tugged
Speaker 1: a little bit about Tagged in the first episode because
Speaker 1: Tagged ultimately acquired High five in two thousand eleven, and
Speaker 1: we mentioned High five early on in this series. But
Speaker 1: Tagged had its beginnings in two thousand four when co
Speaker 1: founders Gregg Singh and Johann Schleier Smith launched a site
Speaker 1: intended for the under eighteen crowd. Like the team at Facebook,
Speaker 1: this project started at Harvard University, but while Facebook was
Speaker 1: aimed at college students, Tagged was very much looking at
Speaker 1: kids in middle and high school ages. Now. To that end,
Speaker 1: the creators set about making an environment that would emphasize
Speaker 1: security and privacy, which was absolutely critical considering the ages
Speaker 1: of the users. So users who were thirteen or fourteen
Speaker 1: years old, their profiles were restricted so that the public
Speaker 1: would not be able to view them, nor would anyone
Speaker 1: on the platform who was over the age of sixteen.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't be able to see the thirteen or fourteen
Speaker 1: year old profiles either. Likewise, users who or fifteen or
Speaker 1: sixteen their profiles were not viewable by the public. So
Speaker 1: these restrictions remained in place when in two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: Tagged opened up to users over the age of eighteen.
Speaker 1: So initially Tagged looks at people eighteen and younger. Then
Speaker 1: they say, all right, we're opening it up for people
Speaker 1: who are older than eighteen. You might wonder why, Well,
Speaker 1: one reason why you would do that is because your age,
Speaker 1: you're the age of your users is going to continue
Speaker 1: to creep up. Right, Like if you attract someone to
Speaker 1: your site when they're fifteen. Four years later, that person's nineteen,
Speaker 1: and if your site no longer allows them to be
Speaker 1: on there and kicks them off, well that is a problem. Right, So,
Speaker 1: anytime you see a site that's aimed at younger users,
Speaker 1: there's a chance for it to evolve to also cater
Speaker 1: to older ones. Tagged made a pivot fairly early on.
Speaker 1: As my Space and Facebook we're dominating social networking, Tagged
Speaker 1: found out from its users that the people who are
Speaker 1: using Tagged, we're doing it for social discovery. By that,
Speaker 1: I mean finding and forming new friendships as opposed to
Speaker 1: finding your existing friends from real life and connecting to
Speaker 1: them on there. So that's what Facebook and my Space
Speaker 1: were being used for. Tagged was used to find new folks,
Speaker 1: and so Tagged evolved into becoming more of a discovery
Speaker 1: platform than your traditional social network, and it served as
Speaker 1: kind of a compliment to the growing networks rather than
Speaker 1: as a competitor, which made it a little bit more
Speaker 1: secure than some of its fellow social networks that were
Speaker 1: coming out around this time. Now, that's not to say
Speaker 1: that Tagged didn't have its own share of downsides, at
Speaker 1: least from the perspective of a non user who wasn't
Speaker 1: interested in the service, because when you signed up for Tagged,
Speaker 1: when you made an account for Tagged, the site would
Speaker 1: encourage you to share your email address book with the site.
Speaker 1: Then the site would go on to blast out emails
Speaker 1: to all your contacts in an effort to get them
Speaker 1: to come and join Tagged two. Now, at some points
Speaker 1: during the company's history, some of those emails would suggest
Speaker 1: that users had been tagged in posts, or rather that
Speaker 1: you had been tagged in a post by a user,
Speaker 1: or maybe that this this person had personally invited you
Speaker 1: to join Tagged, and that wasn't necessarily true. It was
Speaker 1: just part of these blast email approaches to try and
Speaker 1: get more users onto the service. All of that kind
Speaker 1: of somewhat shady behavior led to a lawsuit in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, and ultimately the company would settle out of
Speaker 1: court and agree to not be quite so aggressive in
Speaker 1: its marketing approach. Now, as I said earlier, Tagged acquired
Speaker 1: High Fives i p in two thousand eleven. It was
Speaker 1: scheduled to hold its own i p O initial public
Speaker 1: offering and thus become a publicly traded company in two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen, but Tagged scrubbed those plans because user be
Speaker 1: saviors were shifting away from desktops, so people were not
Speaker 1: accessing Tagged using their computers the way they had been,
Speaker 1: which was affecting Tag's revenue model. This was all part
Speaker 1: of a general move as people were starting to rely
Speaker 1: more on mobile devices, particularly smartphones, to access the web.
Speaker 1: And as I've said in numerous episodes on on lots
Speaker 1: of different topics, it cannot be overstressed how big an
Speaker 1: impact the smartphone revolution had on web content. You had
Speaker 1: entire companies that were dedicated two figuring out how best
Speaker 1: to package material for mobile because everyone was using mobile
Speaker 1: devices to access the web, and if your content was
Speaker 1: not mobile friendly, then you were losing out on tons
Speaker 1: of traffic. Well that's kind of what Tagged was going
Speaker 1: through at this point, and I also mentioned this in
Speaker 1: the High five entry in the series. But the Meat Group,
Speaker 1: that's M E E. T. Meat Group acquired Tagged and
Speaker 1: subsequently High five in two thousand and seventeen. Tagged still
Speaker 1: exists today. You can make a profile and you can
Speaker 1: use it to meet new friends. I haven't, but that's
Speaker 1: because I am old and I am grouchy. There have
Speaker 1: been a few massively effective Internet startup killers in the
Speaker 1: short history of the web. There was the dot com
Speaker 1: bubble bursts that killed lots of startups. It laid waste
Speaker 1: to tons of them, though to be fair, some of
Speaker 1: those companies were probably on thin ice to begin with.
Speaker 1: It was just that the dot com crash was definitely
Speaker 1: too much for them to make it through. But yeah,
Speaker 1: there there were plenty of early web startups where if
Speaker 1: you took a good look at their business plan or
Speaker 1: in some cases lack thereof, you'd say, yeah, of course,
Speaker 1: as didn't last the test of time. But there have
Speaker 1: been also various economic downturns, like one in two thousand
Speaker 1: eight that a lot of companies were unable to push through.
Speaker 1: But there's one killer who has been consistently effective in
Speaker 1: this startup world and then terrifying, and that would be Google.
Speaker 1: Google is the company that never launched or acquired an
Speaker 1: application that it could not subsequently kill off later on.
Speaker 1: The company's infamous for launching or acquiring and then shutting
Speaker 1: down various services and features, or sometimes incorporating parts of
Speaker 1: them into other products. So there are some Frankenstein monster
Speaker 1: style Google products out there that are the sum of
Speaker 1: a bunch of parts that came from other startups and
Speaker 1: services over the years. And there will be other examples
Speaker 1: of social networks that were later killed by Google as
Speaker 1: we go on, But right now we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about or Cut, which was not acquired by Google, it
Speaker 1: was incubated there. The social network was named after a
Speaker 1: software engineer, so Or cult Is his name is a
Speaker 1: Turkish software engineer, and this particular project grew out of
Speaker 1: Google's then policy of allowing employees twenty percent time to
Speaker 1: work on their own projects. So what this meant was
Speaker 1: you could spend one five of every week working on
Speaker 1: projects that are outside of your official duties. So you
Speaker 1: still had to do your job right, you had, you
Speaker 1: had things you had to do as whatever your role was,
Speaker 1: but twenty percent of your time could also be spent
Speaker 1: on other projects. And the idea was that engineers would
Speaker 1: create interesting tools and services and features or technologies that
Speaker 1: Google could later incorporate or adopt in the future. And
Speaker 1: or Cult the social network started out as just that
Speaker 1: kind of a project. Now, Google had previously attempted to
Speaker 1: acquire Friendster, but that effort fizzled out. Friendster lined the
Speaker 1: offer and or cut would be kind of, uh, a
Speaker 1: next step in Google's attempts to kind of tap into
Speaker 1: social networks. It launched fairly quietly. It was initially an
Speaker 1: invitation only service. That's actually a tactic Google has used
Speaker 1: a few times with its products. That used it with Gmail.
Speaker 1: They used it with Google Plus, which we'll talk about
Speaker 1: in a future episode. And let me tell you, nothing
Speaker 1: works quite so well for driving up interest in a
Speaker 1: product as making it somewhat exclusive, because everyone wants to
Speaker 1: be important enough to get into the club, particularly when
Speaker 1: you know that other people are not going to be
Speaker 1: allowed in. But just a few months after the social
Speaker 1: network launched, it became clear that users in a couple
Speaker 1: of regions were responding to it way more enthusiastically than
Speaker 1: in others. For example, users in Brazil were particularly attracted
Speaker 1: to ork it. They outnumbered North American users two to
Speaker 1: one just six months after orc It launched. Over time,
Speaker 1: India would become another huge market for orch it, And
Speaker 1: in both of these places you were seeing a similar
Speaker 1: trend in that more and more people were just starting
Speaker 1: to get access to the Internet, and orch it was
Speaker 1: looking like an on ramp for social networks. For these
Speaker 1: folks where they might otherwise be intimidated or not feel
Speaker 1: like other social networks were quite as friendly to them
Speaker 1: because they were already dominated by English speaking people in
Speaker 1: North America and other places in the world. So it
Speaker 1: didn't see that much traction outside of Brazil and India.
Speaker 1: But it was popular enough in those two countries to
Speaker 1: convince folks that Orchit was the big company and Google
Speaker 1: was the subsidiary. You heard stories about that, like people
Speaker 1: in Brazil or India thought or kit owned Google, not
Speaker 1: the other way around, because that's how important the social
Speaker 1: net work was in those countries. Interesting side note, one
Speaker 1: person who served as the product manager for orch It
Speaker 1: was Marissa Meyer. Now this is the same person who
Speaker 1: would later be hired by Yahoo. She she left Google
Speaker 1: to join Yahoo to serve as the CEO of Yahoo.
Speaker 1: Her tenure at Yahoo would become one of controversy and
Speaker 1: derision in some circles, but that's a story for another time. Anyway,
Speaker 1: for a while, orch it survived because again it was
Speaker 1: so popular in Brazil and India. But as Facebook expanded
Speaker 1: into other countries, Google saw Orchid's popularity go into decline further.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eleven, Google would launch another social network,
Speaker 1: which again we're going to talk about in a later episode,
Speaker 1: called Google Plus. And since Google Plus was clearly going
Speaker 1: to be the future of social networks, and because orch
Speaker 1: It was already losing users to Facebook, Google made the
Speaker 1: decision in two thousand and fourteen to shut ork it
Speaker 1: down for good and just a spoiler alert for the
Speaker 1: future episode. Things would not go smoothly for Google Plus,
Speaker 1: as it turned out. All Right, we're now up to
Speaker 1: two thousand five, and one of the most crazy up
Speaker 1: and down stories of social networks is right around the corner.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about Bibo. So this company was founded
Speaker 1: by wife and husband team show Chee and Michael Birch
Speaker 1: in two thousand five. The name Bibo came from the
Speaker 1: site's motto, which was blog early, blog often. The profile
Speaker 1: designed for Bibo gave users freedom to customize their profiles
Speaker 1: a bit. It was a modular approach, which was kind
Speaker 1: of cool. Made me think a little bit about my Space,
Speaker 1: which also was kind of modular back in the day.
Speaker 1: And you can have a private profile where only your
Speaker 1: friends could view it, or you could allow the general
Speaker 1: public access to you your content and that would include
Speaker 1: stuff like blogs and friend comments. Later on it would
Speaker 1: support stuff like photos and videos, and Bibo became a
Speaker 1: kind of centralized location for pretty much all things you
Speaker 1: It combined elements you would find on other platforms like MySpace, Facebook,
Speaker 1: and later on stuff like YouTube. It also allowed users
Speaker 1: to link other social platforms to Bibo, creating a kind
Speaker 1: of consolidated site of social network activity. That's something we've
Speaker 1: also seen in other social network services as well. For
Speaker 1: three years, Bibo operated independently. It grew in importance, particularly
Speaker 1: in the UK and in Ireland, where it became quite popular,
Speaker 1: and this led up to one of the biggest acquisitions
Speaker 1: in social networking history up to that point, when in
Speaker 1: two thousand eight, A o L bought Bibo from the
Speaker 1: Birches for an astounding eight hundred fifty million bucks. Now
Speaker 1: keep in mind News Corps had purchased my Space, which
Speaker 1: was the number one social network at that time, for
Speaker 1: five eighty million dollars. So yeah, Bibo getting bought for
Speaker 1: eight hundred fifty million that was a huge deal, and
Speaker 1: it was also a deal that other folks at A
Speaker 1: O L thought was, to put it mildly, a bone
Speaker 1: headed move. Randy Falco, the CEO at the time of
Speaker 1: the acquisition, would be removed from that position in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine. He would be replaced by a former Google
Speaker 1: executive named Tim Armstrong to take over at a o L.
Speaker 1: And it is true that the acquisition was foolhardy ao
Speaker 1: L paid way too much for Bibo. But what made
Speaker 1: the matter worse was that two thousand eight, if you
Speaker 1: remember I mentioned it earlier in the episode, that was
Speaker 1: when we saw a massive economic downturn. A o L
Speaker 1: would only hold onto Bibo for two years. It sold
Speaker 1: it in two thousand and ten to a company called
Speaker 1: Criterion Capital Partners or CCP, for reportedly less than ten
Speaker 1: million dollars. So let that sink in. Bibo was bought
Speaker 1: for eight hundred fifty million sold for less than ten million,
Speaker 1: although some sources say it might have been as much
Speaker 1: as twenty five million. Still, that's nothing compared to what
Speaker 1: it was bought for. And that really puts it into
Speaker 1: perspective with the MySpace story, because my Space was bought
Speaker 1: for five million and sold for thirty five million. So
Speaker 1: as bad as the MySpace deal was, it still was
Speaker 1: better than Bibo. Now we should also remember this was
Speaker 1: the same time that Facebook was overtaking my Space and
Speaker 1: muscling out many of the other social networks out there,
Speaker 1: and Bibo, while initially grabbing onto some attention, was getting
Speaker 1: progressively lost in this bigger picture with companies like Facebook
Speaker 1: dominating the conversation. We'll talk about Bibo's fate, which takes
Speaker 1: more twists and turns, but first let's take another quick break.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, we left off with Bibo being acquired by
Speaker 1: CCP Criteria Capital Partners at that time. Michael Birch, you know,
Speaker 1: the husband of the husband wife team that created Bibo
Speaker 1: in the first place, would invest in Bibo under Criterion Capital,
Speaker 1: so he got reinvolved in his creation. Bibo under CCP
Speaker 1: tried to reinvent itself. It did a full redesign, but
Speaker 1: ultimately the economic pressures and the influence of Facebook meant
Speaker 1: at the site just wasn't performing well. It wasn't attracting
Speaker 1: enough users, it wasn't generating enough revenue, and ultimately CCP
Speaker 1: declared bankruptcy in two thousand thirteen, and that's when the
Speaker 1: husband wife team of the Birches swept back in. So
Speaker 1: they had sold Bibo for eight hundred fifty million dollars.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eight, they bought it back for let's see,
Speaker 1: one million dollars. That is a heck of a deal.
Speaker 1: Sell it for eight hundred fifty million, buy it back
Speaker 1: for one million. This is not the end of Bibo.
Speaker 1: The story to continues to go bonkers bananas. So Bibo
Speaker 1: then goes dark for nearly two years because the Birches
Speaker 1: and their team they set about overhauling the platform. They're like, well,
Speaker 1: obviously we can't come back just as Bibo. That's not
Speaker 1: going to be successful. We have to figure out what
Speaker 1: is Bibo moving forward because the social network space at
Speaker 1: this point is truly dominated by Facebook. So this is
Speaker 1: around two thirteen when Bibo goes dark. It would re
Speaker 1: emerge in two thousand fifteen, but it had gone through
Speaker 1: quite a few changes and it would continue to change.
Speaker 1: So the first incarnation was called bibo Blab, which was
Speaker 1: a messaging video app and you could send video messages
Speaker 1: to your friends, so kind of like a text message,
Speaker 1: but a video message, this little ephemeral video message that
Speaker 1: you sent to your buddies, and it quickly gained a
Speaker 1: few million users. Like it was popular early on, but
Speaker 1: it didn't have any staying power. People quickly moved away
Speaker 1: from Bibo to use other things. Part of the problem
Speaker 1: might have been that it just didn't attract enough people
Speaker 1: to adopt it and keep the service sustainable, because if
Speaker 1: only half like like, if you adopt Bibo but none
Speaker 1: of your friends do, well, then you just have half
Speaker 1: a conversation going on as you generate these videos and
Speaker 1: send them. But if they're not creating Bibo accounts, it's
Speaker 1: not like you're getting anything back, and that's not much
Speaker 1: fun to you know, only hold half a conversation unless
Speaker 1: you're a podcaster. Bibo switched focus to e sports streaming,
Speaker 1: and then it actually switched to organizing and running e
Speaker 1: sports tournaments, but this too proved to be unsustainable, and
Speaker 1: in the same year this version of Biebo had launched,
Speaker 1: the site would go dark again, so it didn't even
Speaker 1: spend a full year being kind of an e sports entity.
Speaker 1: But one company that paid attention to Bibou at this
Speaker 1: time and thought there was some I P there that
Speaker 1: would be really useful was Amazon, in the form of
Speaker 1: its subsidiary Twitch now. Twitch, of course, is known primarily
Speaker 1: as a platform for creators to stream themselves as they
Speaker 1: play video games, although there are lots of other types
Speaker 1: of channels as well. So Twitch purchased Bibo in two
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen for maybe million dollars, maybe less than that. Again,
Speaker 1: these deals are never fully public, so it's hard to say,
Speaker 1: but as long as it was more than one million dollars,
Speaker 1: it would still be more than what the purchase spent
Speaker 1: when they were buying it back in the first place.
Speaker 1: Though obviously the subsequent investments in the platform to turn
Speaker 1: it into the new Bibo where presumably more than that.
Speaker 1: Then we get up to one. And to be honest, y'all,
Speaker 1: I don't know how this all happened. I ran out
Speaker 1: of time and I could not dive deep enough to
Speaker 1: find out exactly the detail US behind us. I do
Speaker 1: not know if Michael Birch simply retained the rights to
Speaker 1: the name Bibo or not, or if they purchased those
Speaker 1: rights back from Amazon. But in one Michael Birch posted
Speaker 1: on Twitter the following message quote, AM launching Bibo dot
Speaker 1: com as a social network next month. Have been coding
Speaker 1: it myself during lockdown. I put a coming soon page
Speaker 1: up yesterday and it trended on Twitter in Ireland. Hopefully
Speaker 1: the actual site does nearly as well. End quote. So
Speaker 1: it sounded like the social network that started got bought
Speaker 1: and sold and shut down and reinvented and shut down again,
Speaker 1: and reinvented again and shut down again and bought again,
Speaker 1: was now going to be an independent social network once more. However,
Speaker 1: it was not to be. So if you were to
Speaker 1: go to Bibo dot com now you will see the
Speaker 1: following message quote. We tried our best to resurrect Bibo
Speaker 1: to create it's something new and fresh, but perhaps it
Speaker 1: wasn't new or fresh enough. This has been a fun
Speaker 1: project built during the pandemic, but sadly it must be sunsetted.
Speaker 1: We are grateful to everyone who joined us on this journey.
Speaker 1: Your support is greatly appreciated. Will Bibo rise again? Who knows?
Speaker 1: It has now lived four times, been sold twice. M
Speaker 1: It's been emotional Michael Birch. So, yeah, big dramatic story
Speaker 1: that in two thousand and five, we got the launches
Speaker 1: of a couple of sites that kind of overlap with
Speaker 1: social networks, but neither of them quite fall neatly into
Speaker 1: traditional social networks, and so I thought we would close
Speaker 1: out with them because they are important. Even if you
Speaker 1: don't think of them as your typical social networks, and
Speaker 1: those would be YouTube and Reddit. So let's do YouTube first,
Speaker 1: and we won't go through a thorough history of YouTube
Speaker 1: because it's only tangentially related to social networks. But three
Speaker 1: former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Joe and Karen,
Speaker 1: they founded YouTube in two thousand five, and they were
Speaker 1: already pretty well off at the time because they had
Speaker 1: been working at PayPal, and then PayPal got bought out
Speaker 1: by eBay, so they all got a handsome payout, but
Speaker 1: they wanted to go and make something of their own,
Speaker 1: and they recognize that at the time, while you could
Speaker 1: share digital photos online fairly easily, the same could not
Speaker 1: be said for digital videos, and so they started to
Speaker 1: design YouTube. They're actually multiple conflicting stories about what gave
Speaker 1: them the real idea for YouTube and the focus of YouTube,
Speaker 1: Like there are a lot of stories that say that
Speaker 1: YouTube initially was more kind of catering to dating, like
Speaker 1: almost like computer dating, which would make it not that
Speaker 1: different from say Facebook. But again there are a lot
Speaker 1: of inflicting stories because people have different memories, I guess,
Speaker 1: and also some stories were drawned up more for the
Speaker 1: sake of publicity than others. So it's kind of hard
Speaker 1: to say what is truly reliable information about the founding
Speaker 1: of the company. But anyway, some of you all might
Speaker 1: actually remember a time on the internet when if you
Speaker 1: wanted to watch a video, what that really meant was
Speaker 1: that you would go to a site, you would download
Speaker 1: a video file to your local computer, and then use
Speaker 1: a desktop based app to launch the video and watch it.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's how I remember watching the first season
Speaker 1: of Red Versus Blue from Rooster Teeth. That way, I
Speaker 1: would download the videos and then watch them on my computer.
Speaker 1: There were very few video solutions that were online at
Speaker 1: that time, though there were a couple. I mean, in fact,
Speaker 1: video was already in existence when YouTube was just taking shape.
Speaker 1: They just wasn't being used or promoted very much. Famously,
Speaker 1: the first video on YouTube published in April two five.
Speaker 1: It was called Me at the Zoo and I had
Speaker 1: one of the co founders at the San Diego Zoo.
Speaker 1: And YouTube would open a public beta a month later
Speaker 1: and invite people to join in and start uploading videos.
Speaker 1: It would officially launch in December of two thousand five.
Speaker 1: Early on users had to work within some pretty strict limitations.
Speaker 1: Video files could be no larger than just a hundred megabytes,
Speaker 1: so they were really short. It would actually take quite
Speaker 1: some time before YouTube would really shift toward promoting longer
Speaker 1: form content. For years there was a hard limit of
Speaker 1: ten minutes for the vast majority of users on YouTube,
Speaker 1: and then eventually those restrictions would become less and less important,
Speaker 1: with YouTube really focusing on long form content at a point,
Speaker 1: and now it's kind of shifting back to short form
Speaker 1: as platforms like TikTok gain more more popularity. But even
Speaker 1: before YouTube had launched out of its beta, the site
Speaker 1: was attracting tens of thousands of visitors every day, and
Speaker 1: by January two thousand six, they were racking up more
Speaker 1: than twenty five million views of the videos on the
Speaker 1: site every day. The trajectory was really clear. By the
Speaker 1: summer of two thousand and six, the number of views
Speaker 1: per day topped a hundred million, And with this success
Speaker 1: came some problems. There were technical demands to keep the
Speaker 1: site up and operational, and they were increasing dramatically, so
Speaker 1: it was an important and expensive job to add more
Speaker 1: computational assets like storage and stuff in order to keep
Speaker 1: YouTube going plus people were already showing a bit of
Speaker 1: a tendency to upload videos that you know, they didn't
Speaker 1: actually own the rights too, So various entertainment studios in
Speaker 1: the worlds of music, movies, and television really and a
Speaker 1: crackdown on YouTube due to the proliferation of copyright infringement
Speaker 1: across the site. Fortunately, Big Daddy Google came a call
Speaker 1: in in November two thousand six and signed an acquisition
Speaker 1: deal with YouTube, purchasing YouTube in a deal that was
Speaker 1: valued at one point six five billion with a B
Speaker 1: dollars in stock, so each co founder walked away with
Speaker 1: the equivalent of around four hundred million dollars. Yeawsa. Google
Speaker 1: got to work smoothing out issues with the various entertainment studios,
Speaker 1: and in a rare move, it would keep YouTube as
Speaker 1: its own separate company, so it did not directly incorporate
Speaker 1: YouTube into Google's empire the way it would with other purchases.
Speaker 1: Then we entered into the early age of viral videos,
Speaker 1: and YouTube would later introduce a partner program which will
Speaker 1: allow content creators to make money off of advertising that
Speaker 1: was served against their videos. That story has its own
Speaker 1: set of dramatic turns, like I could do a full
Speaker 1: series of episodes about YouTube's partner program. But anyway, the
Speaker 1: debut of the iPhone and the evolution of the web
Speaker 1: into something the average person would access, you know, anywhere
Speaker 1: with the benefit of a mobile device would really fuel
Speaker 1: YouTube's growth quite a bit. And Google would later make
Speaker 1: some choices about profiles and log ins that would affect YouTube.
Speaker 1: There was a time when Google, in an effort to
Speaker 1: encourage more accountability, was cracking down on user names, but
Speaker 1: that move would get a lot of resistance from multiple
Speaker 1: groups of people, and Google would ease off on those requirements.
Speaker 1: I'm not really diving into that because we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about that more when we get to Google Plus.
Speaker 1: While there are vloggers on YouTube who have their own
Speaker 1: communities around them, it's fair to say that YouTube isn't
Speaker 1: really a social network the way other networks are. It is, however,
Speaker 1: a platform that has played an important part with social works,
Speaker 1: as people have shared YouTube videos elsewhere and as people
Speaker 1: have grown communities around their their content. All right, so
Speaker 1: let's finish up with Reddit. In two thousand five, Alexis
Speaker 1: Ohanian and Steve Hoffman were attending the University of Virginia
Speaker 1: and they were working on a new idea for the web.
Speaker 1: Their early efforts merged fairly quickly with another project called
Speaker 1: info Gami, which was led by Aaron Schwartz, and he
Speaker 1: joined the co founders for Reddit, and together they wanted
Speaker 1: to create a website where users could build little subdomains
Speaker 1: dedicated to specific interests and hobbies, so folks could visit
Speaker 1: the site and then they could go to whichever of
Speaker 1: the subdomains or subreddits as they became known that they
Speaker 1: found interesting. So maybe you like fly fishing, well, there's
Speaker 1: a subreddit for that. Maybe you like politics, there are
Speaker 1: multiple subreddits for that. Maybe you like Disney, there are
Speaker 1: sub credits for that. So users can contribute to conversations,
Speaker 1: they can post in threads and leave messages for each other.
Speaker 1: They can create new threads that are based on whatever
Speaker 1: the subredit is focused on, and gradually communities would form
Speaker 1: around these and some of those communities would become incredibly
Speaker 1: influential and important, some of them would become unbelievably toxic,
Speaker 1: and some would be both. The founders referred to Reddit
Speaker 1: as the front page of the Internet. So the idea
Speaker 1: is that users are curating interesting content relating to you know, whatever,
Speaker 1: specific interests that relate to particular subredits, and then they
Speaker 1: share that content, they publish it within those subredits, and
Speaker 1: some subredits would become wildly popular and have tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people involved in it and get tons of
Speaker 1: users in traffic and engagement. Some are much more niche
Speaker 1: and they have a much smaller community, but that community
Speaker 1: can still have a really strong emotional investment in the
Speaker 1: subject matter and be really engaged in the community. It's
Speaker 1: still just a niche interest. And this idea really caught on,
Speaker 1: and one year after launching, the publisher Conde Nast would
Speaker 1: come along and scoop up Reddit for somewhere between ten
Speaker 1: and twenty million dollars and read It would remain nestled
Speaker 1: under Conde Nast until two thousand eleven, and then read
Speaker 1: It became a full subsidiary of Conde Nast's own parent company,
Speaker 1: Advanced Publications. So Reddit also is not your typical social
Speaker 1: network site. Users can create a profile, they have a
Speaker 1: user name, they use a password to access it. They
Speaker 1: can subscribe to specific sub credits that they're interested in,
Speaker 1: they can leave messages for each other, and all that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. In addition in the site introduced the
Speaker 1: concept of gold memberships, also known as Reddit Premium. This
Speaker 1: would bring in revenue for Reddit that would supplement the
Speaker 1: money that was already coming in from advertising. So you
Speaker 1: might say, well, what what does a Reddit premium member get? So,
Speaker 1: Reddit Premium membership has a few benefits. For what, it
Speaker 1: lets users browse Reddit without ads, so they don't see
Speaker 1: the ads or the promoted reddits, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like promoted Google search results, where it
Speaker 1: can appear like it's just a normal entry in a subreddit,
Speaker 1: and if you don't notice the fact that it was promoted,
Speaker 1: you might just think, oh, some user has submitted this,
Speaker 1: but in fact it is an ad. But yeah, premium
Speaker 1: members don't see those. They also get a monthly allowance
Speaker 1: of Reddit coins that also sometimes is known as Reddit gold.
Speaker 1: But that made things really confusing because the premium membership
Speaker 1: is called Reddit gold and the coins would also be
Speaker 1: called Reddit gold. So they get confused and you might say, well,
Speaker 1: what can you even buy with Reddit coins. Well, you
Speaker 1: can use them to buy awards to give other folks
Speaker 1: on Reddit. Those Reddit coins are really meant to provide
Speaker 1: benefits to other users, so Let's say you've got coins
Speaker 1: and you use them to purchase an award for a
Speaker 1: Reddit user who has posted something that you think is
Speaker 1: really cool, or they made a really good point in
Speaker 1: a thread, or they're just being incredibly helpful and you
Speaker 1: want to award them. You can give them an award,
Speaker 1: and that award might allow that redd user some certain benefits,
Speaker 1: like maybe it will give them some Reddit coins, or
Speaker 1: maybe it will let them browse Reddit without ads for
Speaker 1: a while, that kind of thing. So the reddit coin
Speaker 1: system allows users to purchase awards for other users, and
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, those awards have limited value,
Speaker 1: which is interesting because holy cow, there can be a
Speaker 1: lot of I guess not competition, but requests to be
Speaker 1: recognized like people. And there are a lot of accusations
Speaker 1: that you'll see on Reddit on occasion where people will
Speaker 1: accuse others of pandering in an effort to get more
Speaker 1: Reddit coins. But what do I know. I'm just a
Speaker 1: casual Reddit user. I don't pretend like I fully understand
Speaker 1: the community there. I definitely see Reddit as being incredibly useful,
Speaker 1: particularly if you want to get a good view of
Speaker 1: how a community is thinking about a specific topic. In
Speaker 1: any given amount of time, but beyond that, I find
Speaker 1: the community dynamics to be puzzling at best. Again, I'm
Speaker 1: grouchy and I'm old. Anyway, Reddit, as I said, is
Speaker 1: tangentially related to social networks. There are communities. Users can
Speaker 1: become really well known or infamous depending upon their reputations
Speaker 1: within those communities, and beyond, entire communities can become incredibly influential,
Speaker 1: or due to the spread of toxic behavior and abuse,
Speaker 1: they can be wiped from Reddit entirely. It's a wild place,
Speaker 1: all right. That's enough about Reddit, Like I said, and
Speaker 1: I could do a full episode and probably will do
Speaker 1: a full episode about Reddit and kind of dive into
Speaker 1: it's evolution because a lot of things have happened on
Speaker 1: that platform over the years and have changed it dramatically
Speaker 1: from one incarnation to the next. And I can also
Speaker 1: talk about Reddit versus dig That would be fun. But
Speaker 1: that's it for this episode. Next time we will tackle Twitter,
Speaker 1: which will probably take up a large part of the episode,
Speaker 1: and a few other social networks. If you would like
Speaker 1: to suggest topics for future episodes of of Tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: including big stories in two I should cover in my
Speaker 1: end of the year wrap up let me know. You
Speaker 1: can download the iHeart Radio app for free. Navigate over
Speaker 1: to tech Stuff in the search field, there's a little
Speaker 1: microphone icon. You can leave me a voice message up
Speaker 1: to thirty seconds in length, or if you prefer, you
Speaker 1: can use Twitter. The handle for the show is tech
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