Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and a lot of all things tech. Over the last
Speaker 1: couple of years, I've covered a lot of stories that
Speaker 1: were either directly about Facebook or they related back to
Speaker 1: the social media platform in some way. From Cambridge Analytica,
Speaker 1: you know that whole scandal. There are a couple of
Speaker 1: episodes about that. Two calls from the US government to
Speaker 1: break up some big tech companies. That's back in the news.
Speaker 1: As I record this, Facebook has had a lot of coverage.
Speaker 1: It has been front and center, particularly over the last
Speaker 1: couple of years. There are a lot of good arguments
Speaker 1: to suggest people would be better off if they were
Speaker 1: not on Facebook, if they weren't using it, didn't have
Speaker 1: an account there, And there is plenty of evidence that
Speaker 1: shows that misinformation campaigns and extremist groups are leveraging Facebook's
Speaker 1: algorithms to get widespread coverage and momentum, that they are
Speaker 1: using the social networking site for malicious purposes, and because
Speaker 1: the site ends up benefiting from this through the whole
Speaker 1: advertising realm, they have been largely complicit, or at least
Speaker 1: they haven't cracked down on it as much as they
Speaker 1: a lot of people feel they should have until fairly recently.
Speaker 1: Now all that being said, I gotta be upfront with you, guys,
Speaker 1: I still have a Facebook profile over there, and I
Speaker 1: am still on Facebook way too much. It is a
Speaker 1: complicated thing because I recognize that it would probably be
Speaker 1: better if I were not on there, but it's where
Speaker 1: most of my friends maintain a social presence, and particularly
Speaker 1: in the era of COVID, I can't get together with
Speaker 1: my friends in person, and even before COVID was a thing,
Speaker 1: it was hard to find time for all of us
Speaker 1: to get together in person anyway. So for folks like me,
Speaker 1: staying on Facebook can feel like it's necessity unless I'm
Speaker 1: just willing to cut ties with my friends. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not like people talk on the phone anymore, right Like,
Speaker 1: especially my younger friends, the thought of them getting on
Speaker 1: the phone for a conversation, to actually talk on the
Speaker 1: phone fills a lot of them with anxiety. So I
Speaker 1: feel like there aren't a whole lot of alternatives. And
Speaker 1: this got me to thinking that I really wish there
Speaker 1: were a viable social networking alternative to Facebook. You know,
Speaker 1: a social media platform that could serve as a place
Speaker 1: to connect with people, but one that doesn't rely on
Speaker 1: Facebook's model of engagement, which in turn gives a leg
Speaker 1: up on those malicious campaigns I mentioned. But we've seen
Speaker 1: social media platforms come and go, and none have really
Speaker 1: managed to have staying power, and the ones that are
Speaker 1: still around are definitely not challenging Facebook for superiority. So
Speaker 1: today I thought we would go through some social media
Speaker 1: platforms that either predated Facebook and then faded away, or
Speaker 1: they tried to challenge Facebook but failed in some way.
Speaker 1: Facebook launched in two thousand four, and there were several
Speaker 1: social networking sites that existed before that. One of the earliest,
Speaker 1: and by some accounts, the first true social networking site
Speaker 1: was six degrees dot com, which launched in n Now,
Speaker 1: I'm sure most of you are familiar with the concept
Speaker 1: of six degrees of separation, that any two people in
Speaker 1: the world are at most six social connections apart from
Speaker 1: one another. So the degrees in this case talk about
Speaker 1: those social links. So, for example, I have met the
Speaker 1: actor Colleen Camp and she was Inclue the movie Madeline
Speaker 1: Khan was also include the movie and Madeline Khan was
Speaker 1: in Young Frankenstein with Gene Wilder. So I am two
Speaker 1: degrees separated from the late great Gene Wilder and one
Speaker 1: degree separated from the late great Madeline Khan, and that
Speaker 1: there are two social contacts that link me with Gene
Speaker 1: Wilder and one social contact that links me with Madeleine
Speaker 1: con that being calling Camp. Now to call calling Camp
Speaker 1: a social contact as being grandiose. She likely has no
Speaker 1: memory of me, whatsoever. I met her one day on
Speaker 1: a movie set. It's just an example I wanted to use. Now,
Speaker 1: if I went through all of my social contacts, like
Speaker 1: every single person with whom I have a connection, I
Speaker 1: might find that my link to Gene Wilders even closer.
Speaker 1: It may be that one of my friends or acquaintances
Speaker 1: worked directly with Gene Wilder. But you get the idea.
Speaker 1: And this concept was turned into something of a game,
Speaker 1: the famous game of six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where
Speaker 1: you would try to find the fewest number of professional
Speaker 1: acting links between Kevin Bacon and some other actor. So
Speaker 1: you would just name different films that the actors were
Speaker 1: in to try and find a link to Kevin Bacon.
Speaker 1: The joke being that Kevin Bacon was in so much
Speaker 1: stuff that you frequently didn't have to go more than
Speaker 1: three links before you you found a connection. Anyway, six
Speaker 1: degrees dot Com was a social platform where you could
Speaker 1: upload photos and you could connect with friends, you know,
Speaker 1: the basic stuff of making a profile and connecting with
Speaker 1: people that all social networks sort of share in common.
Speaker 1: And you could also then see the folks that your
Speaker 1: friends are friends with, so you could connect with people
Speaker 1: up to three degrees out from your personal contacts. And
Speaker 1: it was one of those early platforms that really demonstrated,
Speaker 1: you know, that small world phenomenon, how our social circles
Speaker 1: have way more overlap in them than we typically realize.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you had an experience where you saw two
Speaker 1: friends that you know from very different circles in life
Speaker 1: talking with one another and think, how do they know
Speaker 1: each other? Because in my world, this person belongs to
Speaker 1: this group of friends and that person belongs to this
Speaker 1: totally disconnected group of friends. That happens a lot, and
Speaker 1: six degrees dot com was kind of about illustrating that.
Speaker 1: But there was a problem. You see, now in n
Speaker 1: a lot of folks had not really yet ventured into
Speaker 1: the Internet world at large, or the World Wide Web
Speaker 1: in particular. So while a relatively large number of people
Speaker 1: were signing up for six degrees dot com, you often
Speaker 1: felt really isolated on the site because while there were
Speaker 1: a lot of people collectively, it's not like a lot
Speaker 1: of people everyone knew were on there at the same time.
Speaker 1: So there were just not enough people that folks do.
Speaker 1: There weren't enough friends or acquaintances. Also, on six degrees,
Speaker 1: it was like a bunch of disconnected individuals who were
Speaker 1: on there, So it's more like a bunch of tiny
Speaker 1: island chains separated by vast oceans than an interconnected social network.
Speaker 1: A media called youth Stream Media, which specialized in developing
Speaker 1: Internet sites with the youth market in mind, typically you know,
Speaker 1: like high school and college kids, ended up purchasing six
Speaker 1: degrees dot com in nine for a cool one hundred
Speaker 1: twenty five million dollars, a princely sum indeed, But youth
Speaker 1: stream apparently couldn't do much with six degrees, and a
Speaker 1: year later the site would go dark. Just two years
Speaker 1: after that, another company called Alloy acquired youth Stream Media's assets,
Speaker 1: the entire company's assets for just seven million dollars now
Speaker 1: seven million dollars a lot of money. I know, saying
Speaker 1: just makes it sound like it's not. But when you
Speaker 1: consider that youth stream paid a D five million for
Speaker 1: six degrees and then another company bought youth Streams assets
Speaker 1: for just seven million dollars, you really see where the
Speaker 1: value of that company plummeted. So what happened, Well, the
Speaker 1: dot com bubble burst for one thing, as for six
Speaker 1: degrees dot com, and eventually returned in some form or another.
Speaker 1: Though I honestly don't know what it looks like today
Speaker 1: because when I went to go check it out with
Speaker 1: my browser as part of my research for this episode,
Speaker 1: my browser told me, yo, buddy, I really don't think
Speaker 1: you should go in there, essentially saying the site is insecure,
Speaker 1: possibly a host of malware, and I don't want any
Speaker 1: of that garbage on my computer. So I quietly backed away. Now,
Speaker 1: six degrees dot com wasn't a bad idea. It was
Speaker 1: just way ahead of its time. There weren't enough people,
Speaker 1: there wasn't enough saturation on the web to make the
Speaker 1: model work. But the idea behind it was obviously solid.
Speaker 1: Because anyone who has studied social networks online or otherwise
Speaker 1: would recognize the value proposition. Now, a few other folks
Speaker 1: would try to launch social networking sites over the next
Speaker 1: couple of years, but I think it's fair to say
Speaker 1: that the first that got some mainstream traction was Friendster,
Speaker 1: and that one would come out in two thousand two,
Speaker 1: so five years after six Degrees had originally launched, and
Speaker 1: two years before Facebook would launch. Now, Friendster was founded
Speaker 1: by Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chen, and this site also
Speaker 1: subscribed to that six degrees of separation concept. If you
Speaker 1: looked at someone's profile, you'd see how you were connected
Speaker 1: to that person and whether or not it was a
Speaker 1: close connection, so perhaps you might have a mutual friend
Speaker 1: in common with that person, or you would see if
Speaker 1: it was a more tenuous connection, like I know someone
Speaker 1: who knows someone who knows someone who knows that person
Speaker 1: kind of thing. And like a lot of social networking sites,
Speaker 1: it was used primarily by people who are looking to
Speaker 1: find a date um or at least a lot of
Speaker 1: people were using it that way. Maybe primarily is too
Speaker 1: strong a word, but it was a popular use for
Speaker 1: the site. Oh and uh profiles also had a view
Speaker 1: counter attached them. Fun times. Now, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you guys remember when it seemed like every web page
Speaker 1: on the Internet required a view counter. It's a little
Speaker 1: counter up in typically you know, the top of the page,
Speaker 1: maybe in the corner, and it would just tell you
Speaker 1: how many people had visited the website. And it became
Speaker 1: a way to gauge not just the popularity of the
Speaker 1: web page or website, but also by extension, it gave
Speaker 1: an implication of whether or not the site was a
Speaker 1: good quality, you know, the idea being that if that
Speaker 1: many people have visited the site, then it must be
Speaker 1: doing something right. And we still see elements of this today,
Speaker 1: of course, you like in view numbers for YouTube videos
Speaker 1: or how many people like or share a post on
Speaker 1: various social media sites or tweets, that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: but we don't typically see them on web pages as
Speaker 1: much these days now. Finster started strong, but with popularity
Speaker 1: comes challenges, and one of those was just in scaling.
Speaker 1: As more people were joining the site and we're making
Speaker 1: profiles and uploading photos and interacting with one another, the
Speaker 1: company had to scale up the back end systems and
Speaker 1: this became challenging. Google would actually come forward and make
Speaker 1: an offer of thirty million dollars to acquire the company
Speaker 1: in two thousand three, but the business owners turned that
Speaker 1: offer down, and that was probably one of the reasons
Speaker 1: the company would later remove the founder, Jonathan Abrams as
Speaker 1: CEO in two thousand four, the idea of we could
Speaker 1: have cashed out and you said no. Following Abram's departure
Speaker 1: as CEO, there was the old revolving door routine of
Speaker 1: other CEOs. I mean, seriously, if you look at a list,
Speaker 1: it's just like one replaced by another, typically more than
Speaker 1: one in a year, which is really bad. And users
Speaker 1: began to abandon the site. They were frustrated by performance
Speaker 1: problems and that linked back to those challenges with scaling,
Speaker 1: and the users were flocking over to another social networking site,
Speaker 1: one that for a while seemed like it was going
Speaker 1: to be the definitive social networking platform, my Space, because
Speaker 1: this was, you know, a little bit later after my
Speaker 1: Space had gotten started. But we'll get back to my
Speaker 1: Space later in this episode. Before that, I should probably
Speaker 1: explain what actually happened with Friendster. It floundered as a
Speaker 1: social media platform for several more years. It lasted long
Speaker 1: enough to see my Space eventually falled behind the upstart
Speaker 1: competitor of Facebook. Spoiler alert there as if you didn't know.
Speaker 1: But in two thousand eleven, friends to changed from a
Speaker 1: social networking platform to more of a social gaming network.
Speaker 1: And this was really kind of an effort to get
Speaker 1: out of the trap and had found itself in by
Speaker 1: competing directly with Facebook. It couldn't do that, that was
Speaker 1: clearly a lost cause. So Friendster would instead operate as
Speaker 1: a social gaming network and they did that for a
Speaker 1: few more years, but ultimately shut down in t and
Speaker 1: the brand is pretty much non existent today. So with Friendster,
Speaker 1: we have a social networking site that pre existed Facebook,
Speaker 1: but was enable to scale to serve a growing user
Speaker 1: base and thus giving opportunities to competitors. And the next
Speaker 1: platform I should talk about is high five. It's Hi
Speaker 1: and the numeral five. This is a social network site
Speaker 1: that made a profit in its first year of operation.
Speaker 1: It was actually a profitable web based business right at
Speaker 1: the gate, not a very common thing even today now.
Speaker 1: This is according to CBS News. By the way, there
Speaker 1: was an entrepreneur named Ramu Yala Manchi who founded the
Speaker 1: site in two thousand three. And I do apologize for
Speaker 1: my pronunciation of his name. I am terribly ignorant, and
Speaker 1: that is all on me. But anyway, while I was
Speaker 1: researching this episode and I came across High five, I thought, huh,
Speaker 1: that's a social networking site. I don't think I've ever
Speaker 1: heard of before, except maybe I have, because apparently I
Speaker 1: already created a profile for it. See high five is
Speaker 1: still around today, at least theoretically it is. And so
Speaker 1: I thought, you know what I'll do. I'll make a
Speaker 1: profile on there. I'll create a profile to check out
Speaker 1: what this site looks like. Only when I tried to
Speaker 1: do that, when I tried to make a profile with
Speaker 1: my my private email address, I got a message that
Speaker 1: said that my email was blocked, which was odd because
Speaker 1: it's not like I'm using a particularly you know, shady
Speaker 1: email service. It's Gmail for those who want to know,
Speaker 1: it's nothing bad. So I thought, how that's weird. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe what that means is that I may have already
Speaker 1: made a high five accountant. I just forgot about it.
Speaker 1: So I chose the forgot my password feature, you know
Speaker 1: that useful thing, and then I put my email address
Speaker 1: in the little field and I hit the button, and
Speaker 1: the site said it was going to send an email
Speaker 1: to me with instructions on how I could log in,
Speaker 1: and as of this moment, I have not received that email.
Speaker 1: That was hours ago when I I did that. Nothing
Speaker 1: has happened since. So there are a few possibilities. One
Speaker 1: is that it's just taking a really long time. Maybe
Speaker 1: High five servers are few and far between and overloaded.
Speaker 1: Another possibility is that the site just isn't active like
Speaker 1: I had been led to believe, and that it's really dormant.
Speaker 1: I can't really find any information that says one way
Speaker 1: or the other. Another possibility is that I never had
Speaker 1: a profile on there, and everyone gets the message about
Speaker 1: an email being sent, whether they have a profile on
Speaker 1: High five or not, if they go through that whole
Speaker 1: forgot my password process. So I could find that out
Speaker 1: by just making up a fake email address and or
Speaker 1: making a brand new email address even and putting it
Speaker 1: in the field, but I didn't go through that that phase.
Speaker 1: I was already fed up, so I did try to
Speaker 1: sign in or sign up with my work email address,
Speaker 1: and that didn't work either. So honestly, I'm just not
Speaker 1: sure if there's anything going on at High five or not.
Speaker 1: I mean, there is a page there. It's not like
Speaker 1: it goes to you know, some page that says that
Speaker 1: you can get the the U r L or anything,
Speaker 1: but I can't make it do anything. But anyway, High
Speaker 1: five started off as another social network site where you
Speaker 1: would create a profile with information about yourself. There was
Speaker 1: supposed to be an age restriction. Users were supposed to
Speaker 1: be at least thirteen years old, but the site had
Speaker 1: no means of authenticating a person's age, so you know,
Speaker 1: there you go. The site would prompt new users to
Speaker 1: add friends through their contacts with existing services like Yahoo
Speaker 1: mail or hot mail, and boy those take me back.
Speaker 1: And users could customize their profile pages. They could do
Speaker 1: stuff like change the background color of their profile. They
Speaker 1: can move things around on their profile if they wanted to.
Speaker 1: They could even go into HTML editing mode and really
Speaker 1: change things up and customize things if they if they
Speaker 1: so desired. But from the reports I've read, very few
Speaker 1: people went to the trouble of doing that. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it also, like its predecessors, was tying into that that
Speaker 1: concept of six degrees of separation. Now, like for Inster
Speaker 1: and like some others that will be on this list,
Speaker 1: High five would attempt to evolve as sites like my
Speaker 1: Space and later Facebook began to dominate the social networking sphere.
Speaker 1: In two thousand nine, the site changed into more of
Speaker 1: a social gaming site, similar to why happened with Friendster.
Speaker 1: A company called Tagged acquired High fives assets in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven, and then Tagged itself would get scooped up
Speaker 1: by a company called The Meat Group. That's m E
Speaker 1: E T, not M E A T, which is a
Speaker 1: totally different and frankly horrifying company, but anyway, the Meat
Speaker 1: Group got them in two thousand seventeen. Jumping back to
Speaker 1: two thousand three, couple of months after High five launched,
Speaker 1: we got my Space. Now I've done full episodes about
Speaker 1: my Space and the whole story of the rise and
Speaker 1: fall the platform is fascinating. There's a ton of drama
Speaker 1: going on there, So for this episode, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to go into all that detail. I'll give you more
Speaker 1: of a high overview, and I'll do that after we
Speaker 1: take this short break. My Space was monumentally successful in
Speaker 1: the early days of social networking. You had your customizable
Speaker 1: profile pages, similar to what High five was doing. There
Speaker 1: was a fairly robust music industry presence on MySpace from
Speaker 1: the get go, and it became something of a hallmark
Speaker 1: that if you had a MySpace page, you would add
Speaker 1: songs to your profile uh and someone visiting your profile
Speaker 1: would be treated or would be forced to endure the
Speaker 1: music you had selected. If you were particularly mischievous, you
Speaker 1: could design your profile page so that the playback controls
Speaker 1: like pause and and play and everything we're very hard
Speaker 1: to find on the page, so that people who did
Speaker 1: visit your profile would have no option but to listen
Speaker 1: to whatever music you had selected. But gosh darn it,
Speaker 1: I needed everyone to really groove to Tarzan Boy by Baltimore.
Speaker 1: It was important. This was also the site where you
Speaker 1: would have your top eight friends. You could have lots
Speaker 1: and lots of MySpace friends, but on your a file
Speaker 1: page you would only see the top eight listed. In
Speaker 1: the early days, and Tom, one of the founders of
Speaker 1: my Space, was automatically your friend from the beginning. You
Speaker 1: could give him the boot if you wanted to, but
Speaker 1: Tom was everyone's friend when they first joined my Space.
Speaker 1: Not Tom. What a mench Now. For the first few
Speaker 1: years of its existence, it seemed as though my Space
Speaker 1: was going to be the definitive social networking site. It
Speaker 1: was like, this is this company is just on the
Speaker 1: up and up. News Core, the company that owned Fox News,
Speaker 1: among lots of other stuff. Rubert Murdoch's company, in other words,
Speaker 1: would end up buying my Space in two thousand five
Speaker 1: for more than half a billion dollars at truly princely
Speaker 1: some and in two thousand six my Space became the
Speaker 1: most visited site on the entire web. It was valued
Speaker 1: at twelve billion dollars in two thousand and seven. It
Speaker 1: was just astounding, like you would think it's too big
Speaker 1: to fail, right, and then it failed. Funny how that happens.
Speaker 1: So my Space did very well early on, but it
Speaker 1: didn't have fierce competition either Facebook, which cut on with
Speaker 1: college kids because when it first debuted, Facebook membership was
Speaker 1: exclusive to people who had a university or college email address.
Speaker 1: You couldn't join if you didn't, so it was almost
Speaker 1: entirely college kids when it launched. Anyway, it ended up
Speaker 1: getting a ton of momentum after that launch and when
Speaker 1: it opened up to the general public, and it was
Speaker 1: a young demographic, and by two thousand and eight, Facebook
Speaker 1: started to leave my Space behind. They were they had
Speaker 1: more users and people were spending more time on Facebook
Speaker 1: than on MySpace. News Corps tried to pivot. They redesigned
Speaker 1: my Space a few times to try and win people
Speaker 1: back over to the platform, but they couldn't really do
Speaker 1: much other than, you know, slow the flow of users
Speaker 1: from their site to the rival of Facebook. It was
Speaker 1: like putting a band aid on a truly massive wound.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't enough, and eventually news Corps sold my
Speaker 1: Space to a company called Specific Media for thirty five
Speaker 1: million dollars. So again, news Corps paid eight million for
Speaker 1: the site and then they sold it for thirty five million.
Speaker 1: I don't think I need to point out that that's
Speaker 1: not a great deal. Today my Space is technically still around,
Speaker 1: though it's really focused more on entertainment in general and
Speaker 1: the music industry in particular, and it's less of a
Speaker 1: social networking space for users like some of the other
Speaker 1: sites we've talked about on here so far. The only
Speaker 1: way my Space was able to stick around at all
Speaker 1: was to switch its focus from being a social networking
Speaker 1: platform to a different central focus, but still incorporating some
Speaker 1: social elements to the experience, so it's more like it's
Speaker 1: a site about music that has some social networking features
Speaker 1: along with it. Now, our next social platform that preceded
Speaker 1: Facebook is orch it Now. This one only came out
Speaker 1: a month before Facebook did, but technically that makes it earlier.
Speaker 1: It debuted in January two four, and orch It grew
Speaker 1: out of Google, where the company had this standing policy
Speaker 1: that employees could devote their work week to their own
Speaker 1: personal projects within Google, and one of those projects was orchit. Now.
Speaker 1: There have been subsequent allegations that orch it really was
Speaker 1: a replica of UH, an earlier project that the same
Speaker 1: engineer had created for a different company called Affinity Engines,
Speaker 1: but that that's its own thing now. You might recall
Speaker 1: I mentioned that Google had attempted to acquire friends Store
Speaker 1: a couple of years earlier, but had been turned down.
Speaker 1: Or Kit would become Google's first real experiment in social
Speaker 1: networking platforms, and at first the service was by invitation only,
Speaker 1: which helped drive interest in the platform, because it turns
Speaker 1: out people like to feel that they're part of an
Speaker 1: exclusive club, and Google would employ this same strategy for
Speaker 1: several of its products. Further down the line from Gmail
Speaker 1: to another social networking platform, will get to later in
Speaker 1: this episode, but going invitation only meant that new users
Speaker 1: might only know a couple of other people on the
Speaker 1: entire network, which made it really hard to build out
Speaker 1: a circle of friends and meant that ork It didn't
Speaker 1: have a whole lot of usefulness for those folks. My
Speaker 1: Space would end up taking off faster, although ork It
Speaker 1: would end up finding some traction in Brazil. Over time,
Speaker 1: Brazil and India would become the two main markets where
Speaker 1: users were flocking to on orch It, but it was
Speaker 1: largely a bust in the United States. One interesting fact,
Speaker 1: at one point, Marissa Meyer, who would go on to
Speaker 1: be the CEO of Yahoo, was the product manager for
Speaker 1: or Kind. Now the features of Orchid are familiar to
Speaker 1: anyone who has visited a social networking platform. Users would
Speaker 1: have profiles, and they could add friends on their network.
Speaker 1: Unlike some other examples, or could actually allowed users to
Speaker 1: visit any profile that was hosted on the platform, at
Speaker 1: least at first. The other platforms typically would restrict you
Speaker 1: to only being able to visit your friends profiles or
Speaker 1: maybe a couple of degrees out from your friends, but
Speaker 1: beyond that you wouldn't be able to visit a profile
Speaker 1: so if it's a complete stranger where you didn't have
Speaker 1: any contacts in common and they were too far separated
Speaker 1: from you, you wouldn't be allowed to see it. Orcutt
Speaker 1: was different. Now eventually they did change that, but at
Speaker 1: first you could visit any profile on the service. For
Speaker 1: several years, or Kit would remain more popular in Brazil
Speaker 1: and India than rival social networking sites, So it was
Speaker 1: outperforming my Space, it was outperforming Facebook, but eventually face
Speaker 1: Book caught up and then surpassed orch It in both
Speaker 1: of those countries. Meanwhile, Google had turned its fleeting attention
Speaker 1: to a different social networking platform from within the company,
Speaker 1: which we'll get to a little bit later, and so
Speaker 1: ork It was essentially operating without a whole lot of
Speaker 1: support from Google. It would limp along until two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: when Google would officially shut it down. Now, I think
Speaker 1: orc It's main drawback was that limited access very early on,
Speaker 1: and that meant that users who couldn't get an invite
Speaker 1: instead would head over to somewhere else like my Space.
Speaker 1: And typically once you establish an online presence somewhere, you
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of motivation to build it out again.
Speaker 1: Somewhere else, so the likelihood of building out on other
Speaker 1: networks starts to go down. Now, some people are more
Speaker 1: than happy to maintain a profile on multiple social networking sites,
Speaker 1: but I think a lot of us prefer to focus
Speaker 1: on one or two at the most, Like Facebook and
Speaker 1: Twitter are the two that tend to go hand in hand.
Speaker 1: Orc It didn't have the momentum needed to keep up
Speaker 1: with my Space and definitely didn't have the foundation to
Speaker 1: withstand the Facebook flood that would happen around two thousand eight.
Speaker 1: Facebook debuted the month after orc At first launched, so
Speaker 1: in February two four. But heck, this episode is all
Speaker 1: about the attempts to make it an alternative to Facebook,
Speaker 1: so there's no real point talking about Facebook itself. Suffice
Speaker 1: it to say that the social media platform has grown
Speaker 1: beyond all expectations and plays an incredibly important role when
Speaker 1: it comes to the dissemination of ideas and ideologies. Who
Speaker 1: would have thought that what originally started out as a
Speaker 1: flimsy excuse to try and find dates at a college
Speaker 1: university campus would eventually become a potential threat to democracy
Speaker 1: and security. But moving on, in two thousand five, a
Speaker 1: San Francisco couple launched a social net working site they
Speaker 1: called Bibo b e b oh. They would seem more
Speaker 1: success in the United Kingdom and in Ireland than it
Speaker 1: would in the United States. In fact, it actually became
Speaker 1: more popular than my Space over there in the UK
Speaker 1: and in Ireland at one point. Once again, the site
Speaker 1: had the hallmarks of your typical social networking services. You
Speaker 1: could have a profile, you could post blogs, you could
Speaker 1: share videos and music and photographs and do that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. And the success in the UK led to
Speaker 1: the company A O L taking notice of Bibo and
Speaker 1: making a move that in hindsight often gets lumped in
Speaker 1: with the worst deals of all time in the tech space.
Speaker 1: A O L bought Bibo for the princely sum of
Speaker 1: eight hundred fifty million dollars yeawza, and the couple who
Speaker 1: launched Bibo had like seventy steak in the company, so
Speaker 1: they had something that more than five hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: between the two of them. Man and this happened in
Speaker 1: two thousand eight. So A O L was essentially trying
Speaker 1: to establish its presence in the social networking space by
Speaker 1: taking a shortcut. You know, companies do this all the time.
Speaker 1: Where they will scale up, not by building out their
Speaker 1: their assets, but just buying new assets and trying to
Speaker 1: incorporate them into the existing company structure, which doesn't always
Speaker 1: work so well, and it did not work well for
Speaker 1: a o L. The motivation to really get into the
Speaker 1: social networking space really pushed a o L to pay
Speaker 1: way too much for Bibo. Now, granted, in two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: it was hard to predict that Facebook was going to
Speaker 1: eclipse all other social networking sites around the world. Maybe
Speaker 1: there was hope that Bibo could maintain its own special
Speaker 1: space on the web, particularly in places like the UK,
Speaker 1: But the numbers began to fall, and in just two years,
Speaker 1: a o L started to look for a way to
Speaker 1: offload those assets or they were going to shut the
Speaker 1: whole thing down. In t A o L would sell
Speaker 1: Bibo to an investment company called Criterion Capital Partners for
Speaker 1: a fraction of what they paid for it, reportedly just
Speaker 1: ten million dollars. So to recap, A o L spent
Speaker 1: eight hundred fifty million dollars on Bibo in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, and then in two thousand and ten sold
Speaker 1: it for ten million. Now, this makes the News Corps
Speaker 1: acquisition and unloading of MySpace look tame by comparison, But
Speaker 1: Criterion Capital failed to really leverage Bibo, just as a
Speaker 1: o L had failed to do it. And so a
Speaker 1: couple of years later, that same couple who had launched
Speaker 1: the site in the first place and made you know,
Speaker 1: half a billion dollars off of it, uh, they ended
Speaker 1: up buying Bibo back for just one million dollars, so
Speaker 1: a fraction of a per cent of what they were
Speaker 1: paid for it. That's not bad at all. Bibo would
Speaker 1: relaunch in it floundered a bit, It re branded, it
Speaker 1: became more about supporting Twitch streamers by offering up streaming software,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of like overlays and video switchers and
Speaker 1: stuff that streamers use whenever they are live streaming on Twitch.
Speaker 1: And in twenty nineteen, Amazon, the owner of Twitch, acquired
Speaker 1: Bibo for twenty five million dollars, So that story kind
Speaker 1: of ends there. In two thousand seven, we got a
Speaker 1: few more social networks with different value propositions. One of
Speaker 1: those was Tumbler, the micro blogging site, and Tumbler still
Speaker 1: around today, but this one was enjoying popularity among younger
Speaker 1: users for several years. It was like a slightly younger
Speaker 1: crowd than what you were finding on other social networking sites,
Speaker 1: and it passed through various corporate ownership. Yahoo owned it
Speaker 1: for a while. It acquired the company for more than
Speaker 1: a billion dollars, an incredible amount of money. Verizon then
Speaker 1: went on to buy Yahoo assets, including Tumbler, so tumb
Speaker 1: or went with that. Verizon ultimately couldn't figure out really
Speaker 1: what to do with Tumbler and sold it off to
Speaker 1: a company called Automatic that is the current owner of Tumbler.
Speaker 1: One of Tumbler's problems is that the site hosted a
Speaker 1: lot of adult content, meaning people were posting adult content
Speaker 1: like pornography to Tumbler to the point that it was
Speaker 1: becoming part of the site's reputation. And that proved to
Speaker 1: be a real problem for some of these corporate owners.
Speaker 1: I mean, they couldn't very well talk about owning a
Speaker 1: site that was largely trafficking in pornography. Two shareholders and
Speaker 1: so over different eras at Tumbler, there were different restrictions
Speaker 1: put in place with regard to the kinds of content
Speaker 1: that could be shared that changed Tumbler quite a bit. Uh. Tumbler,
Speaker 1: like I said, is still around today. Of course, though
Speaker 1: it does see a lot less traffic than it did
Speaker 1: at its height. Now, out of curiosity, I went to
Speaker 1: see if I had an account on Tumbler, and I do.
Speaker 1: I don't have any record election of when I last
Speaker 1: logged into that account. It's been a few years, but
Speaker 1: the account still exists, still active. All the posts I
Speaker 1: could see when I logged in and casually scrolled through,
Speaker 1: we're all from the official Tumbler account, so I have
Speaker 1: no idea if anyone that I used to follow on
Speaker 1: Tumbler is actually still active over there. So I'm starting
Speaker 1: to sense a theme. And on a side note about Tumbler,
Speaker 1: there's one event I really want to mention because it
Speaker 1: is infamous. It doesn't directly tie into our topic, but
Speaker 1: I don't know when I will ever get a chance
Speaker 1: to talk about it otherwise, so I want to do
Speaker 1: it here. This is one of those examples of something
Speaker 1: that had been built up to be a really special
Speaker 1: celebration but fell far short of what was promised, which
Speaker 1: is putting it lightly. I'm talking, of course, about dash Con,
Speaker 1: which was fire festival before there was a fire festival,
Speaker 1: though on a much more modest scale. So for those
Speaker 1: who don't know about this at all. Dash Con, which
Speaker 1: was originally called tumble Con, although the organizers would change
Speaker 1: the name in order to show that the convention was
Speaker 1: not officially a sanctioned Tumbler event or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It was meant to be a gathering of the tumbler
Speaker 1: community to allow Tumbler creators, many of whom were creating
Speaker 1: incredible video and art, to get together and to celebrate
Speaker 1: their community. And it was gonna have panels and special
Speaker 1: performances by bands. The podcasts were going to be there,
Speaker 1: including Welcome Tonight Vale, which was really taking off in
Speaker 1: popularity and had a huge following on Tumbler. And it
Speaker 1: was supposed to take place in the summer. Of a
Speaker 1: small group of organizers who I think it's safe to
Speaker 1: say we're clearly out of their depth, attempted to throw
Speaker 1: together a three day convention and they rented out of space,
Speaker 1: and they created a path schedule with lots of stuff
Speaker 1: to do and a lot of grandiose promises about what
Speaker 1: was going to be there, and there was a ball pit,
Speaker 1: the famous ball pit. Well, there were problems from the
Speaker 1: very beginning before the convention even got around, but those
Speaker 1: problems became apparent at the beginning of the convention itself. Really,
Speaker 1: just as the convention was getting started, the organizers announced
Speaker 1: to the relatively small crowd that was there that the
Speaker 1: hotel they were using as the host for this convention
Speaker 1: was demanding full payment for the entire weekend in advance,
Speaker 1: and that was an amount equal to seventeen thousand dollars. Now,
Speaker 1: according to the organizers, they anticipated that they would have
Speaker 1: all the money to pay for the hotel by the
Speaker 1: end of the weekend just from the attendance of the convention,
Speaker 1: but they didn't have the money on hand, so it's
Speaker 1: like a liquidity problem. They didn't have the liquid assets available,
Speaker 1: so they took up a collection from the people who
Speaker 1: were there, and amazingly they got enough money to meet
Speaker 1: that seventeen dollar goal. Now there were talk of reimbursements,
Speaker 1: that people were going to get paid back whatever money
Speaker 1: they were putting in, because again the organizers were saying, hey,
Speaker 1: we should be making enough money from admissions to cover
Speaker 1: that cost. So really this is just so that we
Speaker 1: can pay the bill and then you'll get your money back.
Speaker 1: But from what I can tell, there never really was
Speaker 1: a sincere effort put forward to even keep track of
Speaker 1: who was donating how much money. So I'm not sure
Speaker 1: that that was ever going to work out, and it
Speaker 1: ended up being a moot point anyway. Now that massive
Speaker 1: problem was really just the start of the issues, with
Speaker 1: it soon becoming clear that guests were canceling performances were
Speaker 1: not going to happen. The night Vale crew left because
Speaker 1: the payment they had been promised had fallen through. It
Speaker 1: was really ugly and making matters worse, the organizers had
Speaker 1: no real way to make this up to the attendees,
Speaker 1: apart from promising some extra time in the ball pit,
Speaker 1: which I mean, if you haven't seen the photos, you
Speaker 1: need to search Dashkong Ballpit. It's just this little inflated
Speaker 1: pool filled with maybe a couple of thousand plastic balls.
Speaker 1: We now, I would do a whole episode about dash Con,
Speaker 1: but really you should just head over to YouTube and
Speaker 1: watch a video that's titled Tumblers Failed Convention The Story
Speaker 1: of dash Con. It's by Sarah Z. Sarah is a
Speaker 1: talented essayist video sayst on YouTube. She has no connection
Speaker 1: to me. As far as I know, she doesn't know
Speaker 1: who I am. She doesn't know I'm talking about this.
Speaker 1: I just really like her work, and her piece is
Speaker 1: thoroughly researched. It's really interesting. It's also fifty minutes long,
Speaker 1: so it's kind of like a tech stuff episode Anyway. Anyway,
Speaker 1: dash Con was an unmitigated disaster, and some of the
Speaker 1: stank of that failure would rub off on Tumbler itself,
Speaker 1: which is hardly fair. Anyway, I had to throw that
Speaker 1: in here. Plus give a shout out to Sarah's ez YouTube. Seriously,
Speaker 1: go check out the video. It's it's pretty dope, as
Speaker 1: the kids are like to say. When we come back,
Speaker 1: i'll chat about a couple of other challenges to the
Speaker 1: throne of Facebook, and we'll pontificate for a short while
Speaker 1: whether it's even possible for some new platform to make
Speaker 1: a space in a Facebook dominated web. But first, let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break. Another service that launched the same
Speaker 1: year that Tumbler launched was friend Feed. Now this wasn't
Speaker 1: really so much of a standalone social networking site, but
Speaker 1: more of an aggregator created by some former Google employees. Now,
Speaker 1: you could post stuff just a friend feed if you
Speaker 1: wanted to. You could post photos and files and messages,
Speaker 1: but the main attraction was that you could link friend
Speaker 1: fee to other services like your Facebook profile or Twitter
Speaker 1: or Flicker or YouTube. And let's just say that I
Speaker 1: joined friend feed and I connect with you as my
Speaker 1: first friend high friend. Now, at that point, I would
Speaker 1: see a feed of all the stuff you were posting
Speaker 1: on the services you had connected to friend Feed, and
Speaker 1: I would see it in real time and posted in
Speaker 1: reverse chronological orders, so the most recent posts would be
Speaker 1: at the top of the page. So, assuming you had
Speaker 1: connected all of your services to friend feed, and let's
Speaker 1: say that you had just posted something to Facebook, I
Speaker 1: would see your Facebook status update within friend feed. And
Speaker 1: then let's say after that you popped over to Twitter
Speaker 1: and you posted a tweet, Well, then I would see
Speaker 1: the tweet pop up on friend Feed. So instead of
Speaker 1: having to follow someone on multiple services, like I'm following
Speaker 1: you on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, etcetera, etcetera, I
Speaker 1: could just follow your friend feed and get everything your
Speaker 1: post sting, or at least everything you chose to share
Speaker 1: with friend feed, and that ended up making it really,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of useful. Now, not everyone was crazy
Speaker 1: about this, because one big concern was that if you
Speaker 1: linked to say, a blog post, to friend feed, The
Speaker 1: concern was that people were going to read the content
Speaker 1: on friend feed, but they wouldn't actually click through to
Speaker 1: go visit the blog. And if the blog is supported
Speaker 1: by advertising, as most blogs were, that's not very good
Speaker 1: because it would mean that the blogger was getting lower
Speaker 1: page views, and that would mean that they would see
Speaker 1: less revenue from their work. So people would be reading
Speaker 1: their stuff, but it wouldn't be counting toward the ad
Speaker 1: deals that these blogging sites had, so that was something
Speaker 1: of a problem. Facebook thought that friend feed was a
Speaker 1: pretty rad idea, so in two thousand nine, just two
Speaker 1: years after friend feed had launched, Facebook announced plans to
Speaker 1: acquire the service for a reported fifty million dollars. Facebook
Speaker 1: continued to allow the service to operate. It never really
Speaker 1: cut on in a big way. I mean, the people
Speaker 1: who used it tended to like it, but not that
Speaker 1: many people were using it, and Facebook would finally pull
Speaker 1: the plug on the service in two thousand fifteen. The
Speaker 1: last friend had been fed, I suppose. And the third
Speaker 1: social networking site that began in two thousand seven was Twitch,
Speaker 1: though not not actually Twitch, not in that form. It
Speaker 1: was really the predecessor of Twitch a k A justin
Speaker 1: dot tv that launched in two thousand seven. It was
Speaker 1: a live streaming video service. Had really changed in a
Speaker 1: big way a couple of years later because it became
Speaker 1: clear that video game streamers were dominating the platform. It
Speaker 1: necessitated the company to spin off a new video game
Speaker 1: streaming service. That's the one that was called Twitch dot tv. Eventually,
Speaker 1: justin dot tv would become part of like a subsidiary
Speaker 1: of Twitch dot tv, and a little bit later it
Speaker 1: would just get shut down entirely. Twitch dot tv became
Speaker 1: the only focus of the company. Ultimately Amazon would come
Speaker 1: along and acquire that, And of course Twitch dot tv
Speaker 1: is still extremely active today, but it's also a very
Speaker 1: different platform from Facebook. You can't really compare the two.
Speaker 1: I should add, however, that Facebook really hopes to get
Speaker 1: into that space by launching their own streaming video services
Speaker 1: and trying to challenge Twitch. So Twitch isn't really trying
Speaker 1: to play in Facebook's yard, but Facebook is trying to
Speaker 1: play in twitches yard. This is something that Facebook has
Speaker 1: done on numerous occasions with other sites as well. Then
Speaker 1: you've got stuff like Instagram, which Facebook would ultimately acquire,
Speaker 1: and you've got you know, Snapchat, But these social networks
Speaker 1: also come at things in a very different way from Facebook.
Speaker 1: They made a space not through competition with Facebook, but
Speaker 1: by creating something new and different. And then Facebook would
Speaker 1: either try to emulate what these companies were doing, or
Speaker 1: they would just try to buy the ding day companies
Speaker 1: and and mutate them to fit within Facebook's own business model.
Speaker 1: We see that today with stuff like you know, Twitch
Speaker 1: and TikTok. The next traditional social networking platform that I
Speaker 1: really want to talk about arrived in twenty eleven. This
Speaker 1: was Google's second really big push to get back into
Speaker 1: social networking. Now. They had tried a couple of other
Speaker 1: things in between or cut and this. There was Google
Speaker 1: Buzz and Google friend Connect, but neither of those got
Speaker 1: very far. So this one was called Google Plus. Now.
Speaker 1: I remember the launch of Google Plus really well because
Speaker 1: I was one of those jerks who got early access
Speaker 1: to it when it was invitation only. When I joined
Speaker 1: Google Plus, most of the people who were on the
Speaker 1: site were either in the tech industry or they were
Speaker 1: in the tech journalism industry, so it's a it's kind
Speaker 1: of like being in an exclusive club of my peers,
Speaker 1: and that was a lot of fun. I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1: It felt like we were all in our own little
Speaker 1: clubhouse and like or cult. Years earlier, Google chose to
Speaker 1: make Google Plus invitation only network at first to kind
Speaker 1: of control things and scale things up. Uh. I suppose
Speaker 1: they wanted to do this gradually and avoid the pitfalls
Speaker 1: that come with like a massive influx of users all
Speaker 1: at the same time. Old school Twitter users probably remember
Speaker 1: the fail Whale, the character that would pop up whenever
Speaker 1: Twitter would crash, usually because of server overload. Google didn't
Speaker 1: want that stuff to happen. But while this metered edition
Speaker 1: of users might have meant that the servers weren't being overtaxed,
Speaker 1: it also created that feeling of exclusivity and more people
Speaker 1: wanted in to try stuff out. And then when they
Speaker 1: finally did get into Google Plus, they were disappointed to
Speaker 1: find that, you know, it really wasn't that special, and
Speaker 1: it really wasn't Now that's not to say Google Plus
Speaker 1: was bad. I don't think it was bad. It just
Speaker 1: wasn't remarkable, And so it would be natural for someone
Speaker 1: who had their expectations really built up to be this
Speaker 1: amazing thing, like You're gonna go and see the chocolate factory.
Speaker 1: They're going to be disappoin I did it, and Google
Speaker 1: Plus was kind of not at fault for all of that,
Speaker 1: partially of fault, I guess. And it did have some
Speaker 1: cool features. One of those was that you could organize
Speaker 1: the people you know into different circles, Like you would
Speaker 1: literally drop and drag names into different circles. So, for example,
Speaker 1: you could have a circle that you make for your
Speaker 1: close friends, and another for family members, and one for
Speaker 1: co workers, and maybe one for acquaintances. You could have
Speaker 1: people belong to more than one circle if you liked.
Speaker 1: So let's say that you know there's a cousin you're
Speaker 1: particularly close to, so that cousins both in your family
Speaker 1: circle and your close friends circle. When you post something,
Speaker 1: you could choose which circles in your network could see
Speaker 1: that post. So maybe you want to post something about
Speaker 1: a birthday party and you just want friends and family
Speaker 1: to see it. You don't want to include like coworkers
Speaker 1: or distant acquaintances that kind of thing. It was pretty
Speaker 1: easy to do that, easier, I would argue, than the
Speaker 1: way Facebook does it. You could also create a circle
Speaker 1: for no good knicks whom you wish to ignore, and
Speaker 1: you wouldn't see those folks on Google Plus, and they
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to see your stuff either. Google made
Speaker 1: things a bit blurry with Google Plus, and that if
Speaker 1: you were to make a Google account for stuff like
Speaker 1: YouTube or Gmail, that was a Google account that was
Speaker 1: good across all Google services. So let's say you sign
Speaker 1: up an account so that you can have a Gmail address.
Speaker 1: Your Google login would give you access not just to Gmail,
Speaker 1: but also you could have a YouTube account so you
Speaker 1: can start uploading videos if you wanted. Uh, you would
Speaker 1: have a Google Drive account where you could store files
Speaker 1: and use services like Google Docs. Google Plus was part
Speaker 1: of that package, and I think it's safe to say
Speaker 1: there were a lot of folks who had a Google account,
Speaker 1: but they rarely, if ever, would duck into Google Plus.
Speaker 1: That became more apparent when you started looking at engagement
Speaker 1: versus the number of active users. Google Plus had a
Speaker 1: high active user number within the first couple of years
Speaker 1: of launch, really high, like it was on track to
Speaker 1: be a Facebook competitor, but those users were barely spending
Speaker 1: any time at all on the actual platform. In January,
Speaker 1: CNN reported that users were spending about three and a
Speaker 1: half minutes on Google Plus for the month of January,
Speaker 1: whereas they had spent seven and a half hours on Facebook.
Speaker 1: That's not even competitive, right. And There's a lot more
Speaker 1: I could say about Google Plus and that experiment, including
Speaker 1: how Google forced YouTube creators to have accounts linked to
Speaker 1: Google Plus accounts for a while and how all of
Speaker 1: that turned into a total disaster, But I think that
Speaker 1: would warrant its own episode when it comes to explaining failures.
Speaker 1: I think Google Plus really fell short of expectations. It
Speaker 1: didn't provide enough of a reason for people to leave
Speaker 1: Facebook for Google Plus. And also Google did a great
Speaker 1: job at alienating a large percentage of its user base
Speaker 1: by you know, forcing the linking of accounts together. Now,
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna this with a quick overview of
Speaker 1: the social networking site l O E l l O
Speaker 1: created by Paul Budnitts and Todd Berger. They launched the
Speaker 1: site in two thousand fourteen, and the founders were trying
Speaker 1: to do something that I think was a really nice
Speaker 1: idea just ultimately didn't take off. They wanted to launch
Speaker 1: a social networking site where you are not the product.
Speaker 1: That was actually a quote in their manifesto, and that
Speaker 1: gets back to hell. Facebook makes money which is largely
Speaker 1: through advertising, and we the users, are the product that
Speaker 1: Facebook is selling. Facebook is selling access to us to
Speaker 1: various advertisers. And it's not just the fact that there
Speaker 1: are a lot of people on Facebook. I mean that
Speaker 1: alone makes it valuable, but it's also that by interacting
Speaker 1: on Facebook, by sharing our interests, by commenting on things,
Speaker 1: by liking things, we're giving Facebook an extremely detailed look
Speaker 1: at who we are, sp pole at our preferences. Facebook
Speaker 1: knows what we like and what we don't like. It
Speaker 1: knows what sort of stuff catches our attention and what
Speaker 1: we're likely going to just scroll right past. That means
Speaker 1: advertisers can target people who are most likely to respond
Speaker 1: to their ads. A Facebook user isn't valuable just because
Speaker 1: they use Facebook. They might be valuable because they happen
Speaker 1: to like shoes or sports or you know, a particular band.
Speaker 1: And so much of Facebook's decisions, many of which have
Speaker 1: proven to be detrimental to society in the long run,
Speaker 1: are motivated by the desire to serve customers, which would
Speaker 1: be their advertisers, and they want to serve them the
Speaker 1: best product, which is our information. Elo said to Heck,
Speaker 1: with all that our social network isn't going to have
Speaker 1: ads on it. The idea was you would get a
Speaker 1: stripped down ad free experience on Elo. You could build
Speaker 1: out your social network, you could have a profile, all
Speaker 1: without fear that all your activities were really just metrics
Speaker 1: that were being analyzed by algorithms so that the service
Speaker 1: provider could sell ad space to you. But the delusion
Speaker 1: of interested users who flocked to l O when it
Speaker 1: was still nothing but an invite field where you would
Speaker 1: just type in your email address indicated there was going
Speaker 1: to be a problem. The service wasn't really ready to
Speaker 1: handle the number of people who wanted to try it,
Speaker 1: which of course led back to that whole exclusivity feel again. However,
Speaker 1: LO chose to keep accepting new users rather than shut
Speaker 1: down operations or you know, close off choke points. They said,
Speaker 1: we're just gonna deal with this. If the service goes down,
Speaker 1: we'll get it back up as fast as we can,
Speaker 1: but we don't want to end up making this like
Speaker 1: an exclusive club. According to analysts, a lot of LO
Speaker 1: users would get access to the site and then not
Speaker 1: do anything else. A company called r g A Metrics
Speaker 1: took a sample of more than a hundred fifty thousand
Speaker 1: l O users and found that thirty six percent of
Speaker 1: the accounts they looked at had never posted anything, and
Speaker 1: only twenty percent of users who had signed up remained
Speaker 1: active users six days afterward. So in other words, one
Speaker 1: out of every five users who signed up would still
Speaker 1: be active six days later. That's not great. Elo seemed
Speaker 1: to have a lot of initial appeal but no staying power,
Speaker 1: and I think a big part of the problem was that, well,
Speaker 1: everyone was already over on Facebook. So unless your whole
Speaker 1: social circle is making the move with you, then it
Speaker 1: doesn't do you any good to jump off Facebook because
Speaker 1: no one you know is on the new network. It's
Speaker 1: the same problem lots of other attempts have had. Posting
Speaker 1: on Elo was kind of like posting on six Degrees
Speaker 1: way back in There's a good chance no one you
Speaker 1: knew was ever going to see it. It was sort
Speaker 1: of a catch twenty two problem. L O would pivot
Speaker 1: like a lot of other social networking sites, and it
Speaker 1: ultimately changed its focus to be more of an artist
Speaker 1: centric network. L is a great place to discover artists
Speaker 1: who are working in different types of media, but it's
Speaker 1: not a replacement for Facebook, and it makes you wonder
Speaker 1: if anyone will ever create a social networking site that
Speaker 1: has the appeal and stickiness of Facebook. Some days that
Speaker 1: just seems like it's impossible, that it's no way that's
Speaker 1: ever going to happen. But then there was also a
Speaker 1: time when it was obvious quote unquote that my Space
Speaker 1: was going to be the future of social networking, and
Speaker 1: that played out very differently. So who knows. Maybe Facebook's
Speaker 1: also too big to fail. Wink wink. That's all for
Speaker 1: this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: If you have any suggestions for topics I should tackle
Speaker 1: in the future, reach out to me on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle is text stuff H s W and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows. H