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 how the tech are you? So? This episode is
Speaker 1: a continuation of one I published on Monday, November two thousand,
Speaker 1: two days ago. If you're listening to this, the date
Speaker 1: comes out and I'm walking through the history of social networks.
Speaker 1: I was inspired to do this because of various crises
Speaker 1: happening at Meta and Twitter, two of the heavy hitters
Speaker 1: in the social network space, particularly here in the United States,
Speaker 1: and the struggles these two companies are going through have
Speaker 1: prompted some to suggest that perhaps the era of social
Speaker 1: networks could be coming to an end. Now, I am
Speaker 1: not ready to make such a lame, particularly since I
Speaker 1: think the definition of social network is pretty wibbly wobbly,
Speaker 1: if not timey whiney, and that you could argue platforms
Speaker 1: like TikTok or at least a close cousin to social networks,
Speaker 1: if not just a social network in a different form factor,
Speaker 1: and that we're not likely to see the complete disappearance
Speaker 1: of these things. But you know, that's just my opinion. Anyway,
Speaker 1: in the last episode, we left off with the social
Speaker 1: network High five, but we've got a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: other social networks to talk about. And here's the real issue, y'all.
Speaker 1: Two of the biggest, our most important social networks launched
Speaker 1: not long after High five. So while I was hoping
Speaker 1: to cover maybe five, maybe four social networks in this episode,
Speaker 1: we're only going to get to two because they were
Speaker 1: two very big ones and very important ones. Also, just
Speaker 1: a reminder, this series is not really an exhaustive list
Speaker 1: of every social network ever. There have been tons, including
Speaker 1: some that never really found much traction, like some that
Speaker 1: kind of quietly debuted, didn't really get enough users, and
Speaker 1: then went away without anyone really paying much attention. So
Speaker 1: I'm not covering every single one of them. My apologies
Speaker 1: if I leave out your favorite obscure social network as
Speaker 1: we go through this series. So here's our next entry.
Speaker 1: It was a big one, at least for a while.
Speaker 1: It began when a few e Universe employees, among them
Speaker 1: two named Krista Wolfe and Everybody's friend Tom Anderson collaborated
Speaker 1: to create a social network that from the start had
Speaker 1: an emphasis on promoting and discovering music, it was, of
Speaker 1: course my Space. So we're talking two thousand three here. Now.
Speaker 1: Obviously these guys did not come up with the idea
Speaker 1: for an online social network from scratch right like there
Speaker 1: were previous social networks out there. In fact, they had
Speaker 1: been using Friendster, and we talked about Friendster in the
Speaker 1: previous episode in this series. So if you want to
Speaker 1: hear more about that, listen to Monday's episode. Now, for
Speaker 1: those of you who never joined my Space back in
Speaker 1: its original incarnation, because I should point out my Space
Speaker 1: still is a thing, it's just a different thing from
Speaker 1: the original MySpace. Well, if you were never part of
Speaker 1: my Space, you might not remember what it was like
Speaker 1: to be on the site back in those days, so
Speaker 1: pretty early on in MySpace history. Once it launched, users
Speaker 1: could create a profile page that had their their photo
Speaker 1: up on it that could link to other photos as well. Uh.
Speaker 1: They could also include a short playlist of songs that
Speaker 1: were available on my Space and those would automatically play.
Speaker 1: You could set it to automatically play when someone visited
Speaker 1: your profile. This was something that was both interesting and infuriating,
Speaker 1: depending upon your friends musical tastes. It could also really
Speaker 1: put friendships to the test. Right, You go and visit
Speaker 1: a friend's page and you're like, Wow, I didn't know
Speaker 1: that Jonathan was so into Debbie Gibson. Um, not that
Speaker 1: I had Debbie Gibson. Actually I remember I had some
Speaker 1: they might be Giants songs on my my Space profile page.
Speaker 1: As I recall, it has been a long time since
Speaker 1: I had on my Space page, so I I remember
Speaker 1: having they might be Giant songs on there, but I
Speaker 1: could be inventing that memory anyway. You could also deck
Speaker 1: out your profile with various gimmicks that could make the
Speaker 1: experience of visiting someone's profile and eye bleeding affair if
Speaker 1: if you wanted it to be. A lot of folks
Speaker 1: seem to adopt the more is more attitude and they
Speaker 1: threw everything and the kitchen sync at their profiles. At
Speaker 1: least my friends did that, so it was not subtle
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases, like you would see some
Speaker 1: profiles that have little animated flashes of light and things
Speaker 1: like that on them, uh, making it very difficult to
Speaker 1: read stuff on occasion. As for Tom, the co creator
Speaker 1: that I said was everybody's friend, That was literally true
Speaker 1: in my Space. When you first joined my Space, Tom
Speaker 1: Anderson would populate your friends list, so you weren't starting
Speaker 1: from nothing. You had Tom as your friend from the
Speaker 1: very beginning. You could, of course removed Tom from your
Speaker 1: friends list, but it was a nice touch to suggest
Speaker 1: that all users really are our friends of one of
Speaker 1: the creators of the site. Right, you've already got a friend.
Speaker 1: You've got a friend in Tom. Now I should actually
Speaker 1: add this was not always a thing, because technically Tom
Speaker 1: didn't sign up for my Space until it had already launched,
Speaker 1: like two weeks previously, So there was a time where
Speaker 1: Tom was not automatically your friend if you were in
Speaker 1: my Space at the very get go, which was unlikely
Speaker 1: because that was really when the Universe crew themselves were
Speaker 1: kind of launching things and testing it out. Uh, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: he wasn't automatically your number one friend from right out
Speaker 1: of the gate. MySpace introduced a few things that would
Speaker 1: carry over into some other social networks, so some of
Speaker 1: the stuff that my Space came up with would become
Speaker 1: the bread and butter of social networks moving forward. For
Speaker 1: one thing, while you could have dozens of friends, only
Speaker 1: eight would appear on your profile page itself, like you
Speaker 1: would have a list of your top eight friends on
Speaker 1: your profile page, and you could select who appeared in
Speaker 1: that list of eight. The rest of your friends people
Speaker 1: would have to see by clicking through to your friends
Speaker 1: list itself so they could view other friends. It's just
Speaker 1: that these eight would be the ones that would be
Speaker 1: featured on your profile page. So being one of someone's
Speaker 1: top eight spaces became kind of like a popularity contest
Speaker 1: or a status symbol. Weird. Al Yankovic would reference this
Speaker 1: in his song White and Nerdy, which was a a
Speaker 1: parody of millionaires writing dirty. So yeah, if you want
Speaker 1: to listen to a dated tech reference, actually several of them,
Speaker 1: you can listen to that parody song. But you might say, well,
Speaker 1: how did my space even become a thing? How did
Speaker 1: it start to become popular enough? Where being in these
Speaker 1: top eight spaces was important? Because news sites and services
Speaker 1: don't magically become popular instantaneously, right, They have to attract
Speaker 1: a user base. There has to be a beginning to it.
Speaker 1: Otherwise we can't get to the point where two friends
Speaker 1: get into a real life argument because one of them
Speaker 1: isn't in the other's top eight spaces on my Space. Well,
Speaker 1: this gets back to the universe see the my Space
Speaker 1: project began at that company, it didn't spin off to
Speaker 1: be its own thing. This, by the way, is one
Speaker 1: of the features of my Space that would later be
Speaker 1: cited as a big mistake that it started at under
Speaker 1: a Universe. And the reason why I say it would
Speaker 1: be called a big mistake later on is that the
Speaker 1: creators of MySpace didn't have ownership over my Space. So
Speaker 1: when it was eventually bought out, which we will get to,
Speaker 1: the creators did not get massive payouts, at least not
Speaker 1: to the level they would have if they had spun
Speaker 1: off MySpace as an independent project. So it started off
Speaker 1: at the Universe. But one benefit of that was that
Speaker 1: the Universe had a pretty big user base, like twenty
Speaker 1: million email subscribers, so the Universe could lean on that
Speaker 1: subscriber list to send out invitations to join my Space,
Speaker 1: So they already had access to a potential audience and
Speaker 1: that was a big benefit. So this was a real
Speaker 1: project the Universe, I mean the entire hierarchy. Even Brad Greenspan,
Speaker 1: who was the CEO and chairman of the Universe, was
Speaker 1: in on this. So they ended up inviting the Universe
Speaker 1: customers to join my Space and that helped get a
Speaker 1: lot of of folks over And you have to remember,
Speaker 1: in these early days of social networks, some of the
Speaker 1: networks were hitting a peak of around two or three
Speaker 1: million people, right, so that was considered a huge success
Speaker 1: if you had a couple million users. But because the
Speaker 1: universe already had access to like twenty million people, it
Speaker 1: gave my Space a huge leg up, and so very
Speaker 1: quickly my Space became the number one social network on
Speaker 1: the web. You could argue part of that was because
Speaker 1: of the lack of competition, but either way, it became
Speaker 1: number one, and this really became a big deal. When
Speaker 1: the site made a key change to how it operated,
Speaker 1: it would really increase effic to the site. So originally
Speaker 1: on my Space, the only people who could view your
Speaker 1: profile page were people that you had designated as you
Speaker 1: are friends. So you had to do like a friend
Speaker 1: request and accept it, and at that point forward your
Speaker 1: friend would be able to view your profile. But before
Speaker 1: that they would not. They would just have to try
Speaker 1: and contact you to see if you would become their friend.
Speaker 1: The change in the spring of two thousand four was
Speaker 1: that the site made all member profiles publicly viewable, and
Speaker 1: that would mean that there would be a ton more
Speaker 1: traffic going to my Space, which made it one of
Speaker 1: the most popular sites in the web at that time.
Speaker 1: Another thing that made my Space really popular is that
Speaker 1: there was a pretty lax approach to content moderation, So
Speaker 1: things got a little, you know, raunchy on my Space,
Speaker 1: more so than you would see in later social networks.
Speaker 1: It wasn't outright like bedlam Or or Solomon god Mora
Speaker 1: or anything like that. It wasn't, you know, this crazy
Speaker 1: hedonistic landscape, but things could get a little more racy
Speaker 1: on the early MySpace. Now, year after my Space debuted,
Speaker 1: we got Facebook, which obviously will play a huge part
Speaker 1: in this episode when we get to the second half
Speaker 1: of it. Really and in early two thousand five, when
Speaker 1: Facebook had just launched the year before, my Space allegedly
Speaker 1: attempted to buy out this competing social network. Keep in mind,
Speaker 1: Facebook in two thousand five was a very different thing
Speaker 1: than Facebook today. It was just Facebook, and it was
Speaker 1: really restricted to college students and maybe high school students.
Speaker 1: By two thousand five, and according to Julia Angwin's book
Speaker 1: about the history of my Space, the MySpace reps came
Speaker 1: to Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, that is,
Speaker 1: and they offered to acquire Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg quoted
Speaker 1: them a price of seventy million dollars and that my
Speaker 1: Space just said like, no, that's unreal estate, that's way
Speaker 1: too much money. We're good, and they walked away from
Speaker 1: the deal. Now, in hindsight, this would be a very
Speaker 1: bad decision, like if my Space had bought Facebook, things
Speaker 1: might may have turned out at least somewhat differently, But
Speaker 1: at the time they had no way of knowing that,
Speaker 1: so it's not like you can really blame them. They
Speaker 1: just saw Facebook as a small time competitor. And besides that,
Speaker 1: you could argue that this my Space decision was overshadowed
Speaker 1: by a much larger, worse decision that was made later on,
Speaker 1: So Facebook was not the only possible acquisition or merger
Speaker 1: opportunity early on in my Space's history. Both match net
Speaker 1: and Viacom showed early interest in acquiring my Space in
Speaker 1: two thousand four, offering somewhere in the neighborhood of forty
Speaker 1: million dollars, and my Space turned down those offers. So
Speaker 1: my Space did the same thing, you know that they
Speaker 1: were like, we're not going to sell for forty million,
Speaker 1: we feel we're worth more than that. And then, of
Speaker 1: course Zuckerberg had a very similar attitude in two thousand five,
Speaker 1: saying he felt Facebook's value with seventy five million, and
Speaker 1: my Space was like, no, I don't. I don't think so.
Speaker 1: So my Space and Friendster looked at a potential merger,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't come to an agreement on that, so
Speaker 1: ultimately that that fell through. But in June two thousand five,
Speaker 1: a buyer with extremely deep pockets came a call in
Speaker 1: and made my Space an offer it couldn't refuse. And
Speaker 1: that caller was News Corporation or news Corps, the company
Speaker 1: that at the time owned the Fox Entertainment Group and
Speaker 1: several publishing and media concerns. It was run by Rupert Murdoch,
Speaker 1: and the company came to my Space and made an
Speaker 1: offer of five hundred eighty million in dollars. When you
Speaker 1: get an offer that is more than ten times larger
Speaker 1: than offers you got just a year earlier, stuff has
Speaker 1: seriously changed, but it was on the precipice of changing
Speaker 1: even more to a disastrous degree, which we will talk
Speaker 1: about in just a moment. But first let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break Okay, before the break, we had just got
Speaker 1: to the point where news Corps acquired my Space for
Speaker 1: five eight million dollars. After the acquisition, a few of
Speaker 1: the folks at my Space actually stayed on and they
Speaker 1: got huge paychecks. Were doing so so while they didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily get an enormous payout because of the lack of
Speaker 1: ownership of my Space, I mean, Brad Greenspan made out
Speaker 1: really well, but a lot of the others didn't. Uh
Speaker 1: some of them stayed on and they were getting massive
Speaker 1: compensation packages from News Corps. So one of those people
Speaker 1: was Dwolf, who met with Zuckerberg again in two thousand
Speaker 1: five and again wanted to make an offer to acquire Facebook. Right.
Speaker 1: Remember in two thousand four they had asked and we're
Speaker 1: told sony five million. So what happened in two thousand five, Well,
Speaker 1: this time Zuckerberg said, no, the price has gone up
Speaker 1: now it's seven hundred fifty million. Obviously that didn't happen,
Speaker 1: So once again, my Space walks away and decides not
Speaker 1: to purchase Facebook. Within a short while, my Space became
Speaker 1: the most visited site on the web, beating out Yahoo
Speaker 1: and Google. It also landed a nearly one billion dollar
Speaker 1: ad deal with Google, which meant that my spaces website
Speaker 1: real estate would be peppered with ads served up through Google.
Speaker 1: On the site, Facebook was gaining momentum, but was still
Speaker 1: seen as being a second you know, also ran like
Speaker 1: it's distant second, partly because, as we'll talk about later on,
Speaker 1: the site was initially catering to students but not the
Speaker 1: public at large. And by two thousand seven we were
Speaker 1: entering into a new era of social networks, the network
Speaker 1: as a platform for developers. Facebook had actually already pioneered this,
Speaker 1: and other social networks were trying to play catch up
Speaker 1: to create a way for developers to make things that
Speaker 1: could run on top of social networks that users could
Speaker 1: tap into that would augment their experience in some way.
Speaker 1: So this is a really important thing to consider. You know,
Speaker 1: initially everything you encountered on social networks came pretty much
Speaker 1: from the network itself, right You generated the content, but
Speaker 1: all the tools, all the assets that you could use
Speaker 1: to build out your profile, those were provided by whatever
Speaker 1: the social network was. But otherwise that you were limited.
Speaker 1: As these sites evolved, it became possible for third party
Speaker 1: developers to build applications that could use the social network
Speaker 1: as a foundation, so you can get stuff like games
Speaker 1: or new ways to interact with other users. But in turn,
Speaker 1: that was leading to a problem because the landscape was
Speaker 1: terribly fractured. You have to keep in mind by this
Speaker 1: time they were like a dozen or so social networks
Speaker 1: out there. Now there were two really big ones. There
Speaker 1: was my Space and Facebook, which was growing rapidly. Those
Speaker 1: were very easy to spot, so you would understand that
Speaker 1: developers would try to make stuff for those those platforms,
Speaker 1: But there were tons of other social networks out there too,
Speaker 1: including some that we've talked about in the last episode
Speaker 1: like high five and some that we'll talk about in
Speaker 1: the next episode. But without a common framework to rely
Speaker 1: upon for developers, it would mean that developers would have
Speaker 1: to pick and choose which platforms they would develop four
Speaker 1: Otherwise they would have to build the same app numerous times,
Speaker 1: so that would work on each and every social network.
Speaker 1: That's an enormous time sinc and waste of energy and money.
Speaker 1: The same sort of thing happens with game development, right Like,
Speaker 1: ideally you develop a game for all platforms so that
Speaker 1: you're available everywhere, but that's a huge commitment to do that.
Speaker 1: You know, if you want, you could sign an exclusivity
Speaker 1: deal and then you developed just for one platform. You've
Speaker 1: limited your audience, but you've also restricted the amount of
Speaker 1: work you're going to have to do to make it happen. Well,
Speaker 1: to sidestep this problem of the fractured landscape, Google spearheaded
Speaker 1: the Open Social Alliance that brought together a bunch of
Speaker 1: different social networks, but not most notably Facebook, and they
Speaker 1: were trying to build a set of software development standards
Speaker 1: for social networks so that developers could use a common
Speaker 1: set of tools to develop things for multiple networks time. Now,
Speaker 1: part of that might have been because at this point
Speaker 1: it was becoming obvious that Facebook was going to be
Speaker 1: a big existential threat because it was growing considerably. And
Speaker 1: the next year, in two thousand and eight, Facebook overtook
Speaker 1: MySpace in web traffic, and within another year it had
Speaker 1: overtook my Space and unique visitors. People began to migrate
Speaker 1: from my Space to Facebook. On top of that, my
Speaker 1: Space was facing a lot of other problems. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just that people were jumping shut from my Space to Facebook,
Speaker 1: although that was a big part of it. There were
Speaker 1: lawsuits against my Space that were stemming from some really
Speaker 1: serious and dark issues. One was that various U. S.
Speaker 1: Attorneys General had discovered numerous registered sex offenders who were
Speaker 1: creating profiles on my Space, presumably with an intent to
Speaker 1: uh to continue praying upon victims. So my Space also
Speaker 1: became associated with some really really dark stuff like child
Speaker 1: predators as well as there was an infamous suicide case
Speaker 1: where a thirteen year old user of my Space was
Speaker 1: the target of online abuse which was supposedly coming from
Speaker 1: a teenage boy, but in fact was coming from a
Speaker 1: grown woman, and she, this thirteen year old took her
Speaker 1: own life. It was a true tragedy. Megan Meyer, I
Speaker 1: will never forget that story. It was absolutely heartbreaking, and
Speaker 1: that became associated with my Space. It was really an
Speaker 1: early indication of how content moderation and community policies were
Speaker 1: going to be critical for social networks moving forward, and
Speaker 1: in fact, to this day we see conversations around content
Speaker 1: moderation and policies being enforced and all of that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff coming to the forefront. I mean, it's definitely
Speaker 1: a big part of the conversation of what's going on
Speaker 1: over at Twitter right now. So this is this is
Speaker 1: something that we continue to struggle with today. Now. My
Speaker 1: Space also had overextended itself and invested millions of dollars
Speaker 1: into features that users weren't necessarily interested in, some of
Speaker 1: which they might not have even been aware of simply
Speaker 1: because they were hard to find um or in some
Speaker 1: cases it was just because that's not why they created
Speaker 1: a MySpace profile, so you know, there was no reason
Speaker 1: for them to to explore these other features. But a
Speaker 1: big one was the MySpace Music feature. MySpace had always
Speaker 1: been kind of connected to music. I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the things that my Space was used for from the
Speaker 1: very beginning was to promote bands. So there were bands
Speaker 1: out there that had uploaded their own music to my
Speaker 1: Space so that people could discover them. Heck, one of
Speaker 1: the bands that I followed quite a bit in the
Speaker 1: early early to mid two thousand's uh, the Velvet Chain.
Speaker 1: They had their own uh MySpace page that promoted their music,
Speaker 1: and I had seen them play live a few times,
Speaker 1: and so I was an avid follower of their their
Speaker 1: profile page because I got to learn about new music
Speaker 1: and new tours they were doing and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So you could incorporate music into your profile pretty early
Speaker 1: on with my Space, but this music feature, which included
Speaker 1: agreements with three of the big four music labels Sony,
Speaker 1: b MG, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group, would
Speaker 1: let users MySpace users download music from these different you know,
Speaker 1: publishers directly through my Space, Like you could make your
Speaker 1: purchases and all that through my Space, you didn't have
Speaker 1: to go to some other um online marketplace. But one,
Speaker 1: it was arguable that users weren't terribly interested in doing
Speaker 1: this through my Space anyway. And two it was not
Speaker 1: easy to even find the darn thing. And three they
Speaker 1: had some technical issues pretty early on that marred the feature.
Speaker 1: Then there was a massive change of the guard at
Speaker 1: my Space. Uh, the CEO and president were essentially removed,
Speaker 1: so that was like de Wolf and Tom Anderson and
Speaker 1: a former Facebook executive was brought in to kind of
Speaker 1: fixed things. Uh. That executive would then go about laying
Speaker 1: off around thirty of all my Space employees. So that
Speaker 1: was tough. And around this same time, Google's nine million
Speaker 1: dollar ad deal expired, so you also had my Space
Speaker 1: falling behind Facebook, and it had just lost its major
Speaker 1: source of revenue because this ad deal has expired, and
Speaker 1: and it also launched lost a healthy chunk of its workforce.
Speaker 1: A lot of bad things were hitting by Space all
Speaker 1: at the same time, and you also had stories about
Speaker 1: a really bad company culture. And and in the wake
Speaker 1: of things like uby Soft and a division Blizzard, where
Speaker 1: we've heard about truly toxic environments, it doesn't sound to
Speaker 1: me like my Space was that kind of bad work culture.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe that was going on too, but what
Speaker 1: was being reported was that under the ownership of News Corps,
Speaker 1: my spaces corporate culture got very much bogged down with bureaucracy,
Speaker 1: and so it was very hard to innovate and it
Speaker 1: was hard to move quickly, and so everything in my
Speaker 1: Space was bogged down, and there were departments that were
Speaker 1: working at cross purposes with each other, and it was
Speaker 1: just a very frustrating experience trying to get stuff done.
Speaker 1: From what I understand, maybe there were the toxicity problems too,
Speaker 1: but that was not really heavily reported on. This was
Speaker 1: also before the Me Too movement, so that's part of it. Uh. Anyway,
Speaker 1: things over the next couple of years got worse and worse,
Speaker 1: and by two thousand and eleven it was really grim.
Speaker 1: My space was a shadow of what it had once been.
Speaker 1: So News Corps made the decision to cut ties. It's
Speaker 1: sold off my Space for thirty five million dollars. Now,
Speaker 1: remember this is the same company that News Corps had
Speaker 1: bought for five hundred eighty million dollars just a few
Speaker 1: years earlier, and that is probably the biggest worst decision
Speaker 1: in my Space's history. You can actually make an argument
Speaker 1: for several other bad decisions that led to the company's downfall,
Speaker 1: but you frequently will hear about news corps purchase of
Speaker 1: MySpace being one of the worst acquisitions in the text
Speaker 1: space of all time. It's it's right up there with
Speaker 1: things like the A. O. L. Time Warner merger. Actually,
Speaker 1: pretty much everything that has to do with Warner at
Speaker 1: this point has a lot of people saying, yeah, Warner
Speaker 1: just kind of had a lot of of bad deals
Speaker 1: to bad deals situations going on, But yeah, my Space
Speaker 1: and news Corps that always ends up being at the
Speaker 1: top of these conversations. Now, my Space sort of disappeared
Speaker 1: after that for a couple of years, like it was
Speaker 1: essentially gone after the sale from news Corps, and it
Speaker 1: re emerged in two thousand thirteen. Justin timber Lake was
Speaker 1: a big part of the rebranding of my Space, and
Speaker 1: it was coming out more as a music discovery site.
Speaker 1: It was less about being a social network. I guess
Speaker 1: the view was at that point that Facebook had pretty
Speaker 1: much sewned that up and it didn't make sense to
Speaker 1: try and bring that back to my Space. Instead, it
Speaker 1: was more about people who loved music being able to
Speaker 1: find new music that they would come to love. And
Speaker 1: this version of my Space more or less still exists today.
Speaker 1: Um it's it has changed looks a few times since
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen. It also looks to me like my
Speaker 1: Space doesn't get frequent updates because like one of the
Speaker 1: articles I saw featured on the front page of MySpace
Speaker 1: dot com looks like it was more than a year old.
Speaker 1: So if one of the news articles on your homepage,
Speaker 1: like your landing page for your site, is more than
Speaker 1: a year old, uh, that's a bad indication of how
Speaker 1: things are going at your website if it is positioned
Speaker 1: as news. Right. Also, there was like a massive issue
Speaker 1: there was a server migration a couple of years back
Speaker 1: where apparently everything that had been hosted on my Space
Speaker 1: before two fift was lost, So all those user profiles,
Speaker 1: all those photos, all those messages, everything it's all gone.
Speaker 1: So that's an entire chunk of web history, of personal
Speaker 1: history for all the MySpace users that is no longer accessible. Uh. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's the super short summary of my Space. I could
Speaker 1: clearly do multiple episodes really detailing the rise, fall, and
Speaker 1: rebirth of my Space. There's a lot more that went
Speaker 1: into it. Uh. And I did spend more time on
Speaker 1: my Space than some of the ones that I talked
Speaker 1: about in episode one, because it played such an important
Speaker 1: part in establishing social networks as not just a thing,
Speaker 1: but one of the most popular and recognizable applications you
Speaker 1: can find on the web. So we're done with my Space,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna backtrack to my old timeline. See what's next? Uh? Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: next is Facebook. You know, there have been entire documentaries
Speaker 1: and biopics about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, and goodness knows,
Speaker 1: I've done a ton of episodes either specifically about Facebook
Speaker 1: and later Meta, or episodes that were at least tangential
Speaker 1: too Facebook and Meta and mentioned them heavily. I mean,
Speaker 1: half the news episodes of this year ended up being
Speaker 1: about at least partially Meta or Facebook. But I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do it down in dirty summary of the company's history.
Speaker 1: It will be the cliffs notes of cliffs notes versions
Speaker 1: of that history, because it's going to take up the
Speaker 1: rest of our episode. And you know, our third episode
Speaker 1: will be picking up with companies like or Cut and Flicker,
Speaker 1: you know, the ones you really care about. So when
Speaker 1: we come back from the break, we'll start our almost
Speaker 1: childishly simple summary of Facebook, which will take up the
Speaker 1: rest of this episode. But first, before I dive into that,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. All right, As many of
Speaker 1: you undoubtedly know already, Facebook actually grew out of an
Speaker 1: earlier app called face Mash, and this was the brainchild
Speaker 1: of Mark Zuckerberg, the Internet's punching bag, one of them. Anyway,
Speaker 1: for you know, justifiable reasons. I don't feel a whole
Speaker 1: lot of sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg, if I'm being honest.
Speaker 1: But anyway, he was attending Harvard University at the time,
Speaker 1: and he was developing web stuff, web based stuff, and
Speaker 1: he thought what the campus really needed was a website
Speaker 1: where students could rate the attractiveness of other students. So
Speaker 1: essentially he created a tool design to identify all the
Speaker 1: hot girls at Harvard. Just figure it's really good for
Speaker 1: us to start off with that understanding, because it really
Speaker 1: informs a lot of what will follow. Like Facebook, It's
Speaker 1: empire is huge today, enormous. But if you sit there
Speaker 1: and you think, and and I realized this is reductive.
Speaker 1: But if you sit there and think all of this
Speaker 1: grew out of an app that I h raunchy college
Speaker 1: student made in order to be able to rank how
Speaker 1: hot girls were at his school, things make a lot
Speaker 1: of sense. And again, I I understand it's reductive, but
Speaker 1: I'm not apologizing for it. Anyway. Facemash lasted all of
Speaker 1: two whole days before Harvard shut it down. Now, from
Speaker 1: what I understand, the reason Harvard shut it down did
Speaker 1: not really have to do with the facilitating of the
Speaker 1: objectification of Harvard students. That really wasn't the big reason. Instead,
Speaker 1: it was because Zuckerberg was using college resources without permission
Speaker 1: to do it. So, yeah, we have to understand where
Speaker 1: our priorities lie. And I am I am salty about this,
Speaker 1: unapologetically salty, because I am so tired of people being
Speaker 1: valued less than things, right than assets, or being equated
Speaker 1: to assets. I'm just tired of it. People are people. Hey, y'all,
Speaker 1: I love you. You are valuable, valuable people, all on
Speaker 1: your own right. And you should always value yourself more
Speaker 1: than things, and each other value each other more than things. Okay,
Speaker 1: enough of that anyway, Zuckerberg, what he had done was
Speaker 1: he essentially had hacked into the student I D database
Speaker 1: to pull photos for Harvard students to populate face mash,
Speaker 1: and that was against Harvard's policies. That's why I got
Speaker 1: shut down. Now let's get back to business. I'll I'll
Speaker 1: get out of my touchy feely persona for a bit.
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg's initial idea gets shut down, and it received a
Speaker 1: fairly strong response in the brief amount of time it
Speaker 1: was online. So while it was you know, closed off,
Speaker 1: it really sent the message to Zuckerberg that hey, I'm
Speaker 1: onto something here, something that could be really popular. I
Speaker 1: just need to retool it and not use school based
Speaker 1: assets to do this, and we could be in business.
Speaker 1: So he goes on to register a u r L
Speaker 1: called the Facebook dot Com in early two thousand four.
Speaker 1: He teams up with some fellow Harvard College students, among
Speaker 1: them Dustin Makowitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Savern and they
Speaker 1: create a new social network with Zuckerberg being the primary developer.
Speaker 1: Not first, the idea was to create a sort of
Speaker 1: digital yearbook for Harvard students. When the Facebook as it
Speaker 1: was originally known, launched in February two thousand four, Harvard
Speaker 1: students could upload a photo of themselves and they could
Speaker 1: fill out some basic information about themselves, including things like
Speaker 1: their class load and schedule and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: They could also browse through other student profiles, so it
Speaker 1: was a way of reinforcing existing connections and building new ones,
Speaker 1: and it naturally migrated to a social web approach that
Speaker 1: we talked about in the previous episode, though it would
Speaker 1: take a little time for that to happen because it
Speaker 1: was a very basic service when it first launched. Now,
Speaker 1: eventually the team expanded the Facebook to allow students at
Speaker 1: Yale and Stanford to create their own profiles, but it
Speaker 1: was still limited to just those schools. By the summer
Speaker 1: of two thousand four, the Facebook had folks from more
Speaker 1: than thirty different universities and colleges. As part of the Facebook,
Speaker 1: you still needed a dot e d U email address
Speaker 1: to join that would indicate that you were a student
Speaker 1: or faculty member of a college reuniversity. Now, interestingly, it
Speaker 1: wasn't until the fall of two thousand four that the
Speaker 1: Facebook added what was called the Wall. This was a
Speaker 1: part of the Facebook experience that would let friends post
Speaker 1: to other profiles. So the wall was kind of like
Speaker 1: a bulletin board where you could leave messages for other
Speaker 1: users on their profile. And now the Facebook was more
Speaker 1: than just a useful directory. It became a conduit for
Speaker 1: communication between friends. This was a key element to the
Speaker 1: site's early success, right, Like, it was more than just oh, hey,
Speaker 1: I found my friend's profile and here's the classes that
Speaker 1: they're going to. Now is a way of saying, oh,
Speaker 1: I can go to my friend's profile and leave a
Speaker 1: message like Hey, don't forget we're gonna go out for
Speaker 1: pizza tomorrow night, or whatever it might be. In two
Speaker 1: thousand five, the Facebook dropped the the from its name
Speaker 1: and became just Facebook. It also allowed folks to tag
Speaker 1: photos so that a picture could be associated with a
Speaker 1: specific person, and now Facebook friends could see more photos
Speaker 1: of themselves and of their own friends across the platform. Right, so,
Speaker 1: maybe you are not friends with Bob, but Bob happens
Speaker 1: to be a friend with Alice, and Alice is a
Speaker 1: good friend of yours. And Bob posts a photo of
Speaker 1: Alice and tags Alice in the photo, and now you
Speaker 1: can see that photo because even though you're not friends
Speaker 1: with Bob, you are friends with Alice, and so you
Speaker 1: can see this photo that's been posted, and maybe that
Speaker 1: means you meet Bob, and you and Bob hit it
Speaker 1: off and you become friends. So this was really where
Speaker 1: that social web thing was starting to seriously take hold,
Speaker 1: and people were starting to discover new friendships as well
Speaker 1: as reinforce existing ones. So again one of the key
Speaker 1: elements of social networks. It all sounds very basic and
Speaker 1: simple now because we've lived with it for more than
Speaker 1: a decade, right, really like two decades almost, but at
Speaker 1: the time this was one of those really big moments
Speaker 1: that would set a foundational feature in social networks. Now.
Speaker 1: Two thousand five would also see high school students joining
Speaker 1: the site, and the following year Facebook lifted the student requirements,
Speaker 1: so in two thousand and six it opened up the
Speaker 1: site to the public at large. And I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: I held off on making my own Facebook account for
Speaker 1: at least another year because I was not one of
Speaker 1: the cool kids. Actually, I wasn't a kid at all,
Speaker 1: because I graduated college in nine, so I was not
Speaker 1: eligible for Facebook membership because Facebook was restricted to college
Speaker 1: students and I hadn't been a student for years by
Speaker 1: the time Facebook became a thing, So when it finally
Speaker 1: did open up to the public, I did not join
Speaker 1: as soon as I was allowed to. I was a
Speaker 1: relative latecomer. I probably joined in like two thousand seven, baby,
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, Probably two thousand seven. It's hard
Speaker 1: to say because I'm not on Facebook anymore, so I
Speaker 1: can't really look back at my own history. But two
Speaker 1: thousand seven was also when Facebook would hit one of
Speaker 1: its early stumbling blocks, and one that would set a
Speaker 1: tone that would stick with the company for years to come.
Speaker 1: The site launched a feature called Beacon not Bacon, which
Speaker 1: also was a huge trend on the web at the time.
Speaker 1: No Beacon, and companies like retail companies, for example, could
Speaker 1: participate in this Beacon program and incorporate it into their
Speaker 1: online market places. And what this essentially was doing was
Speaker 1: tracking and publishing user purchases on other sites. So let's
Speaker 1: say you decided you wanted to buy a brand new
Speaker 1: pair of sneakers, and this particular sneaker company participates in
Speaker 1: the Beacon program, and so you make a purchase on
Speaker 1: this company's website. Uh, you're doing it through the fact
Speaker 1: that you're also logged into Facebook, and now that purchase
Speaker 1: can be published to your Facebook profile, which lets everyone
Speaker 1: know you've got a brand new pair of kicks. Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of folks pretty quickly pointed out that this
Speaker 1: service could really intrude upon a person's privacy. Like, maybe
Speaker 1: what you're doing is buying a present for someone else,
Speaker 1: but because of Beacon, you accidentally broadcast this purchase to
Speaker 1: every and who visits your profile, perhaps you know, ruining
Speaker 1: the surprise. Or maybe you're buying something that frankly is
Speaker 1: just no one's business but your own. But whoopsie Daisy,
Speaker 1: now it's on your Facebook profile and everyone can see it.
Speaker 1: The negative reaction prompted Facebook too pretty quickly kill Beacon,
Speaker 1: but users were now wary that Facebook wasn't going to
Speaker 1: be super duper vigilant when it comes to protecting user privacy.
Speaker 1: In fact, this would become undeniable in two thousand and ten.
Speaker 1: That's when Mark Zuckerberg would famously declared an interview that
Speaker 1: privacy was dead and sure he would definitely want privacy
Speaker 1: to be dead because the more information that is shared
Speaker 1: with Facebook, the more effectively Facebook can monetize that information
Speaker 1: by developing a targeted advertising strategy. So, just in case
Speaker 1: you're not familiar with targeted advertising, and it's hard for
Speaker 1: me to imagine that these days, but it could happen, right,
Speaker 1: Maybe you've just never encountered that phrase. Targeted advertising is
Speaker 1: what it says it is. It involves matching advertisers or
Speaker 1: ads with people who are most likely to respond to
Speaker 1: those ads. And it could be as something as simple
Speaker 1: as as noting that a person has listed fishing under
Speaker 1: their interests. Right, So back in the day, when you
Speaker 1: create a Facebook profile, you would include things that you
Speaker 1: were interested in, activities and subjects you're interested in. Let's
Speaker 1: say you put fishing in there, Well, that would tell
Speaker 1: Facebook run away, Oh, this person likes fishing. You know.
Speaker 1: We can partner with advertisers that are advertising stuff like
Speaker 1: I don't know, fishing gear or phishing vacations, that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff and serve that to this person who is
Speaker 1: more likely to respond to those ads because they've already
Speaker 1: indicated this is something that they are interested in. And
Speaker 1: so we are matching ads to users which sees a
Speaker 1: benefit across the board, at least in theory right, The
Speaker 1: advertiser sees a benefit because people who are already disposed
Speaker 1: to being interested in their product or service are going
Speaker 1: to see the ad, and then the users are more
Speaker 1: likely to see stuff that they will respond well to
Speaker 1: and actually act on that otherwise maybe they wouldn't see.
Speaker 1: So the idea is that everyone benefits. The problem is
Speaker 1: really the biggest benefit or is Facebook, and they the
Speaker 1: company becomes extremely interested in profiting off of personal information
Speaker 1: as much as it possibly can, So Facebook could see
Speaker 1: lots more data to match users with ads, more than
Speaker 1: just what your interests are that are listed on your profile,
Speaker 1: and Facebook, as a result, would be able to demand
Speaker 1: higher rates to serve ads to users. They could They
Speaker 1: could say, you know, our advertising service is far more
Speaker 1: valuable than our competitors cause we have access to so
Speaker 1: much information. The company wasn't satisfied with just knowing what
Speaker 1: users were up to while they were on Facebook. They
Speaker 1: invented a tool called Pixel, and Pixel is something that
Speaker 1: other websites can install on the back end on their
Speaker 1: website that helps them track user behavior. So they get
Speaker 1: benefit from using Pixel, but some of that data also
Speaker 1: gets sent back to Facebook itself, which in turn can
Speaker 1: profit off that information. So now Facebook is able to
Speaker 1: gather data not just on what people are doing on Facebook,
Speaker 1: the social network, but across the entire web. Any website
Speaker 1: that has a pixel installed on it is sending at
Speaker 1: least some information back to Facebook, and in some cases
Speaker 1: it could be a lot of information. Later on, they
Speaker 1: would find out what people were doing on various apps
Speaker 1: on smartphones. It would track smartphone use and so there
Speaker 1: were are similar tracking systems used so that Facebook would
Speaker 1: know what apps are you most frequently using, how long
Speaker 1: are you on each app per day, what are you
Speaker 1: doing when you go on your apps on your phone.
Speaker 1: This was something that Apple would address a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago now where they gave users the ability to
Speaker 1: prevent companies like Facebook from seeing this kind of activity,
Speaker 1: which was a massive blow to Facebook's revenue strategy, something
Speaker 1: that Facebook has really objected to, which is understandable because again,
Speaker 1: the company was so heavily dependent upon targeted advertising still
Speaker 1: is so heavily depend on targeted advertising that anything that
Speaker 1: that restricts targeted advertising even a little bit is a
Speaker 1: blow to the company's revenue. So Apple's move was a
Speaker 1: huge strike against meta slash Facebook. Uh. Also, we should
Speaker 1: add that Apple itself doesn't seem to have to follow
Speaker 1: the same rules that you know, third parties have to
Speaker 1: follow on iOS devices. So some would argue that Apple
Speaker 1: is giving itself a huge unfair advantage at least as
Speaker 1: far as activity on mobile devices. That's a conversation that's
Speaker 1: still playing out in the tech space. But anyway, this
Speaker 1: really points to how Zuckerberg wants privacy to be dead,
Speaker 1: because private information is what Facebook really profits off of.
Speaker 1: Um personal information. I should say, not just private because
Speaker 1: like if we say private, it suggests that we don't
Speaker 1: share it with Facebook. That's not what Facebook wants. It
Speaker 1: wants access to all the data it can get. So,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned earlier, Facebook overtook my Space as the
Speaker 1: number one social network in two thousand eight. It was
Speaker 1: already ahead of the game and giving developers a chance
Speaker 1: to build applications on top of Facebook because it introduced
Speaker 1: its Application Programming Interface or ap I back in two
Speaker 1: thousand and six, so it got ahead of the Open
Speaker 1: Social Alliance. In fact, you could argue that the Open
Speaker 1: Social Alliance was formed largely because Facebook was making these moves,
Speaker 1: so games began to proliferate on Facebook, as did goofy
Speaker 1: features like the old poke feature. You might not remember
Speaker 1: this if you haven't been on Facebook in a while,
Speaker 1: or maybe you've never been on Facebook, but back in
Speaker 1: the day when they first introduced apps on Facebook, they
Speaker 1: introduced the poke And this was a very simple feature
Speaker 1: where you could choose one of your friends and you
Speaker 1: could send a poke to them and they would get
Speaker 1: a little notification that said so and so poked you,
Speaker 1: and then they could poke you back. And this could
Speaker 1: go back and forth. Right, You could send a poke,
Speaker 1: they could send it back. You can send it back
Speaker 1: to them, they could send it back. And it was
Speaker 1: really just a little message letting you know someone had
Speaker 1: poked you, or that you know they knew that you
Speaker 1: had poked them. And that was it. That was all
Speaker 1: there was to this little app. There was nothing more
Speaker 1: to it. But of course we saw an emergent behavior
Speaker 1: arise where the poke feature was used as a kind
Speaker 1: of flirtatious message, or, if you want to be a
Speaker 1: little more crude and cynical, an attempt to see if
Speaker 1: someone wants to hook up. I mean, considering that Facebook's
Speaker 1: origins date back to a site that lets students rate
Speaker 1: how hot other students were. It's not really a huge
Speaker 1: surprise that that that this would emerge as a way
Speaker 1: to flirt or or feel out someone to see if
Speaker 1: they would be receptive to perhaps a booty call. And yes,
Speaker 1: I know how ridiculous it sounds for me to say
Speaker 1: those words, but yeah, Anyway, a lot of other apps
Speaker 1: would follow, and in the early days, Facebook wasn't too
Speaker 1: terribly careful about the sorts of stuff these apps could
Speaker 1: tap into. Like could these apps actually mine Facebook for information?
Speaker 1: The answer is initially yeah. There were not a lot
Speaker 1: of protections in place to prevent an app from tapping
Speaker 1: into tons of information. This would lead to one of
Speaker 1: the biggest scandals in the company's history that had its
Speaker 1: origins back in two thousand thirteen, when a data scientist
Speaker 1: named Alexander Cogan launched an app called This is Your
Speaker 1: Digital Life. Okay, I'll explain why that was such a
Speaker 1: big deal and how that developed into a huge scandal,
Speaker 1: and then we'll conclude are our story about Facebook as
Speaker 1: we look into a bit more of its history. But
Speaker 1: first let's take one last break. Okay, So, Alexander Cogan
Speaker 1: launches an app called This is Your Digital Life in
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen, and this app consisted of surveys that
Speaker 1: were designed to build out psychological profiles of users, and
Speaker 1: it was pitched as an app that was meant really
Speaker 1: for academic use, that these psychological profiles were going to
Speaker 1: be used for some academic purpose like maybe a research
Speaker 1: paper or something. And further, people who agreed to use
Speaker 1: the app would get compensated for participating in this study,
Speaker 1: so there was an incentive to actually use it. You know,
Speaker 1: if you pitch it as just find out what your
Speaker 1: personality type is, I think it would have already done
Speaker 1: really well, because those sort of things just really did
Speaker 1: well on social media, you know, particularly if you could
Speaker 1: phrase it as what kind of Star Wars character are you?
Speaker 1: Or something like that. Right, It's just it's ridiculous how
Speaker 1: well those take off. But in this case, it was
Speaker 1: about building an actual psychological profile. And the downside here
Speaker 1: or or the dark side. Something that wasn't really communicated
Speaker 1: was that this app would also allow Cogan to access
Speaker 1: not just the people who consented to be part of
Speaker 1: this process, but also to those people's friends. So in
Speaker 1: other words, let's say that you were on Facebook back
Speaker 1: in two thousand thirteen, and you have no interest in
Speaker 1: using the app, right, so you are not part of
Speaker 1: the this is your digital life, you know, experiment or
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it. However, one of your
Speaker 1: friends on Facebook, someone that you are friends with on Facebook,
Speaker 1: has agreed to participate, so they download the app and
Speaker 1: they fill out their survey. Well, their participation would mean
Speaker 1: that Cogan would have access to your information as if
Speaker 1: Cogan had been that Facebook friend of yours. So let's
Speaker 1: let's say that we'll use the word named Bob again.
Speaker 1: Your friend Bob takes this survey. Now Cogan can view
Speaker 1: your profile as if Cogan were Bob, and Cogan can
Speaker 1: do the same with all of Bob's other friends. So
Speaker 1: even though you didn't consent to using that app and
Speaker 1: you don't know Cogan, Cogan can see all your information
Speaker 1: just as if they were your buddy Bob, because Bob
Speaker 1: took the bait and use this app. This was an
Speaker 1: enormous breach in privacy, and it was due to the
Speaker 1: fact that Facebook was not good about setting in protections
Speaker 1: to limit developers to the kinds of information they could
Speaker 1: access when they built an app on Facebook, and it
Speaker 1: gets worse. See now, none of this would really be
Speaker 1: a thing, like people probably wouldn't have even known about it.
Speaker 1: But years later, a political consulting company called Cambridge Analytica
Speaker 1: was found to have bought the data collected by the
Speaker 1: This is Your Digital Life app back in and they
Speaker 1: use that data in an effort to support various political
Speaker 1: campaigns in the UK and in the United States, and
Speaker 1: primarily they were conservative candidate campaigns. Now, Cambridge Analytica attempted
Speaker 1: some pretty underhanded and scummy things like ways to try
Speaker 1: and discourage certain people from even participating in the voting process.
Speaker 1: So they tried this, They tried to affect voter behaviors.
Speaker 1: The company was not terribly good at doing that. It tried,
Speaker 1: but from most reports it sounds like it's aspirations were
Speaker 1: greater than its actual capabilities. But still, there was this
Speaker 1: huge scandal that broke out when the the Cambridge Analytica
Speaker 1: story hit the news, and it was really more about
Speaker 1: what the company was trying to do in an effort
Speaker 1: to manipulate voters rather than what it was actually doing,
Speaker 1: which was, you know, not having a whole lot of
Speaker 1: success and manipulating voters But at the heart of all
Speaker 1: of this was the fact that Facebook had facilitated the
Speaker 1: whole thing through its insufficient user protections in its a
Speaker 1: p I. Now, to be somewhat fair to Facebook, the
Speaker 1: company had changed its a p I in the meantime,
Speaker 1: Like in between when the app was released and when
Speaker 1: all the Cambridge Analytica news came out, Facebook had already
Speaker 1: made these changes to try and limit how developers could
Speaker 1: access user information on Facebook. The idea being that an
Speaker 1: app should only have access to whatever information is necessary
Speaker 1: for the application to actually work. So that way, you
Speaker 1: couldn't create like a dead basic app that has access
Speaker 1: to all user information on Facebook. That would be against
Speaker 1: the rules. It could only tap into whatever was needed
Speaker 1: for the app to actually function and nothing more. But
Speaker 1: that change came too late to prevent the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Speaker 1: All right, Let's look at some of the other big
Speaker 1: moves made by Facebook over the years. The company has
Speaker 1: a reputation of either acquiring competitors or attempting to mimic
Speaker 1: them in an effort to stave off competition. Uh. Actually
Speaker 1: makes me think of the Disney parks in Florida, which
Speaker 1: frequently seemed to try and outperform competitors like Universal Studios
Speaker 1: and Sea World by creating their own kind of uh
Speaker 1: you know, like well, in the case of Universal Studios,
Speaker 1: they created what was originally called MGM Studios and now
Speaker 1: is known as Disney Hollywood Studios. In the case of
Speaker 1: Sea World, it was the Living Seas at Epcot. So
Speaker 1: they saw mixed success with this. But the attempt was,
Speaker 1: how can we convince people to stay on Disney property
Speaker 1: and not split their vacation up between Disney and all
Speaker 1: these other attractions that are in the Orlando area. Well,
Speaker 1: Facebook follows a very similar strategy. Uh. They bought up
Speaker 1: a ton of companies early on. So one of them
Speaker 1: was Parakey, which was an applications development company. They bought that.
Speaker 1: In two thousand seven. They bought connect You, which was
Speaker 1: another social networking company. They bought that. In two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: they scooped up friend Feed. I'm sure I'll talk about
Speaker 1: in the next episode. It technically and our timeline as
Speaker 1: we're going by company debuts hadn't come out by the
Speaker 1: time Facebook came out in two thousand nine. That's when
Speaker 1: it bought a friend feed, and it also bought some
Speaker 1: of Friendster's I p in two thousand ten. I did
Speaker 1: talk about Friendster in the previous episode in this series,
Speaker 1: and it bought up dozens of other companies, but let's
Speaker 1: talk about a couple of truly big ones. In two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve, Facebook announced it would acquire the photo focused
Speaker 1: social network Instagram for a whopping one billion dollars. That
Speaker 1: was a huge deal, and analysts quickly pointed out that
Speaker 1: Facebook was trying to stay on top of the social
Speaker 1: networking game, partly by buying a company that was much
Speaker 1: better at photo sharing than Facebook had been. So this
Speaker 1: was one of those cases where Facebook is essentially saying,
Speaker 1: I recognized this as a key component to being a
Speaker 1: successful social networking company, but I cannot make something I
Speaker 1: can compete with Instagram, which is already doing it super well,
Speaker 1: So let's just buy Instagram instead. Facebook kept buying more companies,
Speaker 1: and the next huge purchase was in when it bought
Speaker 1: WhatsApp for a staggering nineteen billion dollars. Now, while it
Speaker 1: wasn't widely known in the United States that at the
Speaker 1: time of acquisition, WhatsApp was and continues to be a
Speaker 1: popular mobile instant messaging client in the rest of the world,
Speaker 1: and again, Facebook was looking at companies that were doing
Speaker 1: really well in areas where Facebook kind of wasn't. Also,
Speaker 1: we should keep in mind that Facebook was all about
Speaker 1: maximizing the time users were spending on Facebook owned and
Speaker 1: operated services. So if you're spending more time on messaging
Speaker 1: than you are on social networks, well, that could hurt
Speaker 1: Facebook's bottom line unless Facebook buys the messaging service and
Speaker 1: then you're still on Facebook's stuff. That same year, Facebook
Speaker 1: bought up Oculu VR for two billion dollars, and this
Speaker 1: would form the nugget of Facebook's Reality Lambs division, which
Speaker 1: I'm sure I'll mention again before this episode is over.
Speaker 1: And there are many many more acquisitions that Facebook did
Speaker 1: over the years. Some were recently reversed. Take Giffee, for example,
Speaker 1: This is an online database and search engine for animated gifts.
Speaker 1: Facebook bought it in but recently the UK's regulatory authority
Speaker 1: has ordered Facebook to divest itself of this acquisition. It
Speaker 1: has said that otherwise Facebook has engaged in anti competitive
Speaker 1: business practices, which I mean, yeah, that's kind of Facebook's
Speaker 1: bread and butter in many ways. So Facebook has spent
Speaker 1: tens of billions of dollars on acquisitions, of the big
Speaker 1: ones being WhatsApp, than Instagram, UH and Oculus VR. Right,
Speaker 1: those make up a lot of the money that Facebook
Speaker 1: has spent on acquisitions. As for growth, Facebook story has
Speaker 1: also been pretty incredible. At the end of two thousand six,
Speaker 1: Facebook boasted around twelve billion users, and in two thousand
Speaker 1: seven that number just kept growing. In April two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: it hit twenty million. By July it was thirty million,
Speaker 1: by October it was fifty million, and it just kept growing.
Speaker 1: By two thousand twelve, Facebook hit a crazy milestone of
Speaker 1: one billion active users. Five years later it hit two billion.
Speaker 1: Crazy numbers, right. But then this past February, which is
Speaker 1: February twenty two for all of those of y'all who
Speaker 1: are listening from the future, Facebook posted a net loss
Speaker 1: of users for the first time in eighteen years, and
Speaker 1: it amounted to about half a million fewer users logging
Speaker 1: in daily. And that doesn't sound like it's that bad, right, Like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, half a million, that's a lot of people.
Speaker 1: But we were talking about two billion and just insane
Speaker 1: growth from the get go. But this was kind of
Speaker 1: the tip of an iceberg of things that investors became
Speaker 1: really concerned about. For one thing, a loss in daily
Speaker 1: users could be a signal that maybe Facebook has finally
Speaker 1: reached saturation across the world, that they're just no more
Speaker 1: users that they can add to the service, that that
Speaker 1: Facebook weeps for, there are no more worlds to conquer.
Speaker 1: And of course we have to remember that a lot
Speaker 1: of capital investment is largely focused on the concept of growth.
Speaker 1: It's not just good enough to do well year over year.
Speaker 1: A company needs to grow. That is like a big
Speaker 1: part of how investors view company performance. That if you
Speaker 1: failed to grow, then the investment is not going to
Speaker 1: increase over time and you just want to get out.
Speaker 1: So a failure to grow can be a company's death sentence,
Speaker 1: which is crazy because the company can still perform well
Speaker 1: year to year, but it's not growing. It's not good enough.
Speaker 1: If you've already hit as many users as they're going
Speaker 1: to sign up for your service, well you start to
Speaker 1: really face a massive problem. You might think that this
Speaker 1: kind of obsession with growth is ultimately self defeating, and
Speaker 1: I would agree with you, but again I'm no expert
Speaker 1: in financial matters. You could very convincingly argue that I
Speaker 1: am taking far too narrow a view, and you could
Speaker 1: very well be right. I do not pretend to have
Speaker 1: a deep understanding of these things anyway. At this point,
Speaker 1: Facebook the company had changed its name to Meta, with
Speaker 1: Facebook just being one property under Meta's ownership, the other
Speaker 1: big ones being Instagram and WhatsApp. Now the name change
Speaker 1: both indicated Zuckerberg's new desire to forge the next incarnation
Speaker 1: of the Web, or maybe even the Internet, called the metaverse.
Speaker 1: That this was is an indicator of, Yes, this is
Speaker 1: the business that this company is headed toward. But it
Speaker 1: also came to the time when the former Facebook company
Speaker 1: was in headlines a lot for a lot of really
Speaker 1: bad stuff. There was the whistleblower, where we get this enormous,
Speaker 1: uh collection of internal documents that showed a really unflattering
Speaker 1: look at Facebook's business plans and how it treated user privacy,
Speaker 1: and how it viewed misinformation and just it was a
Speaker 1: lot of really ugly stuff that came out from that leak.
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg himself had been called to testify in front of
Speaker 1: the US Congress a few times on different matters, ranging
Speaker 1: from user privacy and security to things like national security
Speaker 1: and the proliferation of misinformation across Facebook, So the name
Speaker 1: change was probably seen as a way to maybe at
Speaker 1: least dodge a little bit of the problems that were
Speaker 1: being flung towards Facebook. I don't know how effective that was,
Speaker 1: but that might have been part of the reason. Today.
Speaker 1: Meta is a company that many of you as being
Speaker 1: in crisis mode. But like a lot of big tech companies,
Speaker 1: that's in crisis mode right. I mean, it's recently held
Speaker 1: layoffs in the face of economic uncertainty, but that's the
Speaker 1: case across numerous big tech companies. It has spent billions
Speaker 1: of dollars developing the metaverse concept, which Zuckerberg himself has
Speaker 1: said is going to take years to become a revenue generator.
Speaker 1: So in other words, that everyone should be prepared for
Speaker 1: the company to continue to lose money while developing this,
Speaker 1: because there's no way to make money from it yet.
Speaker 1: And that is a huge concern to investors too, because
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people still aren't sold on
Speaker 1: the concept of metaverse. You've got a lot of people
Speaker 1: saying like, no one's interested in it, which I think
Speaker 1: is an overstatement. I think there are people who are
Speaker 1: really interested in it. I think a lot of entities
Speaker 1: that are interested in the metaverse are ones that are
Speaker 1: accounting on another gold rush. Right. They don't really know
Speaker 1: what the metaverse is going to turn out to be,
Speaker 1: but they suspect that if it does become a thing,
Speaker 1: that there will be money to be made there. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of push toward the metaverse. A lot
Speaker 1: of companies, including I Heart Radio, have been really active
Speaker 1: and at least establishing some sort of presence related to
Speaker 1: the metaverse, But there's so much uncertainty there that I
Speaker 1: think that gives investors a lot of concern at least
Speaker 1: in the short term. Facebook also has struggled to attract
Speaker 1: younger users who seem to prefer platforms like TikTok. That
Speaker 1: gives investors even more concerns because if you're not replenishing
Speaker 1: your user base, they will continue to age out, and
Speaker 1: then the probe the platform will become less and less
Speaker 1: relevant over time. So you might wonder, are we witnessing
Speaker 1: a mega company on the verge of collapse. Is Meta
Speaker 1: slash Facebook heading toward becoming irrelevant? Well, I think it's
Speaker 1: way too early to make such a pronouncement. I mean,
Speaker 1: I am very critical of meta and I do see
Speaker 1: a lot of problems with the company, but I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that we could say this is the end. I
Speaker 1: think that would be far too premature. Um. I don't
Speaker 1: think Facebook is too big to fail. I don't think
Speaker 1: there is such a thing as being too big to fail.
Speaker 1: But I do think that Facebook is really freaking big,
Speaker 1: so it's gonna take a lot to bring it down.
Speaker 1: So yeah, not too big to fail, but too big
Speaker 1: to fail instantaneously unless like a ridiculous series of events
Speaker 1: comes to pass. But then this year has been pretty ridiculous.
Speaker 1: The company does face increasing regulatory scrutiny around the world,
Speaker 1: so there are various agencies out there calling to further
Speaker 1: break up Meta into its constituent parts. Maybe that will
Speaker 1: go somewhere. I I remain somewhat skeptical of that. But
Speaker 1: they are also increasing invest your demands as people are
Speaker 1: calling on Zuckerberg to make some dramatic changes because they
Speaker 1: don't like seeing costs go up and revenue not go
Speaker 1: up more. It still faces the challenge of attracting new users,
Speaker 1: younger users. It's not doing so well in that, and
Speaker 1: the attempts that it has pursued have gained the company
Speaker 1: a lot of criticism because it sounds like they're trying
Speaker 1: to prey upon young people right, like to create Instagram
Speaker 1: for preteens, when Instagram is also associated with some really
Speaker 1: negative stuff like negative self image issues and that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. It's also trying to sell people on the
Speaker 1: idea of the metaverse, which obviously is still a big
Speaker 1: ask and and a lot more so, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of long bets going on over at Meta slash Facebook.
Speaker 1: If they pay off, then it's possible that Meta will
Speaker 1: be a foundational pillar of the Internet of the future,
Speaker 1: like it's possible that Meta and the Internet will be
Speaker 1: practically synonymous if those long bets pay off. I remain
Speaker 1: skeptical that they will, but some of them might. I
Speaker 1: don't think all of them will. I still find it
Speaker 1: hard to believe that in the future I'll be wearing
Speaker 1: a headset in order to access the web. But we'll see. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there we go. That is the short version, believe it
Speaker 1: or not, of summaries of my Space and Facebook, and
Speaker 1: obviously I could do full series and both of those companies.
Speaker 1: When we come back for the next entry in this series,
Speaker 1: we will pick up with some other social networks, which
Speaker 1: you know, either enjoyed brief popularity and then fizzled away
Speaker 1: or in some cases, are still around. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: we haven't even hit Twitter yet, so that is on
Speaker 1: the horizon. Okay, that wraps this up, y'all. One thing
Speaker 1: I am working on right now as I'm putting together
Speaker 1: a list of some of the biggest stories to unfold
Speaker 1: in two in tech. So if you have any in
Speaker 1: particular you want me to touch on, let me know.
Speaker 1: Obviously they're gonna be some big ones that we talked
Speaker 1: about even in this episode, like stories about Meta and
Speaker 1: stories about Twitter. Don't worry, the Elon Musk Twitter story
Speaker 1: will definitely make the cut because goodness knows. But if
Speaker 1: there are anything, if there's anything that happened in tech
Speaker 1: this past year that you really would like to hear
Speaker 1: me cover in kind of an end of the year
Speaker 1: wrap up, let me know. There are a couple of
Speaker 1: ways to get in touch with me. One is you
Speaker 1: can download the I Heart radio app. You can navigate
Speaker 1: over to tech Stuff. You just put tech stuff in
Speaker 1: the search field, it'll pull up. You can use a
Speaker 1: little microphone icon there and leave me a voice message
Speaker 1: up to thirty seconds in length. Just let me know
Speaker 1: what it is you would like me to cover, or
Speaker 1: if you would prefer, you can head over to Twitter
Speaker 1: and you can leave me a message on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yes. Text
Speaker 1: Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.