Social Networks that Didn't Make It

mostly to the company's constern nation. These have not been positive news stories for the company. Mark Zuckerberg himself said that perhaps the social networking industry in particular might require regulation. And I've seen a few calls from lots of different people that Facebook should either divest itself of some of its properties like Instagram or else maybe the government should come in and do it for them and bust it up, kind of like busting up the old telephone monopolies back

in the day before they kind of reformed. That's a different story. Facebook is one of a few enormous companies Amazon and Google would be two others that has so much access to our personal information that it's always going to be a potential threat, and it could be a potential threat either through internal company decisions, things that Facebook itself does, or there's the possibility of external interference, such

as during the presidential election in the United States. It's a powerful tool that could be used positively or negatively. Facebook was largely able to grow to this size by outperforming numerous other social networking sites, all of which aim to make a business out of connecting people online. So in this episode, I want to talk about a few of the social networking sites that attempted to carve out

a place online. Some of them even predated Facebook. But this is just a small selection I'm going to give you in this episode, because there have been lots of different attempts to do this, and some of them are really localized to specific countries or two specific interests, so I couldn't cover them all, uh, and some of them

didn't even make it past the early development stages. Also, I do not plan to cover my Space in any sort of detail, because I've done an entire episode, actually multiple episodes, dedicated to my Space, and technically it's still around, though it's not anything like what it was originally. So some people would argue that my Space itself is no longer a thing, at least not as it was originally intended.

So anyway, here's a selection of social networking sites that ultimately failed, and a little bit about each of them. And I figured it might be a good idea to start off with a couple of examples from truly huge companies, because that helps illustrate how hard it can be to establish a social networking service that people actually want to use. So if Google and Apple can't do it, these huge companies that have billions of dollars of support behind them,

it's got to be hard to do, right. So we're gonna start off with Google Plus, keeping in mind that Google will pop up again and again in this episode because of their involvement in trying to establish social networks. But Google Plus is a pretty recent one and one that has some more news coming up very shortly. And you know, Google Plus tried a lot. It tried hard for many years to become a true social network destination, but as of April twenty nineteen, it's going to be

shut down for good. And honestly, it probably could have closed up shop a few years ago and the world in general wouldn't have noticed. Instead, it took a massive data breach, or at least the possibility of one, for Google to close the door on Google Plus. So let me talk a little bit about it. So Google Plus wasn't the Internet uh companies first foray into social networking.

As I had mentioned, there had also been Google Buzz, which was a tool that was integrated directly into Gmail, but was discontinued when the company prepared to launch Google Plus. There was also Google friend Connect, which lasted from two thousand eight to two thousand and twelve for all non blogger sites. As in Google Blogger sites, even the blogger

sites had to say goodbye to it. In Google Plus was supposed to take the best ideas from both of those earlier efforts and add more innovation when it would launch in And there's some other social networks that relate back to Google that we'll talk about later in this episode. So Google Plus would let you organize the people in your online social circle into circles. That's what it called the different groups. You had circles, and you could drag

a person's picture into circles to sort them. So you could name circles whatever you wanted, and you could create lots of them in order to sort people out into specific groups. So you could create circles like friends, family, coworkers, or you could create people who really like that one joke I tell. In my case, I had a circle just for people that worked with me at the Georgia Renaissance Festival because there were a few of them on

Google Plus back in the day. Then when you posted on the social networking platform, you could choose which circles could see your post. You might want the whole world to be able to view it, in which case you would just make it public. But let's say that you wanted to address one group and leave out everybody else, like maybe you're asking your friends about recommendations for a job search, in which case you probably don't want your

coworkers to see that post. Then you would select your friends, you would leave out your coworkers, and that would be that you know, you would just post in The only people who would see it were the ones that you had authorized to see it. That was the basic idea, and the platform had all the features that you would expect to find on social networks. You could post updates, you could share links, you can share photos, you can make new friends, you can join groups. There's a lot

of integration with Google's other services like YouTube. But apart from the initial excitement when the platform first opened, fueled in large part by the fact that when it was first open, Google held an invitation only closed beta, so the only way you could get an account was if you've got to invite. It gave the platform some exclusivity, which made people want to be part of it more. Now.

I know because I was part of that first group and I was invited to participate, and it was kind of fun because it was still a very small group of people, generally speaking, who were online, and they were almost all business leaders or tech journalists. So I got the chance to catch up with friends of mine who also got in on that closed beta. Once it opened up, and after I had that initial rush of everyone adding

in their accounts, it had trouble catching on. And it wasn't just the design that didn't really grab people's interests. It was some of the policies that Google had put into place. So this was around the same time that Google had decided to make a single log in for all its services, including stuff like YouTube, and they wanted to link each account to the account owner's real name, so they wanted to make sure that the name of the account was the same as the person who created

that account. Never mind if you have an online following that knows you by a stage name or a brand. The intent was to create accountability, so I would say the intentions were honorable. Google figured people would behave better if their actions online could be traced back to their real identities. If you can't hide behind anonymity, ne're less

likely to be a jerk face on line. That was the logic, but there was an intense backlash from the online community due to this policy, and there were legitimate objections to it. It wasn't just people saying I don't want to have my name on the internet. Some were worried that they could be targeted if their identities were revealed. Maybe they use online social networks as a way of

expressing opinions about an oppressive government. You know, they might not live in a place where such things are are tolerated and might even be actively punished. They don't want to have their identity traced directly back to them, but they still want to be able to share those views with the wider world. Some people had undergone extremely personal changes, like maybe there was someone who had had a sex change operation and literally they were no longer the person

they used to be. They have transformed into a new identity. They did not want their online presence to reflect someone who no longer existed. Google eventually backed off this policy, but the platform never really recovered from that. In fact, there was a lot of animosity, not just on Google Plus, but particularly on YouTube related to all of this. Now, in first glance, the platform seemed to be doing fairly well.

If you were just looking at numbers and you weren't looking too hard, it looked like things were going pretty smoothly, or at least there was an encouraging trend, because in six there were around three million registered accounts that were listed as active. Now that's not like the billion of accounts that Facebook was boasting, but still it's almost half a billion. You're getting close to half a billion. That's a respectable population. Except cent of those accounts had nothing

in them. They were empty. They had someone who had created them, but they weren't posting anything. The nail in the coffin would be that data breach I had mentioned, or really it was more of a vulnerability the design Google Plus would potentially allow a third party app developer to get far more data access than was intended. So let's say that you have a Google Plus account and you want to enable an app that will work on top of Google Plus. You could give that app access

to your information on your profile. Maybe it's just the public information, and you could also give access to the public profile information of your of your friends, so but it's not anything that was listed privately. It would just be the same sort of stuff you would see on your friends profile if you were a total stranger and you just navigated to that person's profile. So anything they

chose that was public this app could see a security probe. However, discovered that the app developers could also get access to information stored in fields that were not tagged as public, so that meant that there this vulnerability would allow a third party developer to see all sorts of information someone had voluntarily put into their profile but had not chosen to reveal publicly. That can include stuff like real names, email addresses, uh, the occupations. These are mostly optional fields,

not ones that you had to fill out. But even if you had filled them out and told Google Plus that you wanted them to be private unless you sorted someone into a friend bucket for example, or circle. I should say that these apps could get access to that information. So Google posted a message that said it had independently

discovered this vulnerability. It wasn't brought to their attention from a breach, but rather while investigating Google Plus, they discovered it and according to Google, according to their their experience, they didn't see any evidence the developer had ever discovered or exploited it, and at least that's what they said. So the company patched the vulnerability in March two thousand eighteen.

But the message was clear. Google Plus was actually more trouble than it was worth to keep around, and so there will be no more Google Plus after April nineteen. It just doesn't make sense to keep uh expending energy and money and resources on a product that very few people are using. But what about Apple? I mentioned Apple as well as one of the other big companies that attempted to create a social network and failed. Well. They tried to integrate a social network like feature into the

Juggernaut program, iTunes. So Apple launched iTunes way back in two thousand one. They announced it at the Macworld Expo that year and revealed to the world an enormous digital music online storefront, which would end up changing the way people bought music and and would even change the way that music would be recorded. The album experience became less important than the single experience became way more important, and then it would go on to support the creation of

a burgeoning art form called the podcast. But nine years later, in upon the release of iTunes version ten, Apple would introduce Ping. Ping was a music centric social networking platform. So with your profile on iTunes, you could follow other users or music artists. You could choose bands or musicians to follow, and you could search out their concert listings.

You could also use paying to indicate that you are attending one of those concerts, you know, kind of be one of those super cool people, almost almost a social status sort of thing, like, Yeah, I'm gonna be at the concert in Brooklyn of this band that four people know about, but don't worry, you'll all know about it in two years. Or you could create or peru's song

lists or album charts. You could see the photos and the videos that your favorite musicians were sharing, and ideally it allow for easier music discovery, something that is pretty tricky, but Ping did not get much traction, and one possible reason for that was that upon launch, there was no way to integrate Paying's features into Facebook profiles. According to

The Verge, that wasn't necessarily Apple's choice. The Verge reported that there were rumors at the very least that Apple had intended to integrate Facebook Support and Paying, but they had to pull it out at the last minute for unsaid reasons. I have no idea what the reasoning was. Now, despite an early rush of users making profiles, just like

with Google Plus, Ping didn't really catch on. Apple chose to shut down the service just two years later in twent Both Google Plus and Paying were latecomers to the social networking party. Though after the break, I'll talk about a site that actually debuted before Facebook and MySpace. But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.

Back in two thousand two, three developers named Peter Chen, Jonathan Abrams, and Dave Lee wanted to create an online tool that would make it easy for people to connect with one another on the Internet. You would be able to link up with folks you already knew, and you would be able to make new friends over this great communications tool. No longer would your real world environment limit who you could befriend. So these three got together and they began to develop this tool one of the earlier

social networking sites. Sometimes people refer to it as the first real social network, or at least the first real one to enjoy mainstream success. It was called Friendster, but I want to be clear, this was two thousand two. There were sites that I would call social network sites that predated friends Ster. I do agree that Friendster was

the first one to be really successful. So they were able to launch a prototype of this Friendster site in the spring of two thousand two, and within a few months they had more than three million users, which is not bad when you remember that this was a pretty early idea. Still, even though there had been a couple of other attempts at creating social networks, that was at a time when there were very few people online at all. So this is still a new concept for a lot

of people. So you had to explain to people what this was all about in the first place before you could even get them to decide whether or not they wanted to join. And Friendster tried to turn everyone into Kevin Bacon, and by that I mean Friendster would show you how you were connected to strangers through a network

of mutual friends. So you might discover that someone you have never met, someone you do not know, is actually very good friends with a couple of people you do know, and maybe those people you know are actually in totally different social circles. Like otherwise, you wouldn't realize that these

two people had anything in common. Uh. The example I would give is, say, let's say that I found out that someone I knew from my work at the Georgia Renaissance Festival was friends with someone uh that was also friends with a coworker, And I would have thought, well, I didn't expect those two worlds to cross because I've never seen seen them interact. But now here's this third

person or fourth person. Really, because I'm counting myself in here too, this fourth person who is a connection both to my co workers and to the folks that I work with at the Georgia Renaissance Festival. Maybe I would like to be friends with that person too, because chances are I share more than a few common interests with them. That was the theory. It was a very compelling concept.

This idea that you could meet people that you would very much be friends with, you just hadn't had the opportunity yet, you hadn't met them yet, and this would be a way to meet them. Unless I'd be remiss, I have to mention this was not a new idea, even for online social networks. Back in the mid nineties, there was a sort of proto social network site called

six degrees and it was built on that very premise. However, it appeared online at that time I was talking about when there weren't that many people on the World Wide Web. Very few people were aware of what the web was or had any experience with it, so there weren't a whole lot of people to sign up for it, and

it eventually kind of faded away. Not many people remember it, however, I will say the site did return years later, and if you have an account, if you if you had made an account for six degrees back in the mid nineties, then you could still log in to that old account. Um, so it does technically exist, but there's fewer than like a quarter million people on there these days. In two thousand three, the developers of Friendster were able to secure

twelve million dollars in funding from an investment firm. But while that was a really good shot in the arm, the site was finding it difficult to handle its rapidly expanding popularity. There were more people joining the site than they could accommodate, and so they were always trying to play catch up, trying to build out enough capacity to

handle the people who wanted to use the service. There were glitches and server issues, the site would load slowly and users would become frustrated it had grown too quickly for the company to manage. My Space, which launched in August two thousand three, also began to get popular and siphon away users, and Friendster never really recovered from that.

The site continued on for a few more years. While it's popularity declined in the States, it did remain strong in Asia, so it wasn't like it was going obsolete everywhere. But then Facebook emerged and started to gain in popularity, and Friendster would continue its decline in the United States, and two thousand nine, the company launched a read as sign, attempting to position itself as the cool social network. In fact, it actually tried to leverage the fact the more people

were on MySpace and Facebook. It was essentially saying, why do you want to be where everybody else is? Why do you want to be mainstream? Man? It's very hipster kind of mentality, like let's let's go someplace that not

everyone's already at. Later, in two thousand nine, a company called m OL Global acquired Friendster for around forty million dollars, although when you subtract all the debts and everything, it was closer to twenty six million, so most most sites list the actual purchase price at twenty six point four million dollars um. That's deducting stuff like Friendster's secured debt

or payouts to Friendster executives. This wasn't great news for the company in two thousand nine because way back in two thousand three, Google had offered to acquire the company for around thirty million dollars, before all that debt was accrued and before all those executive payments would be necessary, so this was actually a step down. Six years later, Friendster continue to operate as designed for a short while, but m OL would go back to the drawing board

and relaunch Friendster as a gaming social networking site. But even that effort failed, and in June two thousand fifteen, the site shut down and has remained that way ever since. Now, jumping back to Google for a second, I want to talk about or Cut, another early social networking site, Ork. It would debut after Friendster and MySpace. It was one of the famed twenty percent projects so over at Google

back in the day. I don't know if this is still the case, but Google part of its reputation was that it had a common practice to allow employees to dedicate up to twenty of their work time to personal projects, as long as those personal projects were aligned with Google's goals. So whatever your normal job was N five at Google, you would do that for eight percent of your time, and then for twenty of your time you could work on something else. Sometimes those projects would grow into something

more than that. They might evolve into a feature or even a fully fledged product at Google. And one of those was or Kit, which was named after its creator, a Turkish developer named Orcit Bouya Cockton or Could joined Google or At the man joined Google after graduating from Stanford.

He built a social network and called it Eden, but then discovered they wouldn't be able to secure the domain Eden dot com so they needed to go back to the drawing board for the name, and ultimately he was told that he should really name it after himself and call it or Kit or kitt and Turkish means happy city, so it seemed like a good fit. Or Kit would become a social networking site and became popular pretty quickly.

It actually overtook Friendster in popularity, and by two thousand and six it was the second most popular social network on the Internet. Number one at that time was my Space,

and the majority of orchits users were in Brazil. Se of the users of orch at were in Brazil, and in fact the site would maintain a dominant position in India and Brazil for several years, but would eventually lose ground to Facebook, to all other domains in the United States, in India, and in two thousand twelve, they finally lost to Facebook in Brazil. Facebook would displace it and never look back. Google would continue to support orch at dot com until two thousand fourteen. Orc At, the man by

then had already left the orchid team. In fact, he had left the orch At team in two thousand eight and became a product manager at Google, but then he left Google entirely. In the same year that the social networking site went offline, he would go on to found another social network called Hello, which still exists. It initially launched in Brazil and it expanded from there, so that one's still around. You could join Hello today if you

wanted to. Now there have been a lot of social networks that have also been aimed at niche audiences, not just the mainstream general Internet audience. There's actually an Early Tech Stuff episode dedicated to these niche social networks, and it included stuff like Ravelry, which is a social network site dedicated to knitting. This, by the way, isn't me dismissing knitting. As far as I'm concerned, Knitting is a pretty awesome creative hobby. But it surprised me at the

time that there was a social network dedicated to it. Eventually, my horizons expanded. My wife started knitting, and then I realized exactly how social and activity it can be. She does knitting circles and so of course it makes sense to have a social network dedicated to it. But at the time I just thought that's just weird. Anyway, Ravelry is not what I really wanted to talk about. The social network that I wanted to mention escaped my attention

until I started looking into this episode. I didn't know about it, or if I had heard about it, I didn't remember it. It was called eons e O N s Now. Part of the reason of not knowing about it was because I'm not in the generation that was targeted by that social network. It was aimed at baby boomers, people who were at least forty, although most reports at the time said it was aiming at the fifty plus crowd when the site launched back in two thousand six.

And while a certain former tech Stuff co host would take great joy in pointing out how old I am, I was not in my forties back in two thousand six. Heck, I wasn't even working for how Stuff works in two thousand six, So maybe I can be forgiven for being ignorant of this particular social network. Jeff Taylor, who was the founder of the site Monster dot com, also was the founder of eons dot com. He created it to target this market of baby boomers, the fifty plus crowd.

He felt that they were under served in the social network space, and I'm inclined to agree with that assessment. Social network sites when they first launch, or at least when they first catch on, tend to do so within a certain generation band of users, a certain age range.

In general, there's always going to be exceptions, but you'll see that the majority of your users tend to fall within a certain range, and unless the network is able to adapt over time, that generation band remains pretty much the same it ages as the the demographic of the the audience. Ages and younger generations tend to opt for alternatives because, among many reasons, there are a quote too many old people end quote on that other site. Eons dot com was supposed to be a site dedicated to

those quote unquote old people now. The site aimed for a clean, easy to navigate interface. They wanted to get rid of a lot of the things that would clutter up the profiles on competing social network sites. It had a simplified search engine, and it also boasted get ready for it, the world's largest obituary database. The goal was to aim at boomer's interests while keeping the features as easy to understand and to use as possible for those

who lacked computer savvy. In two thousand eleven, a company called Crew Media purchased the site from Jeff Taylor for an undisclosed amount. At the time, the site had about eight hundred thousand registered users, very small number compared to other social network sites, but you're also talking about people who have probably a lot of a lot of revenue, who a love income they could they could use on

various advertising if if you were so inclined. The following year, in you Jers became concerned because the site went offline without any warning, and after about a week, executive said the problem was that the server company they were working with had some sort of error and that this was

all getting fixed behind the scenes. But after a little more time it turned out that there was a bit more to it than that, and in June two thousand twelve, the Eons team posted to the site's Facebook page the boy, isn't that fun that a social network site had its

own page on another social network? Anyway, they explained that the sites service provider was asking for a financial commitment that the company could not meet, and in return, the the service would end up fixing this problem and getting the eons dot com site back up online, But because they said they couldn't meet that financial commitment, they couldn't pay to have the site fixed, and so it remained down. The executive said they hoped they could get the site

back up and running, but that never happened. Users were told that their information would remain locked away and safe. It wasn't going to be sold off or shared with anyone. But as of this date, the site has remained dark. I've got a couple more networks I want to mention, but before I get to those, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Hey, it's been a minute. How about we pop back over to Google, you know, the giant social network killing machine. Now. Sadly, for Google,

the social networks it has slain haven't been competitors. Instead, they've been the company's own properties. Not all of them, however, were developed within Google. Some of them came through acquisitions, like jaiqu or if you prefer Haiku, that's with a J, I'm gonna call it Jaiku. So Jaiku was a service launched by a couple finished developers whose names I would absolutely butcher if I tried to say them, and I already did that to poor or cut, so let's just

move on. The crux of Jaiku was essentially the same as Twitter. It was founded as an SMS messaging service. Kind of add on, it was called a micro blogging service, and you were limited to one forty characters for your posts, the same as Twitter's original limit. Now, the reason for that had to do with the limitations of the SMS format,

which could carry one hundred sixty characters. Some of those characters needed to be set aside for user names, so the limit for the actual message length was one forty characters.

Users could choose to make their Jaiku stream public or private and thus invitation only, so in other words, it was really similar to Twitter, though in those early days, early adopters said that Jaiku's implementation was slightly better, largely to a dedicated mobile app that allowed users to leave comments on other people's messages, almost like a Facebook post, as opposed to the at reply method that Twitter relied on.

And keep in mind this was before the smartphone revolution, so this is in the old symbian operating system days. Google purchased Jaiku in two thousand seven, which made some users nervous. Google had a bad reputation for this. They had already purchased a service called Dodgeball, which was an early check in service, you know, one of those where you go someplace in real life and you open up your phone and you open up an app, and then you check into that place, so it lets other people

know where you are. Well. The founders of Dodgeball would go on to later create four Square, which would kind of take that same same idea and run with it, at least for a while. I'll have to do another episode about four Square at some point, because that's an interesting story too, about how that service changed dramatically over time. Anyway, it turned out that the Jaiku fans had good reason to be nervous because Google did very very little with Jiku, or if it did do very much with it, it

was never publicly disclosed. They did shut down the service two thousand nine, just two years after purchasing it. That was around the same time that Google also shut down Dodgeball, So if you were to try and visit the U r L to Jiku dot com, you would get a Google four oh four error. Sad story. A similar micro blogging service called Pounce stuck around a little bit longer, but ultimately it also bowed to Twitter's dominance in the field.

The founders of Pounds were Daniel Berka, Leah Culver, and Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose had co founded Revision three and Dig Daniel Burka. Burka was a creative director over a dig. Leah Culver was fresh out of grad school, and they launched Pounds in two thousand seven. The service had more cheers than Twitter, including the ability to share stuff like photos or videos or MP three's you could embed them in messages. That was something that would take a while

to get implemented into Twitter. Even so, the service just wasn't attracting users at the same rate that Twitter was. It got launched just a little too late, I think, to take advantage of that, and one year after being founded, a company called six Apart approach the founders and offered to buy Pounds off of them, and they agreed, so six Apart purchase Pounds and then they announced that the service was going to get shut down in just a

couple of weeks. So you might say, well, why would a company come in and buy something just to shut it off, And typically the answer to that question is the company isn't interested in the product. The company is interested in the people who made the product. Not necessarily the founders but the actual developers. So it's quite possible that that was the whole reason why, apart when after Pounds in the first place. Either way, Pounds was no

more just a short time after it had been founded. Now, it's important to remember that for most social network sites, the users are in fact the product. It's we gotta remember, you know, you always asked if if a service is free, that really means that you are the thing that's being sold. Social networks tend to make money through advertising, and they attract advertisers because those social networks are privy two tons of private information about users, and advertisers would kill for

that sort of granular demographic information. I say that because the next social network I want to mention came from a behemoth in the retail space that was actually launched by the company Walmart, and a lot of people dismissed it immediately as a crass attempt to cash in on the social network trend, and honestly, it's hard to dis missed those criticisms. However, I would argue that Walmart was just more blatant in its motivations than other social networks.

A lot of social networks out there were just equally as concerned with leveraging a social network in order to make money. They just it just wasn't as obvious. So while it's easy to to cast dispersions, I think we need to cast them equally across the field. Anyway, let's talk about the Hub. So Walmart created the Hub in two thousand six. And part of the reason why I think a lot of people criticize this is because of the target demographic. It wasn't meant for adults. It was

actually targeted toward teens. Now, according to the company, the purpose of the site was so that teens could quote express their individuality end quote. But this expression wasn't exactly free expression. It actually came with some very strict limitations. For one thing, it would notify a user's parents that

the user had joined the service. So you know, you had to provide email, I address I assume of your your parents, and as part of that, the parents would get a notification saying, Hey, your kids trying to join the social networking service. Thought you should know just in case. Users were not allowed to send messages to one another privately on the platform, so you couldn't send emails or

anything like that to each other um. It screened all the content that was coming through the site, and it was largely geared towards the commerce side of social networking. So it was a restrictive platform that was obviously self serving, and it didn't work. It did not attract users the way Walmart had hoped, and after just three months, Walmart pulled the plug on the site and the hub went flat. Now, my last entry of all these failed social networks is

just kind of sort of social network. It's it's social network adjacent, and that would be Yahoo Buzz. This one's also a weird for me to talk about because while I cannot remember which article it was, I remember distinctly early in my career. It was shortly after we started adding more staff writers for how Stuff Works dot com, So this would be in the era when Josh and Chuck of Stuff you Should Know had joined and a

few others were just fresh on the staff. Yahoo Buzz started to really get a big push behind it, even though it had been around for several years at that point, and one of my articles got featured on Yahoo Buzz early on in this in this push, and as a result, the numbers for that article skyrocketed. It became one of the most visited articles on the house stuff works dot com site, and it was mine, which is fantastic. It's a great feeling to see one of your articles just

go viral like this. Now, as it turns out, manufacturing that kind of thing is pretty darn hard to do, and people can typically suss out when you're trying to do it and they just dismiss it. So these days I just focus on trying to do a good job and create good content and not worry about whether or not it goes viral, because I figure that's up to other people. That's not up to me. Anyway. Let's get

back to Buzz. So technically, Buzz was a community news site where users could share articles they had seen online with each other. You could have your own news feed of curated articles that you found interesting, and other people could visit your profile and read the articles that you had curated. It was pretty darn similar to what dig was already doing and what Reddit would go on to

do in the future. Yeah who. Buzz originally launched in two thousand and Yahoo would sunset the service in two thousand eleven, along with several other social media and blog services, all At the same time, the company had come to the conclusion that Buzz and its companions were too challenging to monetize effectively, and so it made more sense to drop those services and focus on strategies that did generate revenue. So along with Buzz, my blog log, Yahoo picks, and

Yahoo bookmarks all got the acts and it all ended. Now, these are all the social networks that for one reason or another went out of business, got shuttered, got shut down. But there are lots of other ones that are technically still around but have very little activity around them or a very small population where they don't get very much coverage. They don't they aren't able to emerge from beneath the

shadow of the giants of Facebook and Twitter. For example, there's plerk, which is a Twitter alternative that a lot of people loved when it first came out. It still exists. There's l O E l l O that was pitched as an ad free social network experience and these days is largely populated by artists and creative types, so it still exists. It's much more stripped down simple. Uh. Some people would say it's too simple, but uh, it's one that a lot of artists are using these days rather

than Facebook. So there's still a few dozen smaller social network sites that don't have the attention or influence of the big guys, and some people tend to put those on the same lists as as the defunct ones I've mentioned. I don't think that's entirely fair because the ones I'm talking about literally they don't exist anymore, or at least they don't exist as their own separate entity. If they exist at all, they exist in the form of features

that have been implemented into other social networks. Um. One person suggested, I do uh Diaspora as an example, but that one technically is still going. It's uh not incredibly popular, there's not a huge number of people using it, but it hasn't gone away yet. So there are more that I could talk about that are are still going. They still have a passionate base in some cases at least, but they don't, you know, they don't even have a

metric to compare against the big ones. I guess the point of all this is that maybe it is time to go in and break up Facebook a bit. It's essentially a monopoly when it comes to the social network space, especially now that, you know, Google Plus. Google Plus probably had a decent chance if it had been implemented in a better way, and if it hadn't had that data breach problem to have really challenged Facebook, but it never quite had the cool factor beyond that exclusivity when it

first launched. Uh, no one else has really come close. However, we said the same thing about my Space back in the day, and then Facebook was able to turn all that around. So it may just mean that somebody has to come up with a very compelling approach to social networks, possibly one that appeals to a younger audience, and maybe then they could topple face it that way. But honestly, at the rate the company is going right now, they're doing a pretty good job toppling themselves, or at least

sticking their corporate foot into their corporate mouth. But that wraps up this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future topics of tech Stuff, why not send me a quick message. The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com or dropped by our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You'll find other ways to contact me there. You'll find the archives of the show. There. Go check that out, and don't forget to visit our store that's

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