The History of Social Networks: Here Come the Micro-Blogs!

com and high five. In episode two, we talked about how my Space became the dominant player in social networks until Facebook swept up from behind and overtook it. And then in the third episode we talked about Google's early attempt at a social network, a Orchid, and we also talked about Bibo, and I covered some networks that are related to social networks but maybe not a full social network on their own, like YouTube and Reddit, and just as a reminder, I am tackling these kind of one

network at a time. So while the episodes are organized chronologically in regards to when these networks were founded, I'm not going like year by year. This isn't like and now we're covering two thousand ten to two thousand fourteen, because you would have to jump back and forth across so many different stories would be impossible to keep them all sorted. It would be Madness or Sparta, or you know,

one of those two. Anyway, we're up to two thousand six, and that year would see the birth of a microblogging service that would be founded early on uh and then launch publicly in the summer. And this microblogging service would end up taking advantage of the technology of things like

short messaging system that kind of thing. And I am, of course talking about jaiqu got you didn't I maybe anyway, it might have sounded like I was talking about Twitter, you know, being founded in two thousand six and launching publicly in that summer. But technically a couple of engineers in Finland founded Jaiku one month before Twitter would emerge. As to who was working on what first, I don't know, but they weren't aware of each other at the time.

They couldn't have been, because Twitter was not a publicly known entity yet at the finished team built their tool with a specific phone operating system in mind, the Symbian operating system specifically on the Nakia S sixty platform. Now keep in mind two thousand six is still a year before the iPhone would launch, and while smartphones would take time to get some traction here in the US, over in Finland, Nokia and the simian Os already had a

leg up. Jaiku's creators figured that young people were starting to do this crazy thing called texting, and they had also taken up the practice of journaling online using blogs, So why not combine the two and build an application that would allow for really concise blog posts microblogging in other words, and it would work on mobile devices so that you could post your thoughts right when you had

them and maybe have no filter. Many of the same concepts that Twitter would embrace were also present in Jaiku. Now there was also a web based components, so you could go to the Jaiku web page and access your account there rather than using the phone interface if you preferred. And I suspect that because the service launched overseas, it didn't really get as much attention here in the United

States as Twitter would. Also, the engineers would later say that the s sixty platform was quote impossible to develop for end quote. It did still an attention, however, and the folks who heard about Jaiku got into it pretty

quickly and used it a lot. And while the team had been hoping for this kind of success, the rapid adoption created some new challenges for the small group of engineers because now they had to figure out how to scale the service to meet demand, and they were having lots of performance issues as a result, because it's expensive. It's something that's really hard for a small team to do, and it soon became clear that they were going to

be completely overwhelmed. And that's what when something that appeared to be a lifeline showed up. In the long run, it wasn't a lifeline, but at the time it seemed that way. So in late two thousand seven, Google bought Jaiku, perhaps sensing that maybe the company Google could push Jaiku to greater heights and challenge the now trendy Twitter, which we will talk about in a second, because by two

thousand seven, Twitter was quite the phenomenon now. Unfortunately, the same thing happened with Jaiku that we've seen happen in countless other examples of Google acquired companies and services. Google didn't really know how to promote Jaiku or to develop Jaiku, and it failed to gain any real traction. While Twitter continued to grow in popularity. In two thousand nine, Google decided to stop actively developing Jaiku as a company, but

turned it into an open source project. But even that move only kept Jaiku around for a couple more years. In two thousand eleven, Google announced it was going to kill off Jaiku at the start of the following year, and in January, Jaiku guessed its last breadths and then was heard no more, as was predicted by the Mayan Long Count calendar. Yes, that's what the two twelve stuff was. No, not really, I'm being asias obviously, but yeah, it was gone.

Jaiku did not stand the test of time. But let's get back to two thousand six, because that is also the year that Twitter would launch. As I said a little bit earlier, it launched a month after Jaiku did well after Jaiku was founded. Technically, Jaiku didn't launch publicly until July, which was after Twitter had its public launch. So I've talked a lot about Twitter's history over the years, especially this year. So we're gonna keep this really bare

bones and relatively fast. I mean, you know me, nothing is fast but as fast as I go. Anyway, So, once upon a time there was a company called Odio, and this company developed directories for stuff like podcasts. The idea was, how can we make podcasts easier to discover and to subscribe to because early, early, early on in the days of podcasts, you kind of had to hunt down our ss feed and subscribe to it. There was not like a whole lot of easy options for you know,

doing this without hunting and pecking. Of course, this isn't the very very early days of podcasts now. The brief story of Odio is a pretty interesting one. It's complete with drama around who started the company versus who got you know, the credit for being a founder, and lots of things like that. But that's for another time. But by two thousand and six, Odeo was struggling to be relevant.

The main problem was that shortly after Odio became a thing, Apple began to support podcasts and incorporate podcast subscriptions into iTunes, and you know, we even call them podcasts because of the Apple iPod. That kind of gives you an idea of how dominant Apple was in the space and still is to a great extent. So Odio quickly found itself looking for ways to keep investors on board because the company was really struggling with its main product. Now a

side project in Odeo was also developing. This project was to create a messaging service that would let one person post a short message via SMS or short messaging service to their own timeline of posts, and it would also send it out to their contacts or followers, and it became a form of microblogging, journaling in very short character messages. That character limit was because the limitations of SMS itself. The project leaders, among them Noah Glass, decided to call

the service Twitter, but there were no vowels. It was t W T t R. Now, of course this would become Twitter t w I T t e R, and it launched in March two thousand six. Jack Dorrisey created the first profile on the platform and sent out the first tweet, which read, just set up my Twitter, and he spelled it the the no vowels way. So worlds are turned on such tweets. So that's Marched two thousand six, right, But Twitter would launch to the public a few months

later in July. Actually, July is the same month that Jaiku would launch to the public too, so both services hit the public at the same time. But to keep in mind. Jaiku is launching in Finland and didn't get nearly the same amount of coverage as Twitter did here in the United States. Ev Williams, biz Stone and Jack Dorsey decided to purchase up most of odio in October

of two thousand six. They bought it back from the various stakeholders and investors, and we're consolidating ownership and pivoting the business away from podcasting where clearly Apple was going to dominate, and instead they were going to focus on this new kind of social network and messaging service. The service grew over the course of two thousand six, but it really began to take off the following March in two thousand seven, So essentially a year after Dorsey sent

out that first tweet, Twitter itself would become famous. It was the year that Twitter had gone to south By Southwest in Austin, Texas. It's a big festival. It's got lots of different components to it, like there's a film component and a music component, but there's also a tech or interactive component in south By and south By is how some people refer to it. I always feel weird calling it south By. I don't think I'm cool enough.

That's the problem is that really cool people can call it south By and sound like, you know, they're not total dweebs. But if I try and say cool things, my dweet bishness comes to the surface and it's undeniable. And I'm cool with that. By the way, I'm not. I'm not upset. I just know who I am. Anyway, Uh, it was seen as sort of the cool conference in the tech space. You know, it's where the young startups would show off what they could do while rubbing elbows

with you know, the mon e and Uh. South By was leaning more towards trendy and fashionable, much more than larger tech industry conferences like ce S, which were still important, but they weren't seen as being like, again, you're gonna think I'm terrible because I'm gonna use terrible, antiquated language. But you know, they didn't seem hip anyway. The Twitter teams set up displays around south By Southwest that showed the latest tweets that were sent across the microblogging service.

And I'm sure you know this. Folks really like it when they see themselves or their words up on screens. Gives them a real kick. So for more proof of that, just go to any big sporting event in the United States and watches the jumbo tron shows video of fans in the stands. They go bonkers for that kind of thing. So Twitter was declared the best startup at south By

Southwest and thousands of people signed on. Moreover, the people who attend south By south West tend to fall into the category of influencer, so these folks had their own fan bases, which also began to join the platform. Twitter proved to be really popular as it seemed to give folks a more personal insight into the lives of folks that they liked, whether those folks were close friends or you know, like a celebrity crush. Twitter spun off to become its own company in two thousand seven, and Jack

Dorsey was the first CEO. Dorsey would serve as CEO another time later on in Twitter's history actually, but in the summer of two thousand seven, Twitter began to see some emergent behavior that would become foundational for the service. And I'm talking about the hashtag. So that's the pound sign, that little cross hatch sign. The hashtag when used in front of a name or a keyword would make it easier to search Twitter for that specific topic to see

what folks were saying about it. Because Twitter wasn't really designed to make large conversations a possibility, right, Like, it's hard to participate in a conversation on Twitter beyond back and forth with just two people. So some users came up with this idea of using a hashtag in front of a keyword, like what the conversation is actually about, so that people could do a search for that hashtag

word and pull up the actual relevant tweets. Tweets that did not have the hashtag in front of the word, those wouldn't get tagged, right, Those wouldn't get pulled up in search results. So this made it easier to look for specific kinds of content. And again, this was just something that emerged through user behavior, but over time Twitter would adopt that and some other user behaviors and incorporate

those as features. In two thousand eight, Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter's CEO and co founder Evan Williams would take a turn. But don't worry, we'll be back with Jack Dorsey in a little it. Before we can do that, though, let's take a quick break, Okay, we're back. In two thousand nine, Twitter got the first account to hit one million followers. That actually was a kind of a race.

The account belonged to Ashton Kutcher, the celebrity who campaigned hard to be the first to hit one million, because CNN was closed again on a million followers right around the same time. These days, you can find lots of accounts that have many millions of followers. But keep in mind, you know, this event where we hit the first one

million followed account was in two thousand nine. It was just a few years after launch, and really folks outside of the text space hadn't really found out much about Twitter at all, Like they didn't know that it was a thing. It was really the tech space that was aware of it, and in a few folks on the periphery of tech. This would change when Oprah set up her own Twitter account on an episode of her daytime talk show, which led to thousands more people signing up.

I should also add Twitter in the United States is seen as a pretty big deal, but it's not as big in other regions. There are other social networks that actually are used more frequently than Twitter. In those cases, I say this because even as someone who is on Twitter, I often forget that it's not as widely used as you might think. And while you might feel that that certain sentiments that are really popular on Twitter, uh have widespread appeal, you're really looking at a kind of slice

of the overall population. I say this because it means that if you spend a lot of time on Twitter, your perspective could be skewed so that you think that more people think a specific way, and that's not necessarily the case. I know I've been guilty of falling into that trap myself, so I just thought I would mention that here now. It's also good to remember that Twitter's early years coincided with the growth of the consumer smartphone.

Like I said, smartphones have been kind of a thing in certain parts of the world, but here in the United States, they just were not the domain of the general consumer. It was pretty much your executive on the go who had a smartphone, and that was it until Apple debuted the iPhone and made smartphones sexy, and then they had a really disruptive effect on the web. In general, services like Twitter could be repackaged as an app, and

this really helped boost user numbers as well. Now, in these early years, Twitter didn't really have a means to generate revenue. Uh, it was dependent upon influxes of cash from investors. But in two the company introduced promoted tweets, so then an account could pay a to have a message promoted so that it would show up on the feeds of hundreds of thousands of Twitter users. Even if those users didn't follow that specific account, they would see

the tweet. We started seeing more brands engage with Twitter as a way to promote themselves and their products as well as to interact with customers. And we also saw the beginning of folks using Twitter as a way to fast track issues to get them resolved with customer service of various companies. I saw so many tweets directed at airlines. Oh and those early years would also be when we

would see the famous fail whale a lot. So This image created by artist Kooney a k a k a Dash ninety two has the official title of Lifting a Dreamer and it shows a flock of little birds holding onto strings that serve as a kind of harness for a happy whale. This was the image that greeted users when Twitter services were put which happened frequently enough that if you were using Twitter back in those days, you undoubtedly saw the fail whale at some point or another.

Twitter users would sometimes push Twitter beyond capacity, particularly during really popular live events where everyone was trying to give their hot take on what was going on at the same time. In Evan Williams stepped down as CEO in order to focus more on product development. He would leave the company no several years later. He actually completely divorced himself from Twitter by like twenty seventeen, so in his place,

Dick Costolo became the new CEO. In two thousands thirteen, Twitter would transition from being a private company to a publicly traded one, and so it held its I p O or initial public offering on November. Uh, well, in November of two thousand thirteen, I don't have the specific date in front of me, but not everything was going super smoothly for Twitter even as it was making this transition. For one thing, the platform was starting to get a

reputation for abusive users. People were complaining that Twitter failed to handle abuse properly. Like it it wasn't responding quickly enough. In fact, a little bit later it was it got so bad that the CEO copped to it. In an internal memo. Costolo said that Twitter had failed to handle trolls and abuse and as a result, had lost users in the process. Now, this was around the time of gamer Gate, which was really a harassment campaign conducted mainly

online but also in other ways. And while Twitter would see quite a bit of action during gamer Gate, the real battles were being fought elsewhere online in the real world. But lots of folks in the gaming industry, particularly women who dared to be so bold as to work professionally

in the field, found themselves the targets of abuse. In the summer of Dick Costolo stepped down as CEO, and hey, Jack Dorsey came back as CEO, you know, the first CEO of Twitter, one of the code founders, and Dorsey remained in charge of Twitter until the fall of when he would resign and the former c t O, Parague Agraval would take over and Agrival would lead the company until a certain tech billionaire would really shake things up.

That tech billionaire was, of course, Elon Musk. He made waves in the spring of So it feels like it was an eternity ago at this point by announcing his intention to acquire Twitter. First, he purchased a significant percentage of shares in the company. Then he declined an invitation to join the company's board of directors because he learned that if he did that it would prevent him from being able to acquire even more stake in the company.

Then he said he wanted to buy the company, and he started going about to secure the funding for it. Then reconsidered and decided he wanted out of the deal, but at that point he had already committed to it. There was no easy way to back out. Twitter went to court to force Musk to go through with the acquisition bias gosh darn it, you're legally bound to And finally, in the fall of Musk actually did purchase Twitter. Then Musk fired like all the leadership at Twitter and half

of the employees. Then another quarter of the employees left the company. And that's kind of where Twitter is today. Musk is aiming to transform Twitter into what he calls Twitter two point oh. And obviously that's a super fast,

super high level treatment of Twitter. We could talk about so much more, but honestly, we kind of have, particularly throughout this year, so I thought I would leave this here for now, but if people want me to do like an honest to goodness deep dive on the history, the evolution, the influence of Twitter, let me know, um and I guess I can do that. But that'll that's almost a mini series on its own because it's just Twitter.

While again, while it's reach is not as big as the way a lot of people think has been incredibly important, particularly here in the United States, but also in other parts of the world, like in in Egypt. But we'll save that for some other time. If y'all want me to talk more about it, some of you are probably sick of hearing about Twitter, so hey, why don't we

talk about something else. So that same year that that Twitter in Jaiku launched in two thousand and six, saw the launch of yet another social networking slash microblogging site, but this one was called Tumbler. I mean it launched in private beta towards the end of two thousand six. It would become a publicly accessible social network the following year in two thousand seven. David carp who turned twenty in two thousand six, dude, anyway, he was behind Tumbler.

He had already established himself as a web developer and tech enthusiasts by then, Like when I looked into his background, because I really didn't know much about David carp. I know much about Tumbler apart from being somewhat familiar with it as a platform, but I looked into his background, I was just so astonished and humbled, because holy cow, this guy, by the time he was twinning, had accomplished so much. So he creates this site along with Marco Armett.

I don't mean to diminish Marco's contributions. And the whole idea was to give a place where users could create profiles and write what we're called tumble logs. So these are short, warm blogs, sometimes longer than tweets, but shorter than what you would typically find in a regular blog. And Tumbler gave tools to users to let them incorporate all kinds of multimedia stuff like photos and audio clips

and videos and even things like chat logs. You could just post those directly into a Tumbler feed, right from the user interface. So it was really streamlining that process so that you could create a really engaging and interesting tumble log about whatever it is that you wanted to write about. You know, maybe it's a journal about your own experiences, maybe it's about something you really are passionate about,

whatever the case may be. So users had a few options when it came to designing the look of their feed. They had a lot of default options, or they could actually shell out some real world money to purchase a pre made theme from Tumbler, kind of like a you know, a premier theme. And like Twitter, Tumbler let users follow accounts that they found interesting, so that each user had

a curated experience based upon their own preferences. Now, one thing was very different with Tumbler, and that was that Tumbler posts didn't feature a comment section, so you could not comment on someone else's post. Carpet had seen how comments could become a breeding ground for abuse and he really wanted to avoid that, so users were not given the option to comment on posts. Alternatively, however, they could choose to reblog someone else's post, and in the reblog

they could include their own commentary. So while you might not be able to leave a comment on one of my posts and write you're a jerk face, you could reblog one of my posts and write, this guy is a jerk face as your commentary that would work words can hurt. Tumbler's emphasis on multimedia really kind of set it apart from other platforms at the time, and it became a place where fandoms would coalesce around various pieces of pop culture, very active communities around fan fiction and

fan theory and things that are in that realm. Like really, when you use the word fan you know, it's short for fanatic. Fanaticism really was playing out on Tumbler. You would see like entire communities grow up around specific theories and wish fulfillment for certain characters in pop culture to get together. That kind of thing. The whole browny culture, which was a male identifying people who are fans of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. That all started on Tumbler.

So you had these kind of micro communities that were really passionate about their specific area of focus. Humbler was pretty popular when in Yahoo came a callin and we've talked about Yahoo already in this series because that's the same company that came around and acquired Flicker a few years earlier. Yahoo shelled out a cool billion dollars for Tumbler. That's billion with a B. David carp stayed on as

CEO for the time being. But unfortunately for Yahoo and for Tumbler, that popularity didn't really translate into profitability, and in two thousand and sixteen, Yaho actually did a write down of that acquisition of more than seven hundred million dollars. Yeah, that's essentially Yahoo's saying, yeah, we paid way too much

for this asset. When Verizon bought Yahoo in tween, Because as quigon Jin reminds us, there's always a bigger fish, Tumbler, like Flicker, was shuffled underneath a parent company called Oath O A t H. In two thousand eighteen, Tumbler made a change that had a dramatic effect. See I talked about fandoms and stuff, but one thing I did not mention is that Tumbler was also a really popular site for posting material of a more adult nature, whether it

was fan fiction, illustrations, photographs, videos. Some users relied on Tumbler to share material that was a bit too hot for Oath. So Tumbler would make a change that would have an enormous impact on the site and its followers. But before we get into that, let's take another quick break. Okay, so I'm sure all of you could at least guess

where this was going if you didn't know already. Tumbler when faced with this issue of adult content proliferating across the site, which by the way, made it very hard to work with advertisers, right because advertisers don't want their ants showing up next to illustrations that depict a raw adic liaisons between Captain Kirk and Darth Vader or whatever. So Tumbler passed a new policy banning adult content on the site, and usage plummeted by about thirty percent. That's

a lot. When you say, hey, no more porn and you lose a third of your traffic, that definitely tells you something about how your users were using your platform. Now that brings us up to two thousand nineteen. So at this point Tumbler is wallowing under Oath, which, now that I actually think about it, that that came out away that was different from what I intended. Not wallowing under Oath, but wallowing under the company called Oath. And it continued to struggle, and at this point David carp

had already left the company. He actually did that in two thousand seventeen, and Oath ended up selling Tumbler off to another company called Automatic, which in turn is kind of connected to WordPress, the publishing platform. And the price tag of Tumbler when it was sold in two thousand

nineteen was three million dollars. Y'all, if you've been following this series, you know, like there have been some notable cases where companies were bought for massive amounts and sold for a tiny percentage afterwards, Like my Space was something like five million dollars, that Newscore bought it four and then sold it for like thirty five million, And you know, we've had other examples where something was bought for like

nine million and then sold for ten million. But this was bought for a billion dollars and then sold off for three million. Yikes, huge drop in value. But importantly, Tumbler did not die. It also didn't change that much. Leadership decided to really focus on how Tumbler allows users to choose how they post and how they consume content, and users began to return to the platform, though there's still a ban on adult content there, so not all

of them did. Something else that sets Tumbler apart from its competitors is that The site follows a chronological ordering system for posts, with the most recent posts being at the top. You do not get an algorithm shuffling everything around so that you see what the algorithm thinks will keep you there longer. That is different from Twitter. It's different from Facebook, and you might notice, if you've ever been on Facebook or Twitter that the posts you're looking

at are all out of order chronologically. Tumbler passed on that particular approach, which I certainly appreciate. I think a lot of users much prefer having a reverse chronological ordering of content and you just keep on scrolling down until you reach the point where you're like, oh, I've seen this before, now I'm all caught up. Tumbler is also not as dominated by brands and influencers as a Facebook and Instagram and Twitter are. It has more of a

community feel to it than other platforms. Now, I'm not saying Tumbler is perfect. In fact, I haven't really used Tumbler very much myself at all, but I do think it is a breath of fresh air if you felt lost in a sea of influencers, algorithms, brands promoting themselves and that kind of thing. But if you're tired of drama,

Tumbler might not be a solution to that. Funny little side note, I actually decided to log into Tumbler for the first time in years while writing this, and one of the top things to populate in the trending tab, which is where it dumped me. I didn't realize that at first. I'm looking at like, I don't recognize any of these accounts. Did I follow all of these back when I was actually on Tumbler years and years ago?

But one of the things I saw was a post about safety tips for new witches, which I thought was funny. Several of my friends consider themselves to be witches. That actually really tickled me to see this. I was like, does Tumbler know who my friends aren't? But then I realized, oh no, I'm in the trending tab. Once I popped over to the four you tabu, the posts were fewer and further between, and they were all very techy, so I was like, oh, okay, no, this is this is

where I left off, all right. Next up, we got a company created by some ex Googlers. So Brett Taylor and Jim Norris had worked on Google Maps before they struck out on their own to work on their own idea at a Finchure capital firm called Benchmark Capital, which had its own kind of incubator program. So their idea was to bring together in one place all the different social network activity of a single user, so that you could catch up on a person's activities no matter where

they were posting. Two other ex Googlers, Sanjeev Singh and Paul bou Kite, whose name I'm sure I have completely mispronounced, so I apologized for that. They helped build Gmail back in the day. Well, they ended up joining on this project as well, and the tool became friend Feed. It could aggregate social network activity across more than twenty different platforms when it launched, and even more as time went on.

So that included stuff like Facebook and Twitter, but it also included stuff like Netflix and YouTube and last Fm and read It and things like that nature. So on friend Feed users could like posts and they could leave comments, much as you would on Facebook later on, but you

could also see activity across all these different things. If if a user activated all these platforms on their their feed, anytime they would post at any of those sites, friend feed would aggregate it and pull it into that feed as well, so you'd have like this consolidated feed, which made it interesting for folks like me where I would post variations of the same thing on different platforms, and so on friend feed, you would get like multiple versions

of essentially the same message, but it would be tailored to whatever platform I was going to. So, for example, I might make a longer post on Facebook to promote say, podcast episode, but on Twitter it would be a much shorter message. Meanwhile, friend feed you'd be like, Jonathan, just can't shut up about this podcast episode you did. But let's say you've got a friend who's really active on

numerous social networks. So instead of having to go place to place to keep up with this friend, you know, all right, well have they posted new YouTube videos? Have they been active on Reddit? You would just subscribe to friend feed and you would get kind of a fire hose of all the content they were posting at different places, assuming that they enabled those platforms when they were joining

friend Feed. So the number of supported services grew and it became a really impressive from that kind of perspective, But the problem was it didn't really fit in anywhere. The UI felt kind of like a hybrid between Twitter and Facebook, it never quite took off. Plus, in two thousand nine, Facebook itself decided to acquire friend Feed. Facebook would continue to operate friend Feed for several more years, but in two thousand and fifteen it officially pulled the

plug and the aggregator went dark. All right, let's go back to our timeline. In two thousand and eight, we got Plerk. So at this point, Twitter and Jaiku had both been out for a couple of years, and Plurk was another one character limit microblogging service that later would expand up to two characters. But clerks Ui was different.

You know, Twitter and a lot of other social networks would arrange their messages vertically in roughly reverse chronological order, although as we've said, algorithms would change the order quite a bit depending upon what was being used at the time. But on the plerk website, messages are organized horizontally along a timeline, and the leftmost plurics represent the most recent messages, and as you go to the right you get to the older and older messages. This company was founded in

Toronto with co founders Danny Lynn and Alvin Woon. Now the name Plurk has a few different meanings. One is a combination of the words people and lurk plerk. Another is the combination of play and work, and yet another is an acronym which is peace, love, unity, respect and karma. Plurk like other services I'm pluric. You can follow other people and you can read their timelines. You can upload photos, you can share links, you can import YouTube videos, that

sort of thing. For a while, Plurk had something called Qualifiers, which was sort of like a menu of words that would let you quickly use them those words to make a message. So you could use a word like loves or hates or likes or wishes, and you could do this to craft a message. And those words had highlight to them, so like the word loves obviously was associated with the color red, hates was associated with the color black.

So you would very quickly be able to just glance at a message and you would see one of these highlighted words and you think, oh, I get the just Jonathan's mad about something again, I'm not even gonna bother reading this, which I think was a very useful tool for people who followed me. Not that different from how Facebook would incorporate moods like you would see that on Facebook posts for a while. I don't know if people

still use it. I haven't been on Facebook and ages, so I don't know if people still use moods or not, or if it even is still a thing. Anyway, users could also respond to Clark messages. They could leave comments on a post, and it was way easier to follow a conversation on Plerk than it was at Twitter at

the time. Anyway, Twitter had really yet to introduce threaded messages, and it was not easy to follow along and read responses to tweets, so it would be really tough to kind of figure out where a conversation was going on Twitter if you were not a direct part of it. But I'm plerk, it was way easier. You would just click on the relevant comment and then or or plerk and you would see all the comments below, so you could just follow the conversation and take part of it. Uh.

That way, it was really easy. Clerk also introduced karma, so folks could award karma they saw stuff they liked doing. Certain actions would get you karma, like if you added a photo to your profile that got you karma and receiving karma meant that you would be able to do, you know, to access certain features like special emoticons that otherwise we're not available, you know, or being able to assign a title to your timeline if you had enough

karma around. Alvin Woon relocated to Taiwan. He took Pork with him. The service never got a ton of love here in the West. Like you know, there are people who used it, but it really wasn't popular. But it did have a steady user base over in Asia and particularly in Taiwan. So the company got a round of Series A funding in as well, and it is still around today. You can actually go to pluric dot com and make yourself an account if you like, actually have one.

I've posted maybe like a dozen times since I first made the account way back in I don't know ten or something like that. I don't know when I made my Plark account, but I haven't posted to it very much. It didn't stick with me the way Twitter did for a very long time. Okay, that's enough for it today. I don't want to go super long with this episode.

We've got a few more we're going to cover before we conclude the history of social networks, We've got some ones that we need to chat about, like Google Plus. I think it's an important one to talk about because it really kind of illustrate some mistakes that Google made in the process of trying to create another social network. And there are a few other examples that we can

talk about. But obviously, like we've hit most of the really big ones, at least the big ones in the West, there are some that are really big in other parts

of the world, like in China and in Russia. And I'm sure I have listeners in places where they're thinking, hey, you're not really covering the ones that are popular here, and to that I apologize, Um, but you know, I just I just drew the line to the ones that were really big or known at least here in the West, and not you know, the ones that that people had

less contact with over here. Maybe in the future I'll do an episode where I focus on some of these other social networks that are almost unknown here in the United States. But I have already four episodes into this series, and if I kept on doing it, it it would probably be like eight episodes long. And uh, I still have to do my end of the year wrap up, folks.

So yeah, to that end, if you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, including any big news tech news items from two that you think should be included in my end of the year wrap up, please get in touch with me. You've got a couple of ways of doing that. One as you can download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download, it's free to use. Navigate over to tech Stuff. You just put tech Stuff in the little search field pop up over to the podcast. Over on the podcast page, you'll

see there's a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length, and if you even like, you can let me know and I can play it in a future episode. But I won't do it unless you tell me too, or if you prefer, you can use Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is

an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.