The History of Social Networks: Myspace and Facebook

I was inspired to do this because of various crises happening at Meta and Twitter, two of the heavy hitters in the social network space, particularly here in the United States, and the struggles these two companies are going through have prompted some to suggest that perhaps the era of social

networks could be coming to an end. Now, I am not ready to make such a lame, particularly since I think the definition of social network is pretty wibbly wobbly, if not timey whiney, and that you could argue platforms like TikTok or at least a close cousin to social networks, if not just a social network in a different form factor, and that we're not likely to see the complete disappearance

of these things. But you know, that's just my opinion. Anyway, in the last episode, we left off with the social network High five, but we've got a whole bunch of other social networks to talk about. And here's the real issue, y'all. Two of the biggest, our most important social networks launched not long after High five. So while I was hoping to cover maybe five, maybe four social networks in this episode, we're only going to get to two because they were

two very big ones and very important ones. Also, just a reminder, this series is not really an exhaustive list of every social network ever. There have been tons, including some that never really found much traction, like some that kind of quietly debuted, didn't really get enough users, and then went away without anyone really paying much attention. So I'm not covering every single one of them. My apologies if I leave out your favorite obscure social network as

we go through this series. So here's our next entry. It was a big one, at least for a while. It began when a few e Universe employees, among them two named Krista Wolfe and Everybody's friend Tom Anderson collaborated to create a social network that from the start had an emphasis on promoting and discovering music, it was, of course my Space. So we're talking two thousand three here. Now.

Obviously these guys did not come up with the idea for an online social network from scratch right like there were previous social networks out there. In fact, they had been using Friendster, and we talked about Friendster in the previous episode in this series. So if you want to hear more about that, listen to Monday's episode. Now, for those of you who never joined my Space back in its original incarnation, because I should point out my Space still is a thing, it's just a different thing from

the original MySpace. Well, if you were never part of my Space, you might not remember what it was like to be on the site back in those days, so pretty early on in MySpace history. Once it launched, users could create a profile page that had their their photo up on it that could link to other photos as well. Uh. They could also include a short playlist of songs that were available on my Space and those would automatically play. You could set it to automatically play when someone visited

your profile. This was something that was both interesting and infuriating, depending upon your friends musical tastes. It could also really put friendships to the test. Right, You go and visit a friend's page and you're like, Wow, I didn't know that Jonathan was so into Debbie Gibson. Um, not that I had Debbie Gibson. Actually I remember I had some they might be Giants songs on my my Space profile page.

As I recall, it has been a long time since I had on my Space page, so I I remember having they might be Giant songs on there, but I could be inventing that memory anyway. You could also deck out your profile with various gimmicks that could make the experience of visiting someone's profile and eye bleeding affair if if you wanted it to be. A lot of folks seem to adopt the more is more attitude and they

threw everything and the kitchen sync at their profiles. At least my friends did that, so it was not subtle in a lot of cases, like you would see some profiles that have little animated flashes of light and things like that on them, uh, making it very difficult to read stuff on occasion. As for Tom, the co creator that I said was everybody's friend, That was literally true in my Space. When you first joined my Space, Tom Anderson would populate your friends list, so you weren't starting

from nothing. You had Tom as your friend from the very beginning. You could, of course removed Tom from your friends list, but it was a nice touch to suggest that all users really are our friends of one of the creators of the site. Right, you've already got a friend.

You've got a friend in Tom. Now I should actually add this was not always a thing, because technically Tom didn't sign up for my Space until it had already launched, like two weeks previously, So there was a time where Tom was not automatically your friend if you were in my Space at the very get go, which was unlikely because that was really when the Universe crew themselves were

kind of launching things and testing it out. Uh, so, yeah, he wasn't automatically your number one friend from right out of the gate. MySpace introduced a few things that would carry over into some other social networks, so some of the stuff that my Space came up with would become

the bread and butter of social networks moving forward. For one thing, while you could have dozens of friends, only eight would appear on your profile page itself, like you would have a list of your top eight friends on your profile page, and you could select who appeared in that list of eight. The rest of your friends people would have to see by clicking through to your friends list itself so they could view other friends. It's just that these eight would be the ones that would be

featured on your profile page. So being one of someone's top eight spaces became kind of like a popularity contest or a status symbol. Weird. Al Yankovic would reference this in his song White and Nerdy, which was a a parody of millionaires writing dirty. So yeah, if you want to listen to a dated tech reference, actually several of them, you can listen to that parody song. But you might say, well, how did my space even become a thing? How did

it start to become popular enough? Where being in these top eight spaces was important? Because news sites and services don't magically become popular instantaneously, right, They have to attract a user base. There has to be a beginning to it. Otherwise we can't get to the point where two friends get into a real life argument because one of them

isn't in the other's top eight spaces on my Space. Well, this gets back to the universe see the my Space project began at that company, it didn't spin off to be its own thing. This, by the way, is one of the features of my Space that would later be cited as a big mistake that it started at under a Universe. And the reason why I say it would be called a big mistake later on is that the

creators of MySpace didn't have ownership over my Space. So when it was eventually bought out, which we will get to, the creators did not get massive payouts, at least not to the level they would have if they had spun off MySpace as an independent project. So it started off

at the Universe. But one benefit of that was that the Universe had a pretty big user base, like twenty million email subscribers, so the Universe could lean on that subscriber list to send out invitations to join my Space, So they already had access to a potential audience and that was a big benefit. So this was a real project the Universe, I mean the entire hierarchy. Even Brad Greenspan, who was the CEO and chairman of the Universe, was

in on this. So they ended up inviting the Universe customers to join my Space and that helped get a lot of of folks over And you have to remember, in these early days of social networks, some of the networks were hitting a peak of around two or three million people, right, so that was considered a huge success

if you had a couple million users. But because the universe already had access to like twenty million people, it gave my Space a huge leg up, and so very quickly my Space became the number one social network on the web. You could argue part of that was because of the lack of competition, but either way, it became number one, and this really became a big deal. When the site made a key change to how it operated,

it would really increase effic to the site. So originally on my Space, the only people who could view your profile page were people that you had designated as you are friends. So you had to do like a friend request and accept it, and at that point forward your friend would be able to view your profile. But before that they would not. They would just have to try and contact you to see if you would become their friend.

The change in the spring of two thousand four was that the site made all member profiles publicly viewable, and that would mean that there would be a ton more traffic going to my Space, which made it one of the most popular sites in the web at that time. Another thing that made my Space really popular is that there was a pretty lax approach to content moderation, So things got a little, you know, raunchy on my Space, more so than you would see in later social networks.

It wasn't outright like bedlam Or or Solomon god Mora or anything like that. It wasn't, you know, this crazy hedonistic landscape, but things could get a little more racy on the early MySpace. Now, year after my Space debuted, we got Facebook, which obviously will play a huge part in this episode when we get to the second half of it. Really and in early two thousand five, when Facebook had just launched the year before, my Space allegedly

attempted to buy out this competing social network. Keep in mind, Facebook in two thousand five was a very different thing than Facebook today. It was just Facebook, and it was really restricted to college students and maybe high school students.

By two thousand five, and according to Julia Angwin's book about the history of my Space, the MySpace reps came to Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, that is, and they offered to acquire Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg quoted them a price of seventy million dollars and that my Space just said like, no, that's unreal estate, that's way too much money. We're good, and they walked away from

the deal. Now, in hindsight, this would be a very bad decision, like if my Space had bought Facebook, things might may have turned out at least somewhat differently, But at the time they had no way of knowing that, so it's not like you can really blame them. They

just saw Facebook as a small time competitor. And besides that, you could argue that this my Space decision was overshadowed by a much larger, worse decision that was made later on, So Facebook was not the only possible acquisition or merger opportunity early on in my Space's history. Both match net and Viacom showed early interest in acquiring my Space in two thousand four, offering somewhere in the neighborhood of forty

million dollars, and my Space turned down those offers. So my Space did the same thing, you know that they were like, we're not going to sell for forty million, we feel we're worth more than that. And then, of course Zuckerberg had a very similar attitude in two thousand five, saying he felt Facebook's value with seventy five million, and my Space was like, no, I don't. I don't think so. So my Space and Friendster looked at a potential merger, but they couldn't come to an agreement on that, so

ultimately that that fell through. But in June two thousand five, a buyer with extremely deep pockets came a call in and made my Space an offer it couldn't refuse. And that caller was News Corporation or news Corps, the company that at the time owned the Fox Entertainment Group and several publishing and media concerns. It was run by Rupert Murdoch, and the company came to my Space and made an

offer of five hundred eighty million in dollars. When you get an offer that is more than ten times larger than offers you got just a year earlier, stuff has seriously changed, but it was on the precipice of changing even more to a disastrous degree, which we will talk about in just a moment. But first let's take a quick break Okay, before the break, we had just got to the point where news Corps acquired my Space for

five eight million dollars. After the acquisition, a few of the folks at my Space actually stayed on and they got huge paychecks. Were doing so so while they didn't necessarily get an enormous payout because of the lack of ownership of my Space, I mean, Brad Greenspan made out really well, but a lot of the others didn't. Uh some of them stayed on and they were getting massive compensation packages from News Corps. So one of those people was Dwolf, who met with Zuckerberg again in two thousand

five and again wanted to make an offer to acquire Facebook. Right. Remember in two thousand four they had asked and we're told sony five million. So what happened in two thousand five, Well, this time Zuckerberg said, no, the price has gone up now it's seven hundred fifty million. Obviously that didn't happen, So once again, my Space walks away and decides not to purchase Facebook. Within a short while, my Space became the most visited site on the web, beating out Yahoo

and Google. It also landed a nearly one billion dollar ad deal with Google, which meant that my spaces website real estate would be peppered with ads served up through Google. On the site, Facebook was gaining momentum, but was still seen as being a second you know, also ran like it's distant second, partly because, as we'll talk about later on, the site was initially catering to students but not the

public at large. And by two thousand seven we were entering into a new era of social networks, the network as a platform for developers. Facebook had actually already pioneered this, and other social networks were trying to play catch up to create a way for developers to make things that could run on top of social networks that users could tap into that would augment their experience in some way.

So this is a really important thing to consider. You know, initially everything you encountered on social networks came pretty much from the network itself, right You generated the content, but all the tools, all the assets that you could use to build out your profile, those were provided by whatever the social network was. But otherwise that you were limited.

As these sites evolved, it became possible for third party developers to build applications that could use the social network as a foundation, so you can get stuff like games or new ways to interact with other users. But in turn, that was leading to a problem because the landscape was terribly fractured. You have to keep in mind by this time they were like a dozen or so social networks out there. Now there were two really big ones. There

was my Space and Facebook, which was growing rapidly. Those were very easy to spot, so you would understand that developers would try to make stuff for those those platforms, But there were tons of other social networks out there too, including some that we've talked about in the last episode like high five and some that we'll talk about in

the next episode. But without a common framework to rely upon for developers, it would mean that developers would have to pick and choose which platforms they would develop four Otherwise they would have to build the same app numerous times, so that would work on each and every social network. That's an enormous time sinc and waste of energy and money.

The same sort of thing happens with game development, right Like, ideally you develop a game for all platforms so that you're available everywhere, but that's a huge commitment to do that. You know, if you want, you could sign an exclusivity deal and then you developed just for one platform. You've limited your audience, but you've also restricted the amount of

work you're going to have to do to make it happen. Well, to sidestep this problem of the fractured landscape, Google spearheaded the Open Social Alliance that brought together a bunch of different social networks, but not most notably Facebook, and they were trying to build a set of software development standards for social networks so that developers could use a common

set of tools to develop things for multiple networks time. Now, part of that might have been because at this point it was becoming obvious that Facebook was going to be a big existential threat because it was growing considerably. And the next year, in two thousand and eight, Facebook overtook MySpace in web traffic, and within another year it had overtook my Space and unique visitors. People began to migrate from my Space to Facebook. On top of that, my

Space was facing a lot of other problems. It wasn't just that people were jumping shut from my Space to Facebook, although that was a big part of it. There were lawsuits against my Space that were stemming from some really serious and dark issues. One was that various U. S. Attorneys General had discovered numerous registered sex offenders who were creating profiles on my Space, presumably with an intent to

uh to continue praying upon victims. So my Space also became associated with some really really dark stuff like child predators as well as there was an infamous suicide case where a thirteen year old user of my Space was the target of online abuse which was supposedly coming from a teenage boy, but in fact was coming from a grown woman, and she, this thirteen year old took her own life. It was a true tragedy. Megan Meyer, I will never forget that story. It was absolutely heartbreaking, and

that became associated with my Space. It was really an early indication of how content moderation and community policies were going to be critical for social networks moving forward, and in fact, to this day we see conversations around content moderation and policies being enforced and all of that kind of stuff coming to the forefront. I mean, it's definitely a big part of the conversation of what's going on over at Twitter right now. So this is this is

something that we continue to struggle with today. Now. My Space also had overextended itself and invested millions of dollars into features that users weren't necessarily interested in, some of which they might not have even been aware of simply because they were hard to find um or in some cases it was just because that's not why they created a MySpace profile, so you know, there was no reason for them to to explore these other features. But a

big one was the MySpace Music feature. MySpace had always been kind of connected to music. I mean, one of the things that my Space was used for from the very beginning was to promote bands. So there were bands out there that had uploaded their own music to my Space so that people could discover them. Heck, one of the bands that I followed quite a bit in the early early to mid two thousand's uh, the Velvet Chain.

They had their own uh MySpace page that promoted their music, and I had seen them play live a few times, and so I was an avid follower of their their profile page because I got to learn about new music and new tours they were doing and that kind of thing.

So you could incorporate music into your profile pretty early on with my Space, but this music feature, which included agreements with three of the big four music labels Sony, b MG, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group, would let users MySpace users download music from these different you know, publishers directly through my Space, Like you could make your purchases and all that through my Space, you didn't have

to go to some other um online marketplace. But one, it was arguable that users weren't terribly interested in doing this through my Space anyway. And two it was not easy to even find the darn thing. And three they had some technical issues pretty early on that marred the feature. Then there was a massive change of the guard at my Space. Uh, the CEO and president were essentially removed, so that was like de Wolf and Tom Anderson and a former Facebook executive was brought in to kind of

fixed things. Uh. That executive would then go about laying off around thirty of all my Space employees. So that was tough. And around this same time, Google's nine million dollar ad deal expired, so you also had my Space falling behind Facebook, and it had just lost its major source of revenue because this ad deal has expired, and and it also launched lost a healthy chunk of its workforce. A lot of bad things were hitting by Space all at the same time, and you also had stories about

a really bad company culture. And and in the wake of things like uby Soft and a division Blizzard, where we've heard about truly toxic environments, it doesn't sound to me like my Space was that kind of bad work culture.

I mean, maybe that was going on too, but what was being reported was that under the ownership of News Corps, my spaces corporate culture got very much bogged down with bureaucracy, and so it was very hard to innovate and it was hard to move quickly, and so everything in my Space was bogged down, and there were departments that were working at cross purposes with each other, and it was just a very frustrating experience trying to get stuff done.

From what I understand, maybe there were the toxicity problems too, but that was not really heavily reported on. This was also before the Me Too movement, so that's part of it. Uh. Anyway, things over the next couple of years got worse and worse, and by two thousand and eleven it was really grim. My space was a shadow of what it had once been. So News Corps made the decision to cut ties. It's

sold off my Space for thirty five million dollars. Now, remember this is the same company that News Corps had bought for five hundred eighty million dollars just a few years earlier, and that is probably the biggest worst decision in my Space's history. You can actually make an argument for several other bad decisions that led to the company's downfall, but you frequently will hear about news corps purchase of MySpace being one of the worst acquisitions in the text

space of all time. It's it's right up there with things like the A. O. L. Time Warner merger. Actually, pretty much everything that has to do with Warner at this point has a lot of people saying, yeah, Warner just kind of had a lot of of bad deals to bad deals situations going on, But yeah, my Space and news Corps that always ends up being at the

top of these conversations. Now, my Space sort of disappeared after that for a couple of years, like it was essentially gone after the sale from news Corps, and it re emerged in two thousand thirteen. Justin timber Lake was a big part of the rebranding of my Space, and it was coming out more as a music discovery site. It was less about being a social network. I guess the view was at that point that Facebook had pretty much sewned that up and it didn't make sense to

try and bring that back to my Space. Instead, it was more about people who loved music being able to find new music that they would come to love. And this version of my Space more or less still exists today. Um it's it has changed looks a few times since two thousand thirteen. It also looks to me like my Space doesn't get frequent updates because like one of the articles I saw featured on the front page of MySpace dot com looks like it was more than a year old.

So if one of the news articles on your homepage, like your landing page for your site, is more than a year old, uh, that's a bad indication of how things are going at your website if it is positioned as news. Right. Also, there was like a massive issue there was a server migration a couple of years back where apparently everything that had been hosted on my Space before two fift was lost, So all those user profiles, all those photos, all those messages, everything it's all gone.

So that's an entire chunk of web history, of personal history for all the MySpace users that is no longer accessible. Uh. Anyway, that's the super short summary of my Space. I could clearly do multiple episodes really detailing the rise, fall, and rebirth of my Space. There's a lot more that went

into it. Uh. And I did spend more time on my Space than some of the ones that I talked about in episode one, because it played such an important part in establishing social networks as not just a thing, but one of the most popular and recognizable applications you can find on the web. So we're done with my Space, I'm gonna backtrack to my old timeline. See what's next? Uh? Right, Yeah,

next is Facebook. You know, there have been entire documentaries and biopics about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, and goodness knows, I've done a ton of episodes either specifically about Facebook and later Meta, or episodes that were at least tangential too Facebook and Meta and mentioned them heavily. I mean, half the news episodes of this year ended up being about at least partially Meta or Facebook. But I'm gonna do it down in dirty summary of the company's history.

It will be the cliffs notes of cliffs notes versions of that history, because it's going to take up the rest of our episode. And you know, our third episode will be picking up with companies like or Cut and Flicker, you know, the ones you really care about. So when we come back from the break, we'll start our almost childishly simple summary of Facebook, which will take up the rest of this episode. But first, before I dive into that,

let's take a quick break. All right, As many of you undoubtedly know already, Facebook actually grew out of an earlier app called face Mash, and this was the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg, the Internet's punching bag, one of them. Anyway, for you know, justifiable reasons. I don't feel a whole lot of sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg, if I'm being honest.

But anyway, he was attending Harvard University at the time, and he was developing web stuff, web based stuff, and he thought what the campus really needed was a website where students could rate the attractiveness of other students. So essentially he created a tool design to identify all the hot girls at Harvard. Just figure it's really good for us to start off with that understanding, because it really informs a lot of what will follow. Like Facebook, It's

empire is huge today, enormous. But if you sit there and you think, and and I realized this is reductive. But if you sit there and think all of this grew out of an app that I h raunchy college student made in order to be able to rank how hot girls were at his school, things make a lot of sense. And again, I I understand it's reductive, but I'm not apologizing for it. Anyway. Facemash lasted all of

two whole days before Harvard shut it down. Now, from what I understand, the reason Harvard shut it down did not really have to do with the facilitating of the objectification of Harvard students. That really wasn't the big reason. Instead, it was because Zuckerberg was using college resources without permission to do it. So, yeah, we have to understand where

our priorities lie. And I am I am salty about this, unapologetically salty, because I am so tired of people being valued less than things, right than assets, or being equated to assets. I'm just tired of it. People are people. Hey, y'all, I love you. You are valuable, valuable people, all on your own right. And you should always value yourself more

than things, and each other value each other more than things. Okay, enough of that anyway, Zuckerberg, what he had done was he essentially had hacked into the student I D database to pull photos for Harvard students to populate face mash, and that was against Harvard's policies. That's why I got shut down. Now let's get back to business. I'll I'll get out of my touchy feely persona for a bit.

Zuckerberg's initial idea gets shut down, and it received a fairly strong response in the brief amount of time it was online. So while it was you know, closed off, it really sent the message to Zuckerberg that hey, I'm onto something here, something that could be really popular. I just need to retool it and not use school based assets to do this, and we could be in business. So he goes on to register a u r L called the Facebook dot Com in early two thousand four.

He teams up with some fellow Harvard College students, among them Dustin Makowitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Savern and they create a new social network with Zuckerberg being the primary developer. Not first, the idea was to create a sort of

digital yearbook for Harvard students. When the Facebook as it was originally known, launched in February two thousand four, Harvard students could upload a photo of themselves and they could fill out some basic information about themselves, including things like their class load and schedule and that kind of stuff.

They could also browse through other student profiles, so it was a way of reinforcing existing connections and building new ones, and it naturally migrated to a social web approach that we talked about in the previous episode, though it would take a little time for that to happen because it was a very basic service when it first launched. Now, eventually the team expanded the Facebook to allow students at Yale and Stanford to create their own profiles, but it

was still limited to just those schools. By the summer of two thousand four, the Facebook had folks from more than thirty different universities and colleges. As part of the Facebook, you still needed a dot e d U email address to join that would indicate that you were a student or faculty member of a college reuniversity. Now, interestingly, it wasn't until the fall of two thousand four that the

Facebook added what was called the Wall. This was a part of the Facebook experience that would let friends post to other profiles. So the wall was kind of like a bulletin board where you could leave messages for other users on their profile. And now the Facebook was more than just a useful directory. It became a conduit for

communication between friends. This was a key element to the site's early success, right, Like, it was more than just oh, hey, I found my friend's profile and here's the classes that they're going to. Now is a way of saying, oh, I can go to my friend's profile and leave a message like Hey, don't forget we're gonna go out for pizza tomorrow night, or whatever it might be. In two thousand five, the Facebook dropped the the from its name

and became just Facebook. It also allowed folks to tag photos so that a picture could be associated with a specific person, and now Facebook friends could see more photos of themselves and of their own friends across the platform. Right, so, maybe you are not friends with Bob, but Bob happens to be a friend with Alice, and Alice is a

good friend of yours. And Bob posts a photo of Alice and tags Alice in the photo, and now you can see that photo because even though you're not friends with Bob, you are friends with Alice, and so you can see this photo that's been posted, and maybe that means you meet Bob, and you and Bob hit it off and you become friends. So this was really where that social web thing was starting to seriously take hold, and people were starting to discover new friendships as well

as reinforce existing ones. So again one of the key elements of social networks. It all sounds very basic and simple now because we've lived with it for more than a decade, right, really like two decades almost, but at the time this was one of those really big moments that would set a foundational feature in social networks. Now.

Two thousand five would also see high school students joining the site, and the following year Facebook lifted the student requirements, so in two thousand and six it opened up the site to the public at large. And I'm pretty sure I held off on making my own Facebook account for at least another year because I was not one of

the cool kids. Actually, I wasn't a kid at all, because I graduated college in nine, so I was not eligible for Facebook membership because Facebook was restricted to college students and I hadn't been a student for years by the time Facebook became a thing, So when it finally did open up to the public, I did not join as soon as I was allowed to. I was a relative latecomer. I probably joined in like two thousand seven, baby,

two thousand and eight, Probably two thousand seven. It's hard to say because I'm not on Facebook anymore, so I can't really look back at my own history. But two thousand seven was also when Facebook would hit one of its early stumbling blocks, and one that would set a tone that would stick with the company for years to come. The site launched a feature called Beacon not Bacon, which also was a huge trend on the web at the time.

No Beacon, and companies like retail companies, for example, could participate in this Beacon program and incorporate it into their online market places. And what this essentially was doing was tracking and publishing user purchases on other sites. So let's say you decided you wanted to buy a brand new pair of sneakers, and this particular sneaker company participates in the Beacon program, and so you make a purchase on

this company's website. Uh, you're doing it through the fact that you're also logged into Facebook, and now that purchase can be published to your Facebook profile, which lets everyone know you've got a brand new pair of kicks. Well, a lot of folks pretty quickly pointed out that this

service could really intrude upon a person's privacy. Like, maybe what you're doing is buying a present for someone else, but because of Beacon, you accidentally broadcast this purchase to every and who visits your profile, perhaps you know, ruining the surprise. Or maybe you're buying something that frankly is just no one's business but your own. But whoopsie Daisy, now it's on your Facebook profile and everyone can see it.

The negative reaction prompted Facebook too pretty quickly kill Beacon, but users were now wary that Facebook wasn't going to be super duper vigilant when it comes to protecting user privacy. In fact, this would become undeniable in two thousand and ten.

That's when Mark Zuckerberg would famously declared an interview that privacy was dead and sure he would definitely want privacy to be dead because the more information that is shared with Facebook, the more effectively Facebook can monetize that information by developing a targeted advertising strategy. So, just in case you're not familiar with targeted advertising, and it's hard for me to imagine that these days, but it could happen, right,

Maybe you've just never encountered that phrase. Targeted advertising is what it says it is. It involves matching advertisers or ads with people who are most likely to respond to those ads. And it could be as something as simple as as noting that a person has listed fishing under their interests. Right, So back in the day, when you create a Facebook profile, you would include things that you

were interested in, activities and subjects you're interested in. Let's say you put fishing in there, Well, that would tell Facebook run away, Oh, this person likes fishing. You know. We can partner with advertisers that are advertising stuff like I don't know, fishing gear or phishing vacations, that kind of stuff and serve that to this person who is more likely to respond to those ads because they've already

indicated this is something that they are interested in. And so we are matching ads to users which sees a benefit across the board, at least in theory right, The advertiser sees a benefit because people who are already disposed to being interested in their product or service are going to see the ad, and then the users are more likely to see stuff that they will respond well to and actually act on that otherwise maybe they wouldn't see.

So the idea is that everyone benefits. The problem is really the biggest benefit or is Facebook, and they the company becomes extremely interested in profiting off of personal information as much as it possibly can, So Facebook could see lots more data to match users with ads, more than just what your interests are that are listed on your profile, and Facebook, as a result, would be able to demand

higher rates to serve ads to users. They could They could say, you know, our advertising service is far more valuable than our competitors cause we have access to so much information. The company wasn't satisfied with just knowing what users were up to while they were on Facebook. They invented a tool called Pixel, and Pixel is something that other websites can install on the back end on their

website that helps them track user behavior. So they get benefit from using Pixel, but some of that data also gets sent back to Facebook itself, which in turn can profit off that information. So now Facebook is able to gather data not just on what people are doing on Facebook, the social network, but across the entire web. Any website that has a pixel installed on it is sending at least some information back to Facebook, and in some cases

it could be a lot of information. Later on, they would find out what people were doing on various apps on smartphones. It would track smartphone use and so there were are similar tracking systems used so that Facebook would know what apps are you most frequently using, how long are you on each app per day, what are you doing when you go on your apps on your phone.

This was something that Apple would address a couple of years ago now where they gave users the ability to prevent companies like Facebook from seeing this kind of activity, which was a massive blow to Facebook's revenue strategy, something that Facebook has really objected to, which is understandable because again, the company was so heavily dependent upon targeted advertising still is so heavily depend on targeted advertising that anything that

that restricts targeted advertising even a little bit is a blow to the company's revenue. So Apple's move was a huge strike against meta slash Facebook. Uh. Also, we should add that Apple itself doesn't seem to have to follow the same rules that you know, third parties have to follow on iOS devices. So some would argue that Apple is giving itself a huge unfair advantage at least as far as activity on mobile devices. That's a conversation that's

still playing out in the tech space. But anyway, this really points to how Zuckerberg wants privacy to be dead, because private information is what Facebook really profits off of. Um personal information. I should say, not just private because like if we say private, it suggests that we don't share it with Facebook. That's not what Facebook wants. It wants access to all the data it can get. So, as we mentioned earlier, Facebook overtook my Space as the

number one social network in two thousand eight. It was already ahead of the game and giving developers a chance to build applications on top of Facebook because it introduced its Application Programming Interface or ap I back in two thousand and six, so it got ahead of the Open Social Alliance. In fact, you could argue that the Open Social Alliance was formed largely because Facebook was making these moves, so games began to proliferate on Facebook, as did goofy

features like the old poke feature. You might not remember this if you haven't been on Facebook in a while, or maybe you've never been on Facebook, but back in the day when they first introduced apps on Facebook, they introduced the poke And this was a very simple feature where you could choose one of your friends and you could send a poke to them and they would get a little notification that said so and so poked you, and then they could poke you back. And this could

go back and forth. Right, You could send a poke, they could send it back. You can send it back to them, they could send it back. And it was really just a little message letting you know someone had poked you, or that you know they knew that you had poked them. And that was it. That was all there was to this little app. There was nothing more

to it. But of course we saw an emergent behavior arise where the poke feature was used as a kind of flirtatious message, or, if you want to be a little more crude and cynical, an attempt to see if someone wants to hook up. I mean, considering that Facebook's origins date back to a site that lets students rate how hot other students were. It's not really a huge surprise that that that this would emerge as a way to flirt or or feel out someone to see if

they would be receptive to perhaps a booty call. And yes, I know how ridiculous it sounds for me to say those words, but yeah, Anyway, a lot of other apps would follow, and in the early days, Facebook wasn't too terribly careful about the sorts of stuff these apps could tap into. Like could these apps actually mine Facebook for information? The answer is initially yeah. There were not a lot of protections in place to prevent an app from tapping

into tons of information. This would lead to one of the biggest scandals in the company's history that had its origins back in two thousand thirteen, when a data scientist named Alexander Cogan launched an app called This is Your Digital Life. Okay, I'll explain why that was such a big deal and how that developed into a huge scandal, and then we'll conclude are our story about Facebook as we look into a bit more of its history. But

first let's take one last break. Okay, So, Alexander Cogan launches an app called This is Your Digital Life in two thousand thirteen, and this app consisted of surveys that were designed to build out psychological profiles of users, and it was pitched as an app that was meant really for academic use, that these psychological profiles were going to be used for some academic purpose like maybe a research

paper or something. And further, people who agreed to use the app would get compensated for participating in this study, so there was an incentive to actually use it. You know, if you pitch it as just find out what your personality type is, I think it would have already done really well, because those sort of things just really did well on social media, you know, particularly if you could phrase it as what kind of Star Wars character are you?

Or something like that. Right, It's just it's ridiculous how well those take off. But in this case, it was about building an actual psychological profile. And the downside here or or the dark side. Something that wasn't really communicated was that this app would also allow Cogan to access not just the people who consented to be part of

this process, but also to those people's friends. So in other words, let's say that you were on Facebook back in two thousand thirteen, and you have no interest in using the app, right, so you are not part of the this is your digital life, you know, experiment or whatever you want to call it. However, one of your friends on Facebook, someone that you are friends with on Facebook, has agreed to participate, so they download the app and

they fill out their survey. Well, their participation would mean that Cogan would have access to your information as if Cogan had been that Facebook friend of yours. So let's let's say that we'll use the word named Bob again. Your friend Bob takes this survey. Now Cogan can view your profile as if Cogan were Bob, and Cogan can

do the same with all of Bob's other friends. So even though you didn't consent to using that app and you don't know Cogan, Cogan can see all your information just as if they were your buddy Bob, because Bob took the bait and use this app. This was an enormous breach in privacy, and it was due to the fact that Facebook was not good about setting in protections to limit developers to the kinds of information they could access when they built an app on Facebook, and it

gets worse. See now, none of this would really be a thing, like people probably wouldn't have even known about it. But years later, a political consulting company called Cambridge Analytica was found to have bought the data collected by the This is Your Digital Life app back in and they use that data in an effort to support various political campaigns in the UK and in the United States, and

primarily they were conservative candidate campaigns. Now, Cambridge Analytica attempted some pretty underhanded and scummy things like ways to try and discourage certain people from even participating in the voting process. So they tried this, They tried to affect voter behaviors. The company was not terribly good at doing that. It tried, but from most reports it sounds like it's aspirations were

greater than its actual capabilities. But still, there was this huge scandal that broke out when the the Cambridge Analytica story hit the news, and it was really more about what the company was trying to do in an effort to manipulate voters rather than what it was actually doing, which was, you know, not having a whole lot of success and manipulating voters But at the heart of all of this was the fact that Facebook had facilitated the

whole thing through its insufficient user protections in its a p I. Now, to be somewhat fair to Facebook, the company had changed its a p I in the meantime, Like in between when the app was released and when all the Cambridge Analytica news came out, Facebook had already made these changes to try and limit how developers could access user information on Facebook. The idea being that an app should only have access to whatever information is necessary

for the application to actually work. So that way, you couldn't create like a dead basic app that has access to all user information on Facebook. That would be against the rules. It could only tap into whatever was needed for the app to actually function and nothing more. But that change came too late to prevent the Cambridge Analytica scandal. All right, Let's look at some of the other big

moves made by Facebook over the years. The company has a reputation of either acquiring competitors or attempting to mimic them in an effort to stave off competition. Uh. Actually makes me think of the Disney parks in Florida, which frequently seemed to try and outperform competitors like Universal Studios and Sea World by creating their own kind of uh you know, like well, in the case of Universal Studios, they created what was originally called MGM Studios and now

is known as Disney Hollywood Studios. In the case of Sea World, it was the Living Seas at Epcot. So they saw mixed success with this. But the attempt was, how can we convince people to stay on Disney property and not split their vacation up between Disney and all these other attractions that are in the Orlando area. Well, Facebook follows a very similar strategy. Uh. They bought up a ton of companies early on. So one of them

was Parakey, which was an applications development company. They bought that. In two thousand seven. They bought connect You, which was another social networking company. They bought that. In two thousand eight, they scooped up friend Feed. I'm sure I'll talk about in the next episode. It technically and our timeline as we're going by company debuts hadn't come out by the time Facebook came out in two thousand nine. That's when it bought a friend feed, and it also bought some

of Friendster's I p in two thousand ten. I did talk about Friendster in the previous episode in this series, and it bought up dozens of other companies, but let's talk about a couple of truly big ones. In two thousand twelve, Facebook announced it would acquire the photo focused

social network Instagram for a whopping one billion dollars. That was a huge deal, and analysts quickly pointed out that Facebook was trying to stay on top of the social networking game, partly by buying a company that was much

better at photo sharing than Facebook had been. So this was one of those cases where Facebook is essentially saying, I recognized this as a key component to being a successful social networking company, but I cannot make something I can compete with Instagram, which is already doing it super well, So let's just buy Instagram instead. Facebook kept buying more companies, and the next huge purchase was in when it bought

WhatsApp for a staggering nineteen billion dollars. Now, while it wasn't widely known in the United States that at the time of acquisition, WhatsApp was and continues to be a popular mobile instant messaging client in the rest of the world, and again, Facebook was looking at companies that were doing really well in areas where Facebook kind of wasn't. Also, we should keep in mind that Facebook was all about maximizing the time users were spending on Facebook owned and

operated services. So if you're spending more time on messaging than you are on social networks, well, that could hurt Facebook's bottom line unless Facebook buys the messaging service and then you're still on Facebook's stuff. That same year, Facebook bought up Oculu VR for two billion dollars, and this would form the nugget of Facebook's Reality Lambs division, which I'm sure I'll mention again before this episode is over. And there are many many more acquisitions that Facebook did

over the years. Some were recently reversed. Take Giffee, for example, This is an online database and search engine for animated gifts. Facebook bought it in but recently the UK's regulatory authority has ordered Facebook to divest itself of this acquisition. It has said that otherwise Facebook has engaged in anti competitive business practices, which I mean, yeah, that's kind of Facebook's

bread and butter in many ways. So Facebook has spent tens of billions of dollars on acquisitions, of the big ones being WhatsApp, than Instagram, UH and Oculus VR. Right, those make up a lot of the money that Facebook has spent on acquisitions. As for growth, Facebook story has also been pretty incredible. At the end of two thousand six, Facebook boasted around twelve billion users, and in two thousand seven that number just kept growing. In April two thousand seven,

it hit twenty million. By July it was thirty million, by October it was fifty million, and it just kept growing. By two thousand twelve, Facebook hit a crazy milestone of one billion active users. Five years later it hit two billion.

Crazy numbers, right. But then this past February, which is February twenty two for all of those of y'all who are listening from the future, Facebook posted a net loss of users for the first time in eighteen years, and it amounted to about half a million fewer users logging in daily. And that doesn't sound like it's that bad, right, Like, oh yeah, half a million, that's a lot of people. But we were talking about two billion and just insane

growth from the get go. But this was kind of the tip of an iceberg of things that investors became really concerned about. For one thing, a loss in daily users could be a signal that maybe Facebook has finally reached saturation across the world, that they're just no more users that they can add to the service, that that Facebook weeps for, there are no more worlds to conquer. And of course we have to remember that a lot of capital investment is largely focused on the concept of growth.

It's not just good enough to do well year over year. A company needs to grow. That is like a big part of how investors view company performance. That if you failed to grow, then the investment is not going to increase over time and you just want to get out. So a failure to grow can be a company's death sentence, which is crazy because the company can still perform well year to year, but it's not growing. It's not good enough.

If you've already hit as many users as they're going to sign up for your service, well you start to really face a massive problem. You might think that this kind of obsession with growth is ultimately self defeating, and I would agree with you, but again I'm no expert in financial matters. You could very convincingly argue that I am taking far too narrow a view, and you could very well be right. I do not pretend to have

a deep understanding of these things anyway. At this point, Facebook the company had changed its name to Meta, with Facebook just being one property under Meta's ownership, the other big ones being Instagram and WhatsApp. Now the name change both indicated Zuckerberg's new desire to forge the next incarnation of the Web, or maybe even the Internet, called the metaverse. That this was is an indicator of, Yes, this is

the business that this company is headed toward. But it also came to the time when the former Facebook company was in headlines a lot for a lot of really bad stuff. There was the whistleblower, where we get this enormous, uh collection of internal documents that showed a really unflattering look at Facebook's business plans and how it treated user privacy, and how it viewed misinformation and just it was a lot of really ugly stuff that came out from that leak.

Zuckerberg himself had been called to testify in front of the US Congress a few times on different matters, ranging from user privacy and security to things like national security and the proliferation of misinformation across Facebook, So the name change was probably seen as a way to maybe at least dodge a little bit of the problems that were being flung towards Facebook. I don't know how effective that was, but that might have been part of the reason. Today.

Meta is a company that many of you as being in crisis mode. But like a lot of big tech companies, that's in crisis mode right. I mean, it's recently held layoffs in the face of economic uncertainty, but that's the case across numerous big tech companies. It has spent billions of dollars developing the metaverse concept, which Zuckerberg himself has said is going to take years to become a revenue generator.

So in other words, that everyone should be prepared for the company to continue to lose money while developing this, because there's no way to make money from it yet. And that is a huge concern to investors too, because I think a lot of people still aren't sold on the concept of metaverse. You've got a lot of people saying like, no one's interested in it, which I think is an overstatement. I think there are people who are

really interested in it. I think a lot of entities that are interested in the metaverse are ones that are accounting on another gold rush. Right. They don't really know what the metaverse is going to turn out to be, but they suspect that if it does become a thing, that there will be money to be made there. So

there's a lot of push toward the metaverse. A lot of companies, including I Heart Radio, have been really active and at least establishing some sort of presence related to the metaverse, But there's so much uncertainty there that I think that gives investors a lot of concern at least in the short term. Facebook also has struggled to attract

younger users who seem to prefer platforms like TikTok. That gives investors even more concerns because if you're not replenishing your user base, they will continue to age out, and then the probe the platform will become less and less relevant over time. So you might wonder, are we witnessing a mega company on the verge of collapse. Is Meta slash Facebook heading toward becoming irrelevant? Well, I think it's

way too early to make such a pronouncement. I mean, I am very critical of meta and I do see a lot of problems with the company, but I'm not sure that we could say this is the end. I think that would be far too premature. Um. I don't think Facebook is too big to fail. I don't think there is such a thing as being too big to fail. But I do think that Facebook is really freaking big, so it's gonna take a lot to bring it down.

So yeah, not too big to fail, but too big to fail instantaneously unless like a ridiculous series of events comes to pass. But then this year has been pretty ridiculous. The company does face increasing regulatory scrutiny around the world, so there are various agencies out there calling to further break up Meta into its constituent parts. Maybe that will

go somewhere. I I remain somewhat skeptical of that. But they are also increasing invest your demands as people are calling on Zuckerberg to make some dramatic changes because they don't like seeing costs go up and revenue not go up more. It still faces the challenge of attracting new users,

younger users. It's not doing so well in that, and the attempts that it has pursued have gained the company a lot of criticism because it sounds like they're trying to prey upon young people right, like to create Instagram for preteens, when Instagram is also associated with some really negative stuff like negative self image issues and that kind

of thing. It's also trying to sell people on the idea of the metaverse, which obviously is still a big ask and and a lot more so, there are a lot of long bets going on over at Meta slash Facebook. If they pay off, then it's possible that Meta will be a foundational pillar of the Internet of the future, like it's possible that Meta and the Internet will be practically synonymous if those long bets pay off. I remain skeptical that they will, but some of them might. I

don't think all of them will. I still find it hard to believe that in the future I'll be wearing a headset in order to access the web. But we'll see. Anyway, there we go. That is the short version, believe it or not, of summaries of my Space and Facebook, and obviously I could do full series and both of those companies. When we come back for the next entry in this series, we will pick up with some other social networks, which you know, either enjoyed brief popularity and then fizzled away

or in some cases, are still around. Um, you know, we haven't even hit Twitter yet, so that is on the horizon. Okay, that wraps this up, y'all. One thing I am working on right now as I'm putting together a list of some of the biggest stories to unfold in two in tech. So if you have any in particular you want me to touch on, let me know. Obviously they're gonna be some big ones that we talked about even in this episode, like stories about Meta and

stories about Twitter. Don't worry, the Elon Musk Twitter story will definitely make the cut because goodness knows. But if there are anything, if there's anything that happened in tech this past year that you really would like to hear me cover in kind of an end of the year wrap up, let me know. There are a couple of ways to get in touch with me. One is you can download the I Heart radio app. You can navigate over to tech Stuff. You just put tech stuff in

the search field, it'll pull up. You can use a little microphone icon there and leave me a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. Just let me know what it is you would like me to cover, or if you would prefer, you can head over to Twitter and you can leave me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yes. 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.