Where are the alternatives to Facebook?

episodes about that. Two calls from the US government to break up some big tech companies. That's back in the news. As I record this, Facebook has had a lot of coverage. It has been front and center, particularly over the last

couple of years. There are a lot of good arguments to suggest people would be better off if they were not on Facebook, if they weren't using it, didn't have an account there, And there is plenty of evidence that shows that misinformation campaigns and extremist groups are leveraging Facebook's algorithms to get widespread coverage and momentum, that they are using the social networking site for malicious purposes, and because the site ends up benefiting from this through the whole

advertising realm, they have been largely complicit, or at least they haven't cracked down on it as much as they a lot of people feel they should have until fairly recently. Now all that being said, I gotta be upfront with you, guys, I still have a Facebook profile over there, and I

am still on Facebook way too much. It is a complicated thing because I recognize that it would probably be better if I were not on there, but it's where most of my friends maintain a social presence, and particularly in the era of COVID, I can't get together with my friends in person, and even before COVID was a thing, it was hard to find time for all of us to get together in person anyway. So for folks like me, staying on Facebook can feel like it's necessity unless I'm

just willing to cut ties with my friends. I mean, it's not like people talk on the phone anymore, right Like, especially my younger friends, the thought of them getting on the phone for a conversation, to actually talk on the phone fills a lot of them with anxiety. So I feel like there aren't a whole lot of alternatives. And this got me to thinking that I really wish there

were a viable social networking alternative to Facebook. You know, a social media platform that could serve as a place to connect with people, but one that doesn't rely on Facebook's model of engagement, which in turn gives a leg up on those malicious campaigns I mentioned. But we've seen social media platforms come and go, and none have really managed to have staying power, and the ones that are

still around are definitely not challenging Facebook for superiority. So today I thought we would go through some social media platforms that either predated Facebook and then faded away, or they tried to challenge Facebook but failed in some way. Facebook launched in two thousand four, and there were several

social networking sites that existed before that. One of the earliest, and by some accounts, the first true social networking site was six degrees dot com, which launched in n Now, I'm sure most of you are familiar with the concept of six degrees of separation, that any two people in the world are at most six social connections apart from one another. So the degrees in this case talk about

those social links. So, for example, I have met the actor Colleen Camp and she was Inclue the movie Madeline Khan was also include the movie and Madeline Khan was in Young Frankenstein with Gene Wilder. So I am two degrees separated from the late great Gene Wilder and one degree separated from the late great Madeline Khan, and that there are two social contacts that link me with Gene Wilder and one social contact that links me with Madeleine con that being calling Camp. Now to call calling Camp

a social contact as being grandiose. She likely has no memory of me, whatsoever. I met her one day on a movie set. It's just an example I wanted to use. Now, if I went through all of my social contacts, like every single person with whom I have a connection, I might find that my link to Gene Wilders even closer. It may be that one of my friends or acquaintances worked directly with Gene Wilder. But you get the idea.

And this concept was turned into something of a game, the famous game of six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where you would try to find the fewest number of professional acting links between Kevin Bacon and some other actor. So you would just name different films that the actors were in to try and find a link to Kevin Bacon. The joke being that Kevin Bacon was in so much stuff that you frequently didn't have to go more than

three links before you you found a connection. Anyway, six degrees dot Com was a social platform where you could upload photos and you could connect with friends, you know, the basic stuff of making a profile and connecting with people that all social networks sort of share in common. And you could also then see the folks that your friends are friends with, so you could connect with people

up to three degrees out from your personal contacts. And it was one of those early platforms that really demonstrated, you know, that small world phenomenon, how our social circles have way more overlap in them than we typically realize. I'm sure you had an experience where you saw two friends that you know from very different circles in life talking with one another and think, how do they know

each other? Because in my world, this person belongs to this group of friends and that person belongs to this totally disconnected group of friends. That happens a lot, and six degrees dot com was kind of about illustrating that. But there was a problem. You see, now in n a lot of folks had not really yet ventured into the Internet world at large, or the World Wide Web

in particular. So while a relatively large number of people were signing up for six degrees dot com, you often felt really isolated on the site because while there were a lot of people collectively, it's not like a lot of people everyone knew were on there at the same time. So there were just not enough people that folks do.

There weren't enough friends or acquaintances. Also, on six degrees, it was like a bunch of disconnected individuals who were on there, So it's more like a bunch of tiny island chains separated by vast oceans than an interconnected social network.

A media called youth Stream Media, which specialized in developing Internet sites with the youth market in mind, typically you know, like high school and college kids, ended up purchasing six degrees dot com in nine for a cool one hundred twenty five million dollars, a princely sum indeed, But youth stream apparently couldn't do much with six degrees, and a

year later the site would go dark. Just two years after that, another company called Alloy acquired youth Stream Media's assets, the entire company's assets for just seven million dollars now seven million dollars a lot of money. I know, saying just makes it sound like it's not. But when you consider that youth stream paid a D five million for six degrees and then another company bought youth Streams assets for just seven million dollars, you really see where the

value of that company plummeted. So what happened, Well, the dot com bubble burst for one thing, as for six degrees dot com, and eventually returned in some form or another. Though I honestly don't know what it looks like today because when I went to go check it out with my browser as part of my research for this episode, my browser told me, yo, buddy, I really don't think you should go in there, essentially saying the site is insecure, possibly a host of malware, and I don't want any

of that garbage on my computer. So I quietly backed away. Now, six degrees dot com wasn't a bad idea. It was just way ahead of its time. There weren't enough people, there wasn't enough saturation on the web to make the model work. But the idea behind it was obviously solid. Because anyone who has studied social networks online or otherwise

would recognize the value proposition. Now, a few other folks would try to launch social networking sites over the next couple of years, but I think it's fair to say that the first that got some mainstream traction was Friendster, and that one would come out in two thousand two, so five years after six Degrees had originally launched, and two years before Facebook would launch. Now, Friendster was founded by Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chen, and this site also

subscribed to that six degrees of separation concept. If you looked at someone's profile, you'd see how you were connected to that person and whether or not it was a close connection, so perhaps you might have a mutual friend in common with that person, or you would see if it was a more tenuous connection, like I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows that person

kind of thing. And like a lot of social networking sites, it was used primarily by people who are looking to find a date um or at least a lot of people were using it that way. Maybe primarily is too strong a word, but it was a popular use for the site. Oh and uh profiles also had a view counter attached them. Fun times. Now, I don't know if you guys remember when it seemed like every web page

on the Internet required a view counter. It's a little counter up in typically you know, the top of the page, maybe in the corner, and it would just tell you how many people had visited the website. And it became a way to gauge not just the popularity of the web page or website, but also by extension, it gave an implication of whether or not the site was a good quality, you know, the idea being that if that many people have visited the site, then it must be

doing something right. And we still see elements of this today, of course, you like in view numbers for YouTube videos or how many people like or share a post on various social media sites or tweets, that kind of thing, but we don't typically see them on web pages as much these days now. Finster started strong, but with popularity comes challenges, and one of those was just in scaling.

As more people were joining the site and we're making profiles and uploading photos and interacting with one another, the company had to scale up the back end systems and

this became challenging. Google would actually come forward and make an offer of thirty million dollars to acquire the company in two thousand three, but the business owners turned that offer down, and that was probably one of the reasons the company would later remove the founder, Jonathan Abrams as CEO in two thousand four, the idea of we could have cashed out and you said no. Following Abram's departure as CEO, there was the old revolving door routine of

other CEOs. I mean, seriously, if you look at a list, it's just like one replaced by another, typically more than one in a year, which is really bad. And users

began to abandon the site. They were frustrated by performance problems and that linked back to those challenges with scaling, and the users were flocking over to another social networking site, one that for a while seemed like it was going to be the definitive social networking platform, my Space, because this was, you know, a little bit later after my Space had gotten started. But we'll get back to my Space later in this episode. Before that, I should probably

explain what actually happened with Friendster. It floundered as a social media platform for several more years. It lasted long enough to see my Space eventually falled behind the upstart competitor of Facebook. Spoiler alert there as if you didn't know. But in two thousand eleven, friends to changed from a social networking platform to more of a social gaming network. And this was really kind of an effort to get out of the trap and had found itself in by

competing directly with Facebook. It couldn't do that, that was clearly a lost cause. So Friendster would instead operate as a social gaming network and they did that for a few more years, but ultimately shut down in t and the brand is pretty much non existent today. So with Friendster, we have a social networking site that pre existed Facebook, but was enable to scale to serve a growing user base and thus giving opportunities to competitors. And the next

platform I should talk about is high five. It's Hi and the numeral five. This is a social network site that made a profit in its first year of operation. It was actually a profitable web based business right at the gate, not a very common thing even today now. This is according to CBS News. By the way, there was an entrepreneur named Ramu Yala Manchi who founded the site in two thousand three. And I do apologize for my pronunciation of his name. I am terribly ignorant, and

that is all on me. But anyway, while I was researching this episode and I came across High five, I thought, huh, that's a social networking site. I don't think I've ever heard of before, except maybe I have, because apparently I already created a profile for it. See high five is still around today, at least theoretically it is. And so I thought, you know what I'll do. I'll make a profile on there. I'll create a profile to check out

what this site looks like. Only when I tried to do that, when I tried to make a profile with my my private email address, I got a message that said that my email was blocked, which was odd because it's not like I'm using a particularly you know, shady email service. It's Gmail for those who want to know, it's nothing bad. So I thought, how that's weird. Well, maybe what that means is that I may have already made a high five accountant. I just forgot about it.

So I chose the forgot my password feature, you know that useful thing, and then I put my email address in the little field and I hit the button, and the site said it was going to send an email to me with instructions on how I could log in, and as of this moment, I have not received that email. That was hours ago when I I did that. Nothing has happened since. So there are a few possibilities. One

is that it's just taking a really long time. Maybe High five servers are few and far between and overloaded. Another possibility is that the site just isn't active like I had been led to believe, and that it's really dormant. I can't really find any information that says one way or the other. Another possibility is that I never had a profile on there, and everyone gets the message about an email being sent, whether they have a profile on High five or not, if they go through that whole

forgot my password process. So I could find that out by just making up a fake email address and or making a brand new email address even and putting it in the field, but I didn't go through that that phase. I was already fed up, so I did try to sign in or sign up with my work email address, and that didn't work either. So honestly, I'm just not sure if there's anything going on at High five or not.

I mean, there is a page there. It's not like it goes to you know, some page that says that you can get the the U r L or anything, but I can't make it do anything. But anyway, High five started off as another social network site where you would create a profile with information about yourself. There was supposed to be an age restriction. Users were supposed to be at least thirteen years old, but the site had no means of authenticating a person's age, so you know,

there you go. The site would prompt new users to add friends through their contacts with existing services like Yahoo mail or hot mail, and boy those take me back. And users could customize their profile pages. They could do stuff like change the background color of their profile. They can move things around on their profile if they wanted to. They could even go into HTML editing mode and really change things up and customize things if they if they

so desired. But from the reports I've read, very few people went to the trouble of doing that. Uh. And it also, like its predecessors, was tying into that that concept of six degrees of separation. Now, like for Inster and like some others that will be on this list, High five would attempt to evolve as sites like my Space and later Facebook began to dominate the social networking sphere.

In two thousand nine, the site changed into more of a social gaming site, similar to why happened with Friendster. A company called Tagged acquired High fives assets in two thousand eleven, and then Tagged itself would get scooped up by a company called The Meat Group. That's m E E T, not M E A T, which is a totally different and frankly horrifying company, but anyway, the Meat

Group got them in two thousand seventeen. Jumping back to two thousand three, couple of months after High five launched, we got my Space. Now I've done full episodes about my Space and the whole story of the rise and fall the platform is fascinating. There's a ton of drama going on there, So for this episode, I'm not going to go into all that detail. I'll give you more of a high overview, and I'll do that after we take this short break. My Space was monumentally successful in

the early days of social networking. You had your customizable profile pages, similar to what High five was doing. There was a fairly robust music industry presence on MySpace from the get go, and it became something of a hallmark that if you had a MySpace page, you would add songs to your profile uh and someone visiting your profile would be treated or would be forced to endure the

music you had selected. If you were particularly mischievous, you could design your profile page so that the playback controls like pause and and play and everything we're very hard to find on the page, so that people who did visit your profile would have no option but to listen to whatever music you had selected. But gosh darn it, I needed everyone to really groove to Tarzan Boy by Baltimore. It was important. This was also the site where you

would have your top eight friends. You could have lots and lots of MySpace friends, but on your a file page you would only see the top eight listed. In the early days, and Tom, one of the founders of my Space, was automatically your friend from the beginning. You could give him the boot if you wanted to, but Tom was everyone's friend when they first joined my Space. Not Tom. What a mench Now. For the first few years of its existence, it seemed as though my Space

was going to be the definitive social networking site. It was like, this is this company is just on the up and up. News Core, the company that owned Fox News, among lots of other stuff. Rubert Murdoch's company, in other words, would end up buying my Space in two thousand five for more than half a billion dollars at truly princely some and in two thousand six my Space became the most visited site on the entire web. It was valued

at twelve billion dollars in two thousand and seven. It was just astounding, like you would think it's too big to fail, right, and then it failed. Funny how that happens. So my Space did very well early on, but it didn't have fierce competition either Facebook, which cut on with college kids because when it first debuted, Facebook membership was exclusive to people who had a university or college email address. You couldn't join if you didn't, so it was almost

entirely college kids when it launched. Anyway, it ended up getting a ton of momentum after that launch and when it opened up to the general public, and it was a young demographic, and by two thousand and eight, Facebook started to leave my Space behind. They were they had more users and people were spending more time on Facebook

than on MySpace. News Corps tried to pivot. They redesigned my Space a few times to try and win people back over to the platform, but they couldn't really do much other than, you know, slow the flow of users from their site to the rival of Facebook. It was like putting a band aid on a truly massive wound. It just wasn't enough, and eventually news Corps sold my Space to a company called Specific Media for thirty five

million dollars. So again, news Corps paid eight million for the site and then they sold it for thirty five million. I don't think I need to point out that that's not a great deal. Today my Space is technically still around, though it's really focused more on entertainment in general and the music industry in particular, and it's less of a social networking space for users like some of the other

sites we've talked about on here so far. The only way my Space was able to stick around at all was to switch its focus from being a social networking platform to a different central focus, but still incorporating some social elements to the experience, so it's more like it's a site about music that has some social networking features along with it. Now, our next social platform that preceded

Facebook is orch it Now. This one only came out a month before Facebook did, but technically that makes it earlier. It debuted in January two four, and orch It grew out of Google, where the company had this standing policy that employees could devote their work week to their own personal projects within Google, and one of those projects was orchit. Now.

There have been subsequent allegations that orch it really was a replica of UH, an earlier project that the same engineer had created for a different company called Affinity Engines, but that that's its own thing now. You might recall I mentioned that Google had attempted to acquire friends Store a couple of years earlier, but had been turned down.

Or Kit would become Google's first real experiment in social networking platforms, and at first the service was by invitation only, which helped drive interest in the platform, because it turns out people like to feel that they're part of an exclusive club, and Google would employ this same strategy for

several of its products. Further down the line from Gmail to another social networking platform, will get to later in this episode, but going invitation only meant that new users might only know a couple of other people on the entire network, which made it really hard to build out a circle of friends and meant that ork It didn't have a whole lot of usefulness for those folks. My Space would end up taking off faster, although ork It

would end up finding some traction in Brazil. Over time, Brazil and India would become the two main markets where users were flocking to on orch It, but it was largely a bust in the United States. One interesting fact, at one point, Marissa Meyer, who would go on to be the CEO of Yahoo, was the product manager for or Kind. Now the features of Orchid are familiar to anyone who has visited a social networking platform. Users would have profiles, and they could add friends on their network.

Unlike some other examples, or could actually allowed users to visit any profile that was hosted on the platform, at least at first. The other platforms typically would restrict you to only being able to visit your friends profiles or maybe a couple of degrees out from your friends, but beyond that you wouldn't be able to visit a profile so if it's a complete stranger where you didn't have any contacts in common and they were too far separated from you, you wouldn't be allowed to see it. Orcutt

was different. Now eventually they did change that, but at first you could visit any profile on the service. For several years, or Kit would remain more popular in Brazil and India than rival social networking sites, So it was outperforming my Space, it was outperforming Facebook, but eventually face Book caught up and then surpassed orch It in both

of those countries. Meanwhile, Google had turned its fleeting attention to a different social networking platform from within the company, which we'll get to a little bit later, and so ork It was essentially operating without a whole lot of support from Google. It would limp along until two thousand fourteen,

when Google would officially shut it down. Now, I think orc It's main drawback was that limited access very early on, and that meant that users who couldn't get an invite instead would head over to somewhere else like my Space. And typically once you establish an online presence somewhere, you don't have a lot of motivation to build it out again. Somewhere else, so the likelihood of building out on other

networks starts to go down. Now, some people are more than happy to maintain a profile on multiple social networking sites, but I think a lot of us prefer to focus on one or two at the most, Like Facebook and Twitter are the two that tend to go hand in hand. Orc It didn't have the momentum needed to keep up with my Space and definitely didn't have the foundation to withstand the Facebook flood that would happen around two thousand eight. Facebook debuted the month after orc At first launched, so

in February two four. But heck, this episode is all about the attempts to make it an alternative to Facebook, so there's no real point talking about Facebook itself. Suffice it to say that the social media platform has grown beyond all expectations and plays an incredibly important role when

it comes to the dissemination of ideas and ideologies. Who would have thought that what originally started out as a flimsy excuse to try and find dates at a college university campus would eventually become a potential threat to democracy and security. But moving on, in two thousand five, a San Francisco couple launched a social net working site they called Bibo b e b oh. They would seem more success in the United Kingdom and in Ireland than it

would in the United States. In fact, it actually became more popular than my Space over there in the UK and in Ireland at one point. Once again, the site had the hallmarks of your typical social networking services. You could have a profile, you could post blogs, you could share videos and music and photographs and do that kind

of stuff. And the success in the UK led to the company A O L taking notice of Bibo and making a move that in hindsight often gets lumped in with the worst deals of all time in the tech space. A O L bought Bibo for the princely sum of eight hundred fifty million dollars yeawza, and the couple who launched Bibo had like seventy steak in the company, so they had something that more than five hundred million dollars between the two of them. Man and this happened in

two thousand eight. So A O L was essentially trying to establish its presence in the social networking space by taking a shortcut. You know, companies do this all the time. Where they will scale up, not by building out their their assets, but just buying new assets and trying to incorporate them into the existing company structure, which doesn't always work so well, and it did not work well for a o L. The motivation to really get into the social networking space really pushed a o L to pay

way too much for Bibo. Now, granted, in two thousand eight, it was hard to predict that Facebook was going to eclipse all other social networking sites around the world. Maybe there was hope that Bibo could maintain its own special space on the web, particularly in places like the UK, But the numbers began to fall, and in just two years, a o L started to look for a way to offload those assets or they were going to shut the

whole thing down. In t A o L would sell Bibo to an investment company called Criterion Capital Partners for a fraction of what they paid for it, reportedly just ten million dollars. So to recap, A o L spent eight hundred fifty million dollars on Bibo in two thousand and eight, and then in two thousand and ten sold it for ten million. Now, this makes the News Corps acquisition and unloading of MySpace look tame by comparison, But Criterion Capital failed to really leverage Bibo, just as a

o L had failed to do it. And so a couple of years later, that same couple who had launched the site in the first place and made you know, half a billion dollars off of it, uh, they ended up buying Bibo back for just one million dollars, so a fraction of a per cent of what they were

paid for it. That's not bad at all. Bibo would relaunch in it floundered a bit, It re branded, it became more about supporting Twitch streamers by offering up streaming software, you know, kind of like overlays and video switchers and stuff that streamers use whenever they are live streaming on Twitch. And in twenty nineteen, Amazon, the owner of Twitch, acquired Bibo for twenty five million dollars, So that story kind of ends there. In two thousand seven, we got a

few more social networks with different value propositions. One of those was Tumbler, the micro blogging site, and Tumbler still around today, but this one was enjoying popularity among younger users for several years. It was like a slightly younger crowd than what you were finding on other social networking sites, and it passed through various corporate ownership. Yahoo owned it for a while. It acquired the company for more than

a billion dollars, an incredible amount of money. Verizon then went on to buy Yahoo assets, including Tumbler, so tumb or went with that. Verizon ultimately couldn't figure out really what to do with Tumbler and sold it off to a company called Automatic that is the current owner of Tumbler. One of Tumbler's problems is that the site hosted a lot of adult content, meaning people were posting adult content like pornography to Tumbler to the point that it was

becoming part of the site's reputation. And that proved to be a real problem for some of these corporate owners. I mean, they couldn't very well talk about owning a site that was largely trafficking in pornography. Two shareholders and so over different eras at Tumbler, there were different restrictions put in place with regard to the kinds of content that could be shared that changed Tumbler quite a bit. Uh. Tumbler,

like I said, is still around today. Of course, though it does see a lot less traffic than it did at its height. Now, out of curiosity, I went to see if I had an account on Tumbler, and I do. I don't have any record election of when I last logged into that account. It's been a few years, but

the account still exists, still active. All the posts I could see when I logged in and casually scrolled through, we're all from the official Tumbler account, so I have no idea if anyone that I used to follow on Tumbler is actually still active over there. So I'm starting to sense a theme. And on a side note about Tumbler, there's one event I really want to mention because it

is infamous. It doesn't directly tie into our topic, but I don't know when I will ever get a chance to talk about it otherwise, so I want to do it here. This is one of those examples of something that had been built up to be a really special celebration but fell far short of what was promised, which is putting it lightly. I'm talking, of course, about dash Con, which was fire festival before there was a fire festival, though on a much more modest scale. So for those

who don't know about this at all. Dash Con, which was originally called tumble Con, although the organizers would change the name in order to show that the convention was not officially a sanctioned Tumbler event or anything like that. It was meant to be a gathering of the tumbler community to allow Tumbler creators, many of whom were creating incredible video and art, to get together and to celebrate their community. And it was gonna have panels and special

performances by bands. The podcasts were going to be there, including Welcome Tonight Vale, which was really taking off in popularity and had a huge following on Tumbler. And it

was supposed to take place in the summer. Of a small group of organizers who I think it's safe to say we're clearly out of their depth, attempted to throw together a three day convention and they rented out of space, and they created a path schedule with lots of stuff to do and a lot of grandiose promises about what was going to be there, and there was a ball pit, the famous ball pit. Well, there were problems from the very beginning before the convention even got around, but those

problems became apparent at the beginning of the convention itself. Really, just as the convention was getting started, the organizers announced to the relatively small crowd that was there that the hotel they were using as the host for this convention was demanding full payment for the entire weekend in advance,

and that was an amount equal to seventeen thousand dollars. Now, according to the organizers, they anticipated that they would have all the money to pay for the hotel by the end of the weekend just from the attendance of the convention, but they didn't have the money on hand, so it's like a liquidity problem. They didn't have the liquid assets available, so they took up a collection from the people who were there, and amazingly they got enough money to meet

that seventeen dollar goal. Now there were talk of reimbursements, that people were going to get paid back whatever money they were putting in, because again the organizers were saying, hey, we should be making enough money from admissions to cover that cost. So really this is just so that we can pay the bill and then you'll get your money back. But from what I can tell, there never really was a sincere effort put forward to even keep track of

who was donating how much money. So I'm not sure that that was ever going to work out, and it ended up being a moot point anyway. Now that massive problem was really just the start of the issues, with it soon becoming clear that guests were canceling performances were not going to happen. The night Vale crew left because

the payment they had been promised had fallen through. It was really ugly and making matters worse, the organizers had no real way to make this up to the attendees, apart from promising some extra time in the ball pit, which I mean, if you haven't seen the photos, you need to search Dashkong Ballpit. It's just this little inflated pool filled with maybe a couple of thousand plastic balls.

We now, I would do a whole episode about dash Con, but really you should just head over to YouTube and watch a video that's titled Tumblers Failed Convention The Story of dash Con. It's by Sarah Z. Sarah is a talented essayist video sayst on YouTube. She has no connection to me. As far as I know, she doesn't know who I am. She doesn't know I'm talking about this. I just really like her work, and her piece is thoroughly researched. It's really interesting. It's also fifty minutes long,

so it's kind of like a tech stuff episode Anyway. Anyway, dash Con was an unmitigated disaster, and some of the stank of that failure would rub off on Tumbler itself, which is hardly fair. Anyway, I had to throw that in here. Plus give a shout out to Sarah's ez YouTube. Seriously, go check out the video. It's it's pretty dope, as

the kids are like to say. When we come back, i'll chat about a couple of other challenges to the throne of Facebook, and we'll pontificate for a short while whether it's even possible for some new platform to make a space in a Facebook dominated web. But first, let's take another quick break. Another service that launched the same year that Tumbler launched was friend Feed. Now this wasn't really so much of a standalone social networking site, but

more of an aggregator created by some former Google employees. Now, you could post stuff just a friend feed if you wanted to. You could post photos and files and messages, but the main attraction was that you could link friend fee to other services like your Facebook profile or Twitter or Flicker or YouTube. And let's just say that I joined friend feed and I connect with you as my

first friend high friend. Now, at that point, I would see a feed of all the stuff you were posting on the services you had connected to friend Feed, and I would see it in real time and posted in reverse chronological orders, so the most recent posts would be at the top of the page. So, assuming you had connected all of your services to friend feed, and let's say that you had just posted something to Facebook, I

would see your Facebook status update within friend feed. And then let's say after that you popped over to Twitter and you posted a tweet, Well, then I would see

the tweet pop up on friend Feed. So instead of having to follow someone on multiple services, like I'm following you on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, etcetera, etcetera, I could just follow your friend feed and get everything your post sting, or at least everything you chose to share with friend feed, and that ended up making it really,

you know, kind of useful. Now, not everyone was crazy about this, because one big concern was that if you linked to say, a blog post, to friend feed, The concern was that people were going to read the content on friend feed, but they wouldn't actually click through to go visit the blog. And if the blog is supported by advertising, as most blogs were, that's not very good because it would mean that the blogger was getting lower page views, and that would mean that they would see

less revenue from their work. So people would be reading their stuff, but it wouldn't be counting toward the ad deals that these blogging sites had, so that was something of a problem. Facebook thought that friend feed was a pretty rad idea, so in two thousand nine, just two years after friend feed had launched, Facebook announced plans to acquire the service for a reported fifty million dollars. Facebook continued to allow the service to operate. It never really

cut on in a big way. I mean, the people who used it tended to like it, but not that many people were using it, and Facebook would finally pull the plug on the service in two thousand fifteen. The last friend had been fed, I suppose. And the third social networking site that began in two thousand seven was Twitch, though not not actually Twitch, not in that form. It was really the predecessor of Twitch a k A justin dot tv that launched in two thousand seven. It was

a live streaming video service. Had really changed in a big way a couple of years later because it became clear that video game streamers were dominating the platform. It necessitated the company to spin off a new video game streaming service. That's the one that was called Twitch dot tv. Eventually, justin dot tv would become part of like a subsidiary of Twitch dot tv, and a little bit later it would just get shut down entirely. Twitch dot tv became

the only focus of the company. Ultimately Amazon would come along and acquire that, And of course Twitch dot tv is still extremely active today, but it's also a very different platform from Facebook. You can't really compare the two. I should add, however, that Facebook really hopes to get into that space by launching their own streaming video services and trying to challenge Twitch. So Twitch isn't really trying to play in Facebook's yard, but Facebook is trying to

play in twitches yard. This is something that Facebook has done on numerous occasions with other sites as well. Then you've got stuff like Instagram, which Facebook would ultimately acquire, and you've got you know, Snapchat, But these social networks also come at things in a very different way from Facebook. They made a space not through competition with Facebook, but

by creating something new and different. And then Facebook would either try to emulate what these companies were doing, or they would just try to buy the ding day companies and and mutate them to fit within Facebook's own business model. We see that today with stuff like you know, Twitch and TikTok. The next traditional social networking platform that I really want to talk about arrived in twenty eleven. This was Google's second really big push to get back into

social networking. Now. They had tried a couple of other things in between or cut and this. There was Google Buzz and Google friend Connect, but neither of those got very far. So this one was called Google Plus. Now. I remember the launch of Google Plus really well because I was one of those jerks who got early access

to it when it was invitation only. When I joined Google Plus, most of the people who were on the site were either in the tech industry or they were in the tech journalism industry, so it's a it's kind of like being in an exclusive club of my peers, and that was a lot of fun. I'm not gonna lie. It felt like we were all in our own little clubhouse and like or cult. Years earlier, Google chose to make Google Plus invitation only network at first to kind

of control things and scale things up. Uh. I suppose they wanted to do this gradually and avoid the pitfalls that come with like a massive influx of users all at the same time. Old school Twitter users probably remember the fail Whale, the character that would pop up whenever Twitter would crash, usually because of server overload. Google didn't

want that stuff to happen. But while this metered edition of users might have meant that the servers weren't being overtaxed, it also created that feeling of exclusivity and more people wanted in to try stuff out. And then when they finally did get into Google Plus, they were disappointed to find that, you know, it really wasn't that special, and it really wasn't Now that's not to say Google Plus

was bad. I don't think it was bad. It just wasn't remarkable, And so it would be natural for someone who had their expectations really built up to be this amazing thing, like You're gonna go and see the chocolate factory. They're going to be disappoin I did it, and Google Plus was kind of not at fault for all of that, partially of fault, I guess. And it did have some cool features. One of those was that you could organize the people you know into different circles, Like you would

literally drop and drag names into different circles. So, for example, you could have a circle that you make for your close friends, and another for family members, and one for co workers, and maybe one for acquaintances. You could have people belong to more than one circle if you liked. So let's say that you know there's a cousin you're particularly close to, so that cousins both in your family

circle and your close friends circle. When you post something, you could choose which circles in your network could see that post. So maybe you want to post something about a birthday party and you just want friends and family to see it. You don't want to include like coworkers or distant acquaintances that kind of thing. It was pretty easy to do that, easier, I would argue, than the

way Facebook does it. You could also create a circle for no good knicks whom you wish to ignore, and you wouldn't see those folks on Google Plus, and they wouldn't be able to see your stuff either. Google made things a bit blurry with Google Plus, and that if you were to make a Google account for stuff like YouTube or Gmail, that was a Google account that was good across all Google services. So let's say you sign up an account so that you can have a Gmail address.

Your Google login would give you access not just to Gmail, but also you could have a YouTube account so you can start uploading videos if you wanted. Uh, you would have a Google Drive account where you could store files and use services like Google Docs. Google Plus was part of that package, and I think it's safe to say there were a lot of folks who had a Google account, but they rarely, if ever, would duck into Google Plus. That became more apparent when you started looking at engagement

versus the number of active users. Google Plus had a high active user number within the first couple of years of launch, really high, like it was on track to be a Facebook competitor, but those users were barely spending any time at all on the actual platform. In January, CNN reported that users were spending about three and a half minutes on Google Plus for the month of January, whereas they had spent seven and a half hours on Facebook.

That's not even competitive, right. And There's a lot more I could say about Google Plus and that experiment, including how Google forced YouTube creators to have accounts linked to Google Plus accounts for a while and how all of that turned into a total disaster, But I think that would warrant its own episode when it comes to explaining failures. I think Google Plus really fell short of expectations. It didn't provide enough of a reason for people to leave

Facebook for Google Plus. And also Google did a great job at alienating a large percentage of its user base by you know, forcing the linking of accounts together. Now, I think I'm gonna this with a quick overview of the social networking site l O E l l O created by Paul Budnitts and Todd Berger. They launched the site in two thousand fourteen, and the founders were trying to do something that I think was a really nice

idea just ultimately didn't take off. They wanted to launch a social networking site where you are not the product. That was actually a quote in their manifesto, and that gets back to hell. Facebook makes money which is largely through advertising, and we the users, are the product that Facebook is selling. Facebook is selling access to us to various advertisers. And it's not just the fact that there

are a lot of people on Facebook. I mean that alone makes it valuable, but it's also that by interacting on Facebook, by sharing our interests, by commenting on things, by liking things, we're giving Facebook an extremely detailed look at who we are, sp pole at our preferences. Facebook knows what we like and what we don't like. It knows what sort of stuff catches our attention and what

we're likely going to just scroll right past. That means advertisers can target people who are most likely to respond to their ads. A Facebook user isn't valuable just because they use Facebook. They might be valuable because they happen to like shoes or sports or you know, a particular band.

And so much of Facebook's decisions, many of which have proven to be detrimental to society in the long run, are motivated by the desire to serve customers, which would be their advertisers, and they want to serve them the best product, which is our information. Elo said to Heck, with all that our social network isn't going to have ads on it. The idea was you would get a

stripped down ad free experience on Elo. You could build out your social network, you could have a profile, all without fear that all your activities were really just metrics that were being analyzed by algorithms so that the service provider could sell ad space to you. But the delusion of interested users who flocked to l O when it was still nothing but an invite field where you would just type in your email address indicated there was going

to be a problem. The service wasn't really ready to handle the number of people who wanted to try it, which of course led back to that whole exclusivity feel again. However, LO chose to keep accepting new users rather than shut down operations or you know, close off choke points. They said, we're just gonna deal with this. If the service goes down, we'll get it back up as fast as we can, but we don't want to end up making this like

an exclusive club. According to analysts, a lot of LO users would get access to the site and then not do anything else. A company called r g A Metrics took a sample of more than a hundred fifty thousand l O users and found that thirty six percent of the accounts they looked at had never posted anything, and only twenty percent of users who had signed up remained active users six days afterward. So in other words, one out of every five users who signed up would still

be active six days later. That's not great. Elo seemed to have a lot of initial appeal but no staying power, and I think a big part of the problem was that, well, everyone was already over on Facebook. So unless your whole social circle is making the move with you, then it doesn't do you any good to jump off Facebook because no one you know is on the new network. It's

the same problem lots of other attempts have had. Posting on Elo was kind of like posting on six Degrees way back in There's a good chance no one you knew was ever going to see it. It was sort of a catch twenty two problem. L O would pivot like a lot of other social networking sites, and it ultimately changed its focus to be more of an artist

centric network. L is a great place to discover artists who are working in different types of media, but it's not a replacement for Facebook, and it makes you wonder if anyone will ever create a social networking site that has the appeal and stickiness of Facebook. Some days that just seems like it's impossible, that it's no way that's ever going to happen. But then there was also a time when it was obvious quote unquote that my Space was going to be the future of social networking, and

that played out very differently. So who knows. Maybe Facebook's also too big to fail. Wink wink. That's all for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for topics I should tackle in the future, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is text 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. H