Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech area. You know. The mess over at Twitter has prompted many a story in my news episodes lately, not to mention the equally interesting but different mess that meta slash Facebook has found itself in. And I thought I could use that as a sort of jumping off point to talk about social networks and blogging and micro blogging services that have emerged over the years and find out what's happened to them. Some of them are long gone, some of them were merged into other services, and if you actually still hold on to this day. So we're gonna sort of talk about the history of social networks in a way. And I'm going service by service as opposed to strictly chronologically, because if I went with just a chronological approach, I would have to jump back and forth between so many different companies that I wouldn't be able to keep things straight. This will also be a multi part episode. I'm hoping for just two parts, but I've only got this one written. I don't know if I'll end up having enough where I'll need to write, you know, a third episode two. But there is a lot to talk about now. There are a lot of different attempts at making social networks, and spoiler alert, I don't even get all the way to my space in this one. That would have you know that launched in two thousand three. That tells you how many early attempts there were, and only a few of those would survive beyond a few years. But let's start off with a site that launched in the mid nineteen nineties. This would make it one of the first online social networks, perhaps the first one. It's hard when you start talking about first because it also depends on how do you define a social network. What are the features of a social network that make it a social network versus a community site, Because I would argue that there were message boards and such that had a lot of the features we would find later on in social networks kind of baked in, so there's not like a hard and fast rule here. Also, I should point out that there were obviously precursors to social networks before the Internet became a big thing for the average person. Nerds like me were spending a lot of time on bulletin board systems back in the eighties, where we would log into someone else's computer and we would have access to message boards and file sharing and all that kind of stuff back in the eighties. So you had elements of social networks even around then. So I don't include those include bulletin board systems because one, there were hundreds of them around the world. Because these were largely local organizations. Right, it might just be someone who happens to have a computer with some phone lines going to it in their basement, and that was a bolting board system. Uh and too, it really would just be a lot of me saying. And this site also had these features. So the first one we're talking about is the Globe dot com. So this was an actual website, not a bolting board system. And it was founded by Todd Kerzelman and Stefan Pattern, whose names I'm probably butchering and I apologize for that. These were two students who were attending Cornell and they came up with this concept. They were used to the bulletin board systems. They saw how message boards were starting to grow on the web, and they thought about creating a community site a site that would allow users to join and form an online community, and it was really all about you know, chatting, uh, having news available, being able to play games, a lot of the same stuff that you would have found in an online service providers, services like America Online being the big example. OSPs Online service providers were kind of similar to bulletin board systems but bigger. They were kind of islands that existed unto themselves and then later would form connections to other networks. But originally OSPs were not really that wasn't really the Internet. It was a network, but it wasn't networked to other networks, so it wasn't the Internet. So the Globe was kind of taking those ideas and applying them to the Web, which was, you know, a pretty young thing in the mid nineties, Like the web really just emerged in the early nineties, so it hadn't been around for very long. Well, the idea was a hit, and by the company was prepping to go public, to hold its initial public offering, in other words, to go from being a privately held company to a publicly traded company, and boy howdy, did it have a whopper of a first day with shares of the of the site climbing six hundred six percent in prices, going six six percent above where they thought they are going to be. That is a heck of a first day, right That makes you go from you know, a scrappy little website two being a millionaire in an instant. Crazy Now, at its peak, the globe boasted around one point three million users. That is obviously chump change if you compare it to something like Facebook at its peak, where it's looking at like two billion users. One point three million is nothing. But we have to keep in mind this was in the nineties. This is when folks were still actually just learning what the web was and what the internet was, so your average household didn't necessarily have any access to the Internet. It would take a few years for that to catch on around the world. So for a site to get one point three million users when a lot of people still don't really know what the internet it is, that's pretty impressive. It really wouldn't be until the proliferation of consumer smartphones that we would see you know, web activity really explode. That's really where things would change dramatically. So we're looking at like two thousand seven, two thousand eight at that point so one point three million in the late nineties. Pretty impressive. Uh. Anyway back to the Globe, so co founder Stefan would be spotted dancing on a table in the club in Manhattan, wearing vinyl pants and declaring himself ready for a life of rampant consumerism and debauchery. Uh. This story became extremely popular. It went viral. The press would refer to Stefan as the CEO in the plastic pants. I only repeat that because I mean, I think it's funny. I'm sure it was one of those moments that Stefan really wishes he could just kind of take back, because it's not fun to have to live with that sort of moniker your whole life. So I feel a little sympathy for him. But at the same time, dude, to hit its super rich. It did not handle it super well anyway. So the Globe in some ways became the poster child for the new web economy. In the late nineties, we were headed toward the end of the dot com bubble inflationary period at this point, right you had all this money pouring into dot com companies like the Globe, and right around the corner was the Piper waiting to be paid. The Globe, like a lot of other web based companies in the late nineties, proved to be overvalued and under monetized. Now, at the very least, the Globe had a sort of revenue model in place that was tied to advertising. And that's more than I can say for a lot of other dot com companies of that era that had an interesting idea but no real way to capitalize on that idea it to actually make money from it. But anyway, the Internet dot com bubble bursts for lots of reasons that we don't need to go into, and the Globe, like a ton of other startups from the mid to late nineties, totally collapsed. The Stock Exchange delisted the company in two thousand one, and the Globe went Bye bye. Pattern not would go on to found a company called Slated. It's a crowdfunding site specifically for independent filmmakers. So the idea there's you pitch your project, you know, you list it, you try to get backing for it, financial backing, maybe you even network and you get distribution for your film. That kind of thing, And unlike the Globe, Slated has stuck around now a close cousin to the social network is the chat or instant messenger client. This is something else that was kind of evolving around the same time as the early concepts for social networks, and and a lot of social networks incorporate chat or instant messengers within them. Meta's messenger, for example, is incorporated into Facebook and also exists as its own separate app. Now, one very early example of an instant messenger was called pow Wow and just get this all the way early on, this intrigue contains stuff in it that I personally think steps way over the line of cultural appropriation. So I wanted to get that all the way all right. So this was the brainchild of John McAfee. Now, if that name is not familiar to you, he gads you are in for a wild ride. My friend John McFee worked for NASA in the late sixties. He hopped over to UNIVAC for a spell. He became an os architect or Xerox for a while, and he did some more career hops. He never really stayed in one place for more than just a few years is and then in the late eighties he went into business or himself. McAfee created anti virus software. Yeah, that's the McAfee. You have ever seen McAfee anti virus that came from this guy originally, So his anti virus program was one of, if not the first commercial anti virus programs on the market. Might have been the very first one. Again, it's hard to tell because these sort of things aren't super well documented. But from nineteen seven to nineteen McAfee either ran or worked for his company that created anti virus software, and he made a lot of money, like a lot a lot of money. And in ninety four he decided to cash out and he sold his stake in the company and he moved on. Now, around that same time, McAfee, who was the son of an American father and a British mother, founded a company called Tribal Voices. This is where that cultural appropriation stuff really starts up. The Tribal Voice website referred to itself as a Native American company, but I'm not sure how that actually played out. So anyway, this is around and the main thing this company produces is a Windows based Internet chat client called how Wow Now instant messaging clients. We're kind of a big deal. Before stable social networks became a thing. Lots of folks relied on instant messaging programs to stay in touch with one another, and a really big player in the space would be America Online of the AOL is. Also what was called a o l's client was the a o L Instant Messenger, better known as aim ai M, and one thing a lot of developers try to do was to make their own chat client interoperable with other chat clients, primarily aim. The messenger landscape was kind of fractured, so that might mean you might have some friends who use one instant messenger and other friends who use a different one, and it was a hassle trying to stay in contact with everyone because you had to have multiple clients open and who knew what was going on in which one. So one valuable thing that a lot of clients tried to do was to make it interoperable with other services so that you could have like one place where all your messages could come in. But those were kind of hard to do because anytime anyone updated their service, it could break interoperability. Moreover, some companies, like a O L didn't want interoperability in the first place. They wanted to push people to just use aim. So anyway, all L brought lawsuits against Tribal Voice, claiming that the company was copying its systems, and McAfee then brought in a new CEO for Tribal Voice. In the following year, a company called c mg I bought Tribal Voice. CMGI has its own bizarre history. Today it's got a different name. It's called steel Connect and it focuses on supply chain management. So things have definitely changed for that company. But back in the nineties, cmg I was purchasing internet startups because, as we all know, the Internet was going to be the next big thing. But cmg I didn't see the dot com bubble bursting, and anyway, Powell would become a casualty of the dot com bubble. In the office that used to be Tribal Voice was shut down in early two thousand one. At its peak, it was said to have around two million users. Okay, we've got a lot more to get through before we go on to any more of these social networks and their history. Let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back, and next we actually have a site that's still around. You know, obviously pow Wow is gone, and uh, the globe is gone, but this next one you can still join. And I'm talking about classmates dot com. If you're of a certain age, you might remember some big news stories about how this site got into some trouble for various shenanigans, which we will touch on. But let's start at the beginning, which I am told is a very good place to start. So a guy named Randy Conrad's founded classmates dot com in nineteen again early days for the web, right, and the idea was simple. Users would create a profile on classmates dot com and they could fill out forms to list which schools they went to and what years they attended those schools, as well as things like if they served in the military, you know which branch, what years that kind of stuff, uh, and even some employment information, you know what companies did they work at and what years. And this was also that it would be easier to reconnect with folks who also attended those schools, or were enlisted in the military, or were employed by those entities. So this was all about looking up people you knew in the real world in uh, in real life or I r L. And that just makes me feel ancient for saying that. And you could find them online, and you might think, huh, I wonder whatever happened to you know, the kids who sat with me at lunch every day for all of high school? Where are those guys at? And you might create an account on classmates dot com to list where and when you attended school, and then you could look to see if others did the same thing. Some cases, you might be the first one there, right, and you might think, well, maybe someone will make an account and I'll get reconnected with an old classmate. Sometimes would join in and find out that there was already a pretty hefty community building up around that particular school and that class Anyway, it was a neat idea. It connected people by linking them through commonly shared experiences in life, and it could really help folks who were in school in the days before the internet was a thing, you know, at least for that general population. Obviously, the internet has been a thing for a while, like well before the web came online. But there were some of us, I mean, those of you all who have grown up with an internet in place your whole lives have lots of ways to stay in touch with people if you want to. But some of us older relics. We didn't have those options, right, Like, the Internet was not a thing when I was in high school, at least not to the general public. So there were no email addresses to share, there was no social network profiles you could share. And so once we graduated and we went our separate ways, and that was kind of that you didn't really have a way to stay in touch unless you like gave someone an address then just kept up with it. So classmates dot com change things, but the company also would over time get into some hot water now and again for various reasons. Uh, there are two basic levels of membership for classmates dot com. There's a free level of membership, but that gives you really limited access to features, to the point where you could see that you have notifications in your messages and you can't read them because you don't have permission to do so until you become a paid member. So that was a big part of of the controversy around classmates dot com, not even controversy, just people grousing about it, right because it would lure you in with the promise of reconnecting with old friends, but in order to be able to really access all the features, you need to become a paid member. Now, honestly, I think that that's a valid business decision. It just rubbed some people the wrong way because they were starting to get used to the idea of if it's on the web, it's more or less free. So it was an effective way of generating revenue. But the the features that you've got access to included stuff like being able to see who had viewed your profile. That way, you could be alerted if say, like that creepy person you knew in school is still stalking you or whatever. Not exactly comforting, or maybe you're thinking, hey, maybe that that cute classmate of mine looked in on me and I wonder whatever happened to them, and maybe it's a misconnection kind of thing. Anyway, One of the issues classmates dot Com ran into you is that the company would send out these promotional emails to prospective users, like maybe it's someone who's registered for free, or maybe it's just someone who could potentially become a member of classmates dot com. And some of these emails had claims in them saying that someone had been searching for that person on the website. You know, you get a message saying, hey, someone's looking for you, and you're thinking, oh, an old friend of mine is trying to look me up. I want to see who that is. So you might want to actually join classmates dot com as a paid member so you can find out who the heck is looking for me. Maybe it's important, or maybe this is a chance to reconnect with an old friend that I haven't talked to in years. But it turned out that at least some of the time, those messages were alerting you to situations that didn't exist, that no person was actually searching for you, which, by the way, is I gotta feel awful right that you get an email saying, hey, someone's looking for you, and when you pay the fee so you can access the information, you find out, actually, no one has looked for you, no one's thought about you in years. You might as well not even exist to those people. I might be projecting it here anyway. Some users brought a class action lawsuit against classmates dot Com, and the company would eventually settle the lawsuit and paid out a couple of million dollars in two thousand and eight. It was a really big deal at the time, but another thing they got them a bad reputation is. The site uses an auto renewal process, so if you do get a paid membership, it automatically renews your membership at the end of you know, a year's service. And from what I understand, joining classmates dot Com as a paid member is kind of like when you join like a gym or a fitness center. It can be incredibly challenging to cancel your membership once you're in. It's like the mafia. Once you're in, you're in. At least that's how it used to be. I don't know if it still is, but PC World back in two thousand six had an article that was titled just canceled the bleep account. The bleep in this case at like just random symbols, you know, kind of like Cubert cursing if you remember the Cubert video game I'm really dating myself in this episode anyway, Uh, the PC World said that that classmates dot Com counted as a quote unquote big hassle when you wanted to cancel your membership. Despite these and some other controversies, classmates dot Com is still active today. I don't know about you. Totally cool being persona non garratta to my high school classmates. For the most part, it's good old gen X. You know, we kind of cut ties once we left and didn't look back. I didn't even go to any of my high school reunions. I just skipped them all. But enough about me. Let's move on to a different social network, okay. Dan Pelson and Jane Mount create a site that would have many social network elements to it, including a message board, had intend messaging. It linked together different folks through common interests, and it would later go on to incorporate things like internet audio and video, so it would evolve over time and increase the features of the site. And this was called Bolt dot com and it had a relatively decent run. And remember this one also launched mid nineties before the dot com bubble burst, so for about a decade things ran fairly well at Bolt dot com. Despite the dot com bubble burst. It stuck around, it survived that calamity, and initially Bolt was targeting teenagers as its user base. Here's the thing, though, when people join a network and they like the network and they form relationships on that network, they tend to stick around and it becomes an age user base. So the users were getting older and older uh and continuing to use Bolt and Bolt was not being super effective at attracting new users. This is a message that we will here repeated with Meta and Facebook in particular right that Facebook is a social network that has an enormous user base but has a real problem of attracting new users to the service and the existing users are just continuing to age well. In two thousand five, Bolt, through its parent company which was called Bolt Media, got into the video sharing business, and the original Bolt site, the social networking version of Bolt, kind of was pushed aside. It was shifted over to a new u r L which was Bolt to dot com. Two is in the number two ms actual numeral too. The original u r L Bolt dot Com became the host for this video sharing site, which more and more frequently wasn't so much about user generated videos but was more about sharing other videos, either created by Bolt Media or stuff like music videos. But then various media companies got really litigious because companies like Bolt were sharing music videos without you know, paying licensing fees, and the companies were getting sued, including Bolt Media getting sued for copyright infringement. Things got really rough for Bolt Media. So then a company called go Fish initially decides that it's going to acquire Bolt Media and Bolt to, the original social networking element for the company, turned off the quote unquote lights. It's shut down in two thousand seven, on April six at noon Eastern time. We actually have a specific time for when that site shut down. Asked for the acquisition, Well, that never happened. Go Fish got cold feet or cold fins or something. Anyway, Go Fish swam the heck away from this acquisition and Bolt Media the company went into bankruptcy. Now, the original Bolt had a brief revival in two thousand eight when a company called fund Bolt had secured the rights to the I P and a site very similar to the original Bolt or what became Bolt Too launched. But unfortunately this was only up for a few months before it once again had to close up shop, this time for good. Obviously, it was one of those issues where the costs were greater than any revenue being brought in, so Bolt was once again dead. So that one no longer around. Okay, next up, we have yet another nineties startup. This one is six degrees dot com. Now, interestingly, this emerged after people started playing the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's actually just based off this idea that any two people are only six degrees of separation between them. The Kevin Bacon version obviously is about linking actors together. Uh you know, Kevin Bacon is an actor for those of you who don't know this name. He's also Peter Quill's Christmas present. According to the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, which I watched recently and was delighted by. Anyway, Kevin Bacon has been in a ton of movies, and he's worked with a huge number of actors. So he's been around and worked with so many that it's possible to essentially link any two actors who have ever worked in Hollywood together, using Kevin Bacon as kind of the link king material between the two. If you move forward a couple of years into an entrepreneur named Andrew win Reich created a social network based off this idea that everyone is just six degrees of separation or less from everybody else, and that by mapping your social web, you can find connections to and between people that you never suspected, Like maybe you had that small world experience where you find out that two different friends you have happened to know each other. But the two friends you you know, they're in very different friends circles, right, Like maybe you know one from someplace you worked and one from a social circle, and it turns out these two people are also friends with each other, and you never knew that. You just have that strange experience. Well, that's the kind of thing that Winrich was kind of interested in exploring, and so he created six degrees dot com. And with six degrees, users would put in their information, and they would also include information about their contacts, right the people they knew, and users who listed one another would end up getting connected, and they could also put in folks who weren't on the network too, you know, as part of their connections. And then those folks would eventually get hounded by emails asking them to create a profile on six degrees dot com to build out the network further. This social web model would be kind of a foundation for future social networks like MySpace, which we will talk about in the next episode, and other ones like Facebook. Now, the original six degrees dot com was bought by another company in ninety five million dollars, and then we get to the old dot com bubble bursting, and like several of the other companies we've mentioned in this episode, the parent company for six degrees hit turbulence and didn't make it through, so the site shut down around two thousand. Now there is a six degrees dot com social network out there today. There is one that's active, but I have no idea who runs it at this point. I did some looking and didn't find a whole lot of information. The website has a copyright notice listed as so if that is when it was relaunched, it's pretty recent. I will say it is not an HTTPS link, so it's not secure. If you go to that site, it is not a secure site. I would say that means do not put identifiable information into that site, because anyone could be snooping and you wouldn't even know. I did check the contact us link to see if it would give me more information, but it just takes you to a little online form and it didn't have time to fill out something and get any information before this podcast. But I suspect that six degrees dot com of today has no common ground with the original incarnation, and it's just the general idea brought back around again. All right, we've got some more to cover before we finish out this particular episode. Before we do that, let's take another quick break. We're back okay. In and nine, we get a couple of online journal sites launching. Open Diary opened in and live Journals started journaling in nine. So these sites would allow users to create online journals and to share those journals, either publicly or with specific friends. They also introduced a feature that was really a Web two point oh idea. That was that they allowed other users to leave comments on posts, so your friends could actually comment on things you wrote. So, for example, I remember I used live journal once upon a time to post things like April Fool's jokes, and the comments would be uh. They would begin with people saying, Wow, that's incredible, and then with people saying, oh, I see what you did. And I would try to leave as many clues as possible that I was just joshing. But I eventually gave up April Fool's Jokes because I felt like I got too good at lying and I didn't like that. Anyway, The whole idea of leaving comments user generated comments on posts really became another foundational element in social networks moving forward, This is another basic building block that would be very important for social networks, and both open Diary and live journal would survive the dot com purge once the bubble bursts, so they both made it through that. Now an Open Diary case, the site would evolve over time. It introduced new features and new ways to interact with one another. But despite the fact that it was continuing to introduce these new features, the business side was really starting to struggle post two thousand ten, so the side actually shut down in February two fourteen. It had been struggling financially for a couple of years at that point, and it would remain offline until two thousand eighteen. But in two thousand eighteen it relaunched, this time as a subscription based journaling service, so if you wanted to join, you could get like a month free, but then you had to become a paid subscriber to use the service. But one thing that was really nice was that former users could then access their old journal entries, which otherwise we have just been lost right because the site went down, and all of those journal entries, according to the company, had been preserved during the four years that it was offline, so that was kind of cool. So yes, open Diary still exists, just in a different form than it was up to through two thousand and fourteen. Live Journal has its own bumpy history. The site launched in the spring of nineteen, and as I've indicated, I was a fairly active member early on, but I drifted away from live journal as other social networks emerged and grew. A company called six Apart purchased live Journal in two thousand five from its creator, Brad Fitzpatrick, and a year later a Russian company called sup Media licensed the live journal brand and then outright purchased live Journal in two thousand seven. This move was seen as a pretty big blow to the live journal community, particularly the community that was in Russia. It was really popular in Russia, but with a Russian company purchasing the live journal brand, its signaled a possible crackdown on Russian users. There were fears that the company would impose censorship on users and it would bring live Journal in line with other Russian operated sites and services. The transition to Russia continued over the following years. The site moved to Russian based servers in two thousand sixteen, and it now operates in accordance with Russian law, which does put a bit of a damper on free expression. Now that being said, live journal, like open diary, is technically still online. You could create an account and journal on live journal, but it is in a very different form from the one I remember from the early two thousand's and again is burdened by the restrictions that the Russian government places on online communications. Really, anything that would be critical of the Russian government, the Russian Federation and is probably not going to stick around for very long on the platform. Okay, moving on. In two thousand two, a guy named Jonathan Abrams began working on a new social networking site that was building on the ideas that fueled services like six degrees dot com. This site was Friendster, which some of you may have used. Some of you probably have heard the name, but maybe never actually used it. It appeared to be leaning a little bit on the notoriety of the peer to peer service Napster. Napster made a huge name for itself because lots of people used it to pirate music, and it was nuked to oblivion by the music industry in legislation or rather court cases that I think you could only describe as being over the top, but I've done episodes about that in the past. Anyway, Friendster would allow users to create friend circles, and thus people could start to see connections between friends and ways, similar to what six degrees had been doing. But by this point six degrees had been shut down, right, so that was gone, so Friendster was able to kind of take its place. So Abraham's launched Friendster in two thousand three, and it got fairly popular pretty early on because it came out before MySpace and Facebook, and it wasn't bogged down by all the baggage of the dot com era the way earlier networks had been, because it came out after all of that dust had settled. Now, within the first year of launch, Friendster already had a suitor, and it was none other than our old friend Google. Now reportedly, Google's proposed acquisition would have been for thirty million dollars in Google stock, which, as you can imagine, would mean that original deal would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I think even more than a billion dollars at this point if people had just taken that deal and held onto the stock. Because of how google stocks value has grown you know, considerably since the early two thousand's, but Friendster turned down the office. It was all a moot point, and I suppose that for users of the site that was probably for the best at the time, because Google has a very long history of acquiring and then subsequently shutting down services. Anyway, in two thousand four, the board of directors for Friendster handed Jonathan Abrams his walking papers. They essentially fired him as CEO and replaced him. Uh. There was kind of a revolving door for the leadership of Friendster for a little while, and a few years later, Friendster was losing most of its American user base as people were migrating to other service is, namely Facebook. The site continued to enjoy popularity in Asia, however, so while America was seeing you know, flagging results, Asia was doing much better. In two thousand nine, a Malaysian company called m O L Global acquired Friendster, or at least some of Friendster's technology. Facebook would end up buying the rest of Friendster's i P and a couple of years later, Friendster transformed into a social gaming service and all the stuff that made it a pure social network was ditched. The whole site would go dark in two thousand and fifteen. We'll hear similar stories about this as we go on. In two thousand three, we also saw the launch of a social network geared toward professionals, you know, employers and people seeking employment. And I am, of course referencing linked In, which i've lee is another site that survives to this day, and I am reminded of that pretty much daily because I get emails alerting me to the fact that folks have apparently visited my profile, which has to be really disappointing for them because I have not kept up with it for years. Anyway, LinkedIn really puts the network in social networks because it's primarily intended to be a networking tool, and it can be a really effective one. You know, it can help you get connected with the right people, or you know, if you're really bad at social media, it's really great at convincing folks you are absolutely not the person they should hire. So a little word of advice if you use LinkedIn, don't post photos of your wild night in Vegas on the site. That seems like that would be a no brainer, but there's always someone who does it. LinkedIn had connections with PayPal founders. You know that also makes sense the folks who were saying, how can we create financial transactions online? How can we illitate that having the same idea of how can we facilitate networking like professional networking online? Makes sense. So it operated as a private company until two thousand eleven. That's when it held its initial public offering when transformed into a publicly traded company, and it would continue as a publicly traded company on its own until two thousand sixteen, when Microsoft proposed a twenty six billion dollar acquisition. The company was offering almost two hundred dollars a share, and the shareholders of LinkedIn said yes please. Now, as I mentioned, LinkedIn is still very much alive. It is a Microsoft owned service to this day. You can create an account, you can fill out your education and employment history. You can network with colleagues and perspective employers or employees. And I see a lot of my peers getting a ton out of using it, like former co workers of mine are really leveraging LinkedIn. Well, I probably should be using it, but y'all, I hit social network fatigue hard a couple of years ago, and I have not recovered yet and here's another one, another site that is technically still around kind of so let me explain. We're gonna conclude on this one for this episode. This social network is called high five spelled h I and then the numeral five, and it originally launched in two thousand three, shortly before my Space would take the stage. Ramu Yala Manschi is the founder of high five. He earned a degree in computer science at the University of Illinois, and then he worked in different capacities at several different tech companies, including one that got acquired by our old friend c mg I before cmg I became that supply chain company. Now, the original High five was similar in many ways to my Space. Users would create profiles, they would seek out connections with other users. There was a focus on reconnecting with people you already knew. I r L again, I feel ancient saying that. Anyway, according to Yellomanchi, the site was profitable within its first year. Now, if that's true, that's incredible. I don't know if it's true, because the site would continue seeking out investment rounds moving forward, and I don't know what their method was to generate revenue. I assume it was advertising, but there's very little information available for the original incarnation of High five. Yellomanchi emphasized growing his user base beyond the United States, which was probably a good idea because there was a lot less competition outside the US. In time, people in Latin American countries really became loyal High five users. That became like the real ground swell of the user base was in Latin America, and it propelled High five to a dominent spot among social networks, or at least a little while. Now. I might one day need to do a full episode to really look into what happened at high five, because if you look at most articles mentioning the company, things changed really really fast, and in a way that that brings up questions and I don't have the answers to them. Supposedly, High five was a top social networking site in two thousand and seven, second only to my Space. So my Space is number one, despite the fact that it came out after High five. Then you have High five, you get to two thousand eight, things have changed already. It's now in third place because Facebook was really gaining traction in two thousand and eight. But still you would think that a social networking site, one that has a strong base in Latin America and is ranked third behind two of the Juggernauts, would still more or less be okay. Right, Like, this is a company that supposedly was profitable in its first hear it should be fine, but apparently it wasn't. So in two thousand nine, the company gets a new CEO and it switches focus. It drops the social network stuff, it gets out of the social network game. It turns into a social gaming company. Which you know, it's not the first time we've heard that, right, We already heard that before. The third largest social network company would no longer be a social network company, but it did stick around, so High five was still a thing. But in two thousand eleven things would change again. Tagged, which is a different social network company that I'll talk about in the next episode, acquired High fives assets. Some of the High five team then apparently went on to found a different social gaming site, but that one lasted less than a year, so social gaming was just a no go anyway. Tags version of High five would change a little bit. Initially, they just stripped the games that High five would run on its social gaming site and replace them with games that were developed by Tagged members. But there's always a bigger fish. So then Tagged gets scooped up by another company called the Meat Group m e et, not the Meat group like sausages and stuff, but meet like let's meet anyway. I'm sure I'll mention that again in the next episode when we talk more about Tagged itself. But anyway, high fives still stuck around. In fact, it's around today, but it's not a social gaming site, and it's not as much of a social network site either. It's really more about meeting new people with kind of an emphasis on online dating and flirting. That seems to be where the focus is now, So I think of it kind of more like Tender or Grinder, but as a social network as opposed to just strictly about meeting and king up. So it's less about reconnecting with folks you already know and more about meeting new people. So while the site is still around, it has a very different approach to the service that launched way back in two thousand three. And that wraps up this first part of kind of a history of social networks. It's not an exhaustive history. There are others that I have not touched on, some of which were popular in other parts of the world briefly, but I am gonna continue to cover the big ones and talk about what happened and how things unfolded. You know, we're starting to get into the years where we get the big names like my Space and Facebook and whatnot. But we'll pick up with that in our next episode, and until then, if you have suggestions for me reach out let me know. You can do so by downloading the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download and use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff in the search field. There's a little microphone icon. You can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length that way, or if you prefer, drop me a message on Twitter while it's still a thing. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W. I'll have alternatives lined up in the near future if you don't want to be on Twitter anymore. But that's it for this episode and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech area. You know. The mess over at Twitter has prompted many a story in my news episodes lately, not to mention the equally interesting but different mess that meta slash Facebook has found itself in. And I thought I could use that as a sort of jumping off point to talk about social networks and blogging and micro blogging services that have emerged over the years and find out what's happened to them. Some of them are long gone, some of them were merged into other services, and if you actually still hold on to this day. So we're gonna sort of talk about the history of social networks in a way. And I'm going service by service as opposed to strictly chronologically, because if I went with just a chronological approach, I would have to jump back and forth between so many different companies that I wouldn't be able to keep things straight. This will also be a multi part episode. I'm hoping for just two parts, but I've only got this one written. I don't know if I'll end up having enough where I'll need to write, you know, a third episode two. But there is a lot to talk about now. There are a lot of different attempts at making social networks, and spoiler alert, I don't even get all the way to my space in this one. That would have you know that launched in two thousand three. That tells you how many early attempts there were, and only a few of those would survive beyond a few years. But let's start off with a site that launched in the mid nineteen nineties. This would make it one of the first online social networks, perhaps the first one. It's hard when you start talking about first because it also depends on how do you define a social network. What are the features of a social network that make it a social network versus a community site, Because I would argue that there were message boards and such that had a lot of the features we would find later on in social networks kind of baked in, so there's not like a hard and fast rule here. Also, I should point out that there were obviously precursors to social networks before the Internet became a big thing for the average person. Nerds like me were spending a lot of time on bulletin board systems back in the eighties, where we would log into someone else's computer and we would have access to message boards and file sharing and all that kind of stuff back in the eighties. So you had elements of social networks even around then. So I don't include those include bulletin board systems because one, there were hundreds of them around the world. Because these were largely local organizations. Right, it might just be someone who happens to have a computer with some phone lines going to it in their basement, and that was a bolting board system. Uh and too, it really would just be a lot of me saying. And this site also had these features. So the first one we're talking about is the Globe dot com. So this was an actual website, not a bolting board system. And it was founded by Todd Kerzelman and Stefan Pattern, whose names I'm probably butchering and I apologize for that. These were two students who were attending Cornell and they came up with this concept. They were used to the bulletin board systems. They saw how message boards were starting to grow on the web, and they thought about creating a community site a site that would allow users to join and form an online community, and it was really all about you know, chatting, uh, having news available, being able to play games, a lot of the same stuff that you would have found in an online service providers, services like America Online being the big example. OSPs Online service providers were kind of similar to bulletin board systems but bigger. They were kind of islands that existed unto themselves and then later would form connections to other networks. But originally OSPs were not really that wasn't really the Internet. It was a network, but it wasn't networked to other networks, so it wasn't the Internet. So the Globe was kind of taking those ideas and applying them to the Web, which was, you know, a pretty young thing in the mid nineties, Like the web really just emerged in the early nineties, so it hadn't been around for very long. Well, the idea was a hit, and by the company was prepping to go public, to hold its initial public offering, in other words, to go from being a privately held company to a publicly traded company, and boy howdy, did it have a whopper of a first day with shares of the of the site climbing six hundred six percent in prices, going six six percent above where they thought they are going to be. That is a heck of a first day, right That makes you go from you know, a scrappy little website two being a millionaire in an instant. Crazy Now, at its peak, the globe boasted around one point three million users. That is obviously chump change if you compare it to something like Facebook at its peak, where it's looking at like two billion users. One point three million is nothing. But we have to keep in mind this was in the nineties. This is when folks were still actually just learning what the web was and what the internet was, so your average household didn't necessarily have any access to the Internet. It would take a few years for that to catch on around the world. So for a site to get one point three million users when a lot of people still don't really know what the internet it is, that's pretty impressive. It really wouldn't be until the proliferation of consumer smartphones that we would see you know, web activity really explode. That's really where things would change dramatically. So we're looking at like two thousand seven, two thousand eight at that point so one point three million in the late nineties. Pretty impressive. Uh. Anyway back to the Globe, so co founder Stefan would be spotted dancing on a table in the club in Manhattan, wearing vinyl pants and declaring himself ready for a life of rampant consumerism and debauchery. Uh. This story became extremely popular. It went viral. The press would refer to Stefan as the CEO in the plastic pants. I only repeat that because I mean, I think it's funny. I'm sure it was one of those moments that Stefan really wishes he could just kind of take back, because it's not fun to have to live with that sort of moniker your whole life. So I feel a little sympathy for him. But at the same time, dude, to hit its super rich. It did not handle it super well anyway. So the Globe in some ways became the poster child for the new web economy. In the late nineties, we were headed toward the end of the dot com bubble inflationary period at this point, right you had all this money pouring into dot com companies like the Globe, and right around the corner was the Piper waiting to be paid. The Globe, like a lot of other web based companies in the late nineties, proved to be overvalued and under monetized. Now, at the very least, the Globe had a sort of revenue model in place that was tied to advertising. And that's more than I can say for a lot of other dot com companies of that era that had an interesting idea but no real way to capitalize on that idea it to actually make money from it. But anyway, the Internet dot com bubble bursts for lots of reasons that we don't need to go into, and the Globe, like a ton of other startups from the mid to late nineties, totally collapsed. The Stock Exchange delisted the company in two thousand one, and the Globe went Bye bye. Pattern not would go on to found a company called Slated. It's a crowdfunding site specifically for independent filmmakers. So the idea there's you pitch your project, you know, you list it, you try to get backing for it, financial backing, maybe you even network and you get distribution for your film. That kind of thing, And unlike the Globe, Slated has stuck around now a close cousin to the social network is the chat or instant messenger client. This is something else that was kind of evolving around the same time as the early concepts for social networks, and and a lot of social networks incorporate chat or instant messengers within them. Meta's messenger, for example, is incorporated into Facebook and also exists as its own separate app. Now, one very early example of an instant messenger was called pow Wow and just get this all the way early on, this intrigue contains stuff in it that I personally think steps way over the line of cultural appropriation. So I wanted to get that all the way all right. So this was the brainchild of John McAfee. Now, if that name is not familiar to you, he gads you are in for a wild ride. My friend John McFee worked for NASA in the late sixties. He hopped over to UNIVAC for a spell. He became an os architect or Xerox for a while, and he did some more career hops. He never really stayed in one place for more than just a few years is and then in the late eighties he went into business or himself. McAfee created anti virus software. Yeah, that's the McAfee. You have ever seen McAfee anti virus that came from this guy originally, So his anti virus program was one of, if not the first commercial anti virus programs on the market. Might have been the very first one. Again, it's hard to tell because these sort of things aren't super well documented. But from nineteen seven to nineteen McAfee either ran or worked for his company that created anti virus software, and he made a lot of money, like a lot a lot of money. And in ninety four he decided to cash out and he sold his stake in the company and he moved on. Now, around that same time, McAfee, who was the son of an American father and a British mother, founded a company called Tribal Voices. This is where that cultural appropriation stuff really starts up. The Tribal Voice website referred to itself as a Native American company, but I'm not sure how that actually played out. So anyway, this is around and the main thing this company produces is a Windows based Internet chat client called how Wow Now instant messaging clients. We're kind of a big deal. Before stable social networks became a thing. Lots of folks relied on instant messaging programs to stay in touch with one another, and a really big player in the space would be America Online of the AOL is. Also what was called a o l's client was the a o L Instant Messenger, better known as aim ai M, and one thing a lot of developers try to do was to make their own chat client interoperable with other chat clients, primarily aim. The messenger landscape was kind of fractured, so that might mean you might have some friends who use one instant messenger and other friends who use a different one, and it was a hassle trying to stay in contact with everyone because you had to have multiple clients open and who knew what was going on in which one. So one valuable thing that a lot of clients tried to do was to make it interoperable with other services so that you could have like one place where all your messages could come in. But those were kind of hard to do because anytime anyone updated their service, it could break interoperability. Moreover, some companies, like a O L didn't want interoperability in the first place. They wanted to push people to just use aim. So anyway, all L brought lawsuits against Tribal Voice, claiming that the company was copying its systems, and McAfee then brought in a new CEO for Tribal Voice. In the following year, a company called c mg I bought Tribal Voice. CMGI has its own bizarre history. Today it's got a different name. It's called steel Connect and it focuses on supply chain management. So things have definitely changed for that company. But back in the nineties, cmg I was purchasing internet startups because, as we all know, the Internet was going to be the next big thing. But cmg I didn't see the dot com bubble bursting, and anyway, Powell would become a casualty of the dot com bubble. In the office that used to be Tribal Voice was shut down in early two thousand one. At its peak, it was said to have around two million users. Okay, we've got a lot more to get through before we go on to any more of these social networks and their history. Let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back, and next we actually have a site that's still around. You know, obviously pow Wow is gone, and uh, the globe is gone, but this next one you can still join. And I'm talking about classmates dot com. If you're of a certain age, you might remember some big news stories about how this site got into some trouble for various shenanigans, which we will touch on. But let's start at the beginning, which I am told is a very good place to start. So a guy named Randy Conrad's founded classmates dot com in nineteen again early days for the web, right, and the idea was simple. Users would create a profile on classmates dot com and they could fill out forms to list which schools they went to and what years they attended those schools, as well as things like if they served in the military, you know which branch, what years that kind of stuff, uh, and even some employment information, you know what companies did they work at and what years. And this was also that it would be easier to reconnect with folks who also attended those schools, or were enlisted in the military, or were employed by those entities. So this was all about looking up people you knew in the real world in uh, in real life or I r L. And that just makes me feel ancient for saying that. And you could find them online, and you might think, huh, I wonder whatever happened to you know, the kids who sat with me at lunch every day for all of high school? Where are those guys at? And you might create an account on classmates dot com to list where and when you attended school, and then you could look to see if others did the same thing. Some cases, you might be the first one there, right, and you might think, well, maybe someone will make an account and I'll get reconnected with an old classmate. Sometimes would join in and find out that there was already a pretty hefty community building up around that particular school and that class Anyway, it was a neat idea. It connected people by linking them through commonly shared experiences in life, and it could really help folks who were in school in the days before the internet was a thing, you know, at least for that general population. Obviously, the internet has been a thing for a while, like well before the web came online. But there were some of us, I mean, those of you all who have grown up with an internet in place your whole lives have lots of ways to stay in touch with people if you want to. But some of us older relics. We didn't have those options, right, Like, the Internet was not a thing when I was in high school, at least not to the general public. So there were no email addresses to share, there was no social network profiles you could share. And so once we graduated and we went our separate ways, and that was kind of that you didn't really have a way to stay in touch unless you like gave someone an address then just kept up with it. So classmates dot com change things, but the company also would over time get into some hot water now and again for various reasons. Uh, there are two basic levels of membership for classmates dot com. There's a free level of membership, but that gives you really limited access to features, to the point where you could see that you have notifications in your messages and you can't read them because you don't have permission to do so until you become a paid member. So that was a big part of of the controversy around classmates dot com, not even controversy, just people grousing about it, right because it would lure you in with the promise of reconnecting with old friends, but in order to be able to really access all the features, you need to become a paid member. Now, honestly, I think that that's a valid business decision. It just rubbed some people the wrong way because they were starting to get used to the idea of if it's on the web, it's more or less free. So it was an effective way of generating revenue. But the the features that you've got access to included stuff like being able to see who had viewed your profile. That way, you could be alerted if say, like that creepy person you knew in school is still stalking you or whatever. Not exactly comforting, or maybe you're thinking, hey, maybe that that cute classmate of mine looked in on me and I wonder whatever happened to them, and maybe it's a misconnection kind of thing. Anyway, One of the issues classmates dot Com ran into you is that the company would send out these promotional emails to prospective users, like maybe it's someone who's registered for free, or maybe it's just someone who could potentially become a member of classmates dot com. And some of these emails had claims in them saying that someone had been searching for that person on the website. You know, you get a message saying, hey, someone's looking for you, and you're thinking, oh, an old friend of mine is trying to look me up. I want to see who that is. So you might want to actually join classmates dot com as a paid member so you can find out who the heck is looking for me. Maybe it's important, or maybe this is a chance to reconnect with an old friend that I haven't talked to in years. But it turned out that at least some of the time, those messages were alerting you to situations that didn't exist, that no person was actually searching for you, which, by the way, is I gotta feel awful right that you get an email saying, hey, someone's looking for you, and when you pay the fee so you can access the information, you find out, actually, no one has looked for you, no one's thought about you in years. You might as well not even exist to those people. I might be projecting it here anyway. Some users brought a class action lawsuit against classmates dot Com, and the company would eventually settle the lawsuit and paid out a couple of million dollars in two thousand and eight. It was a really big deal at the time, but another thing they got them a bad reputation is. The site uses an auto renewal process, so if you do get a paid membership, it automatically renews your membership at the end of you know, a year's service. And from what I understand, joining classmates dot Com as a paid member is kind of like when you join like a gym or a fitness center. It can be incredibly challenging to cancel your membership once you're in. It's like the mafia. Once you're in, you're in. At least that's how it used to be. I don't know if it still is, but PC World back in two thousand six had an article that was titled just canceled the bleep account. The bleep in this case at like just random symbols, you know, kind of like Cubert cursing if you remember the Cubert video game I'm really dating myself in this episode anyway, Uh, the PC World said that that classmates dot Com counted as a quote unquote big hassle when you wanted to cancel your membership. Despite these and some other controversies, classmates dot Com is still active today. I don't know about you. Totally cool being persona non garratta to my high school classmates. For the most part, it's good old gen X. You know, we kind of cut ties once we left and didn't look back. I didn't even go to any of my high school reunions. I just skipped them all. But enough about me. Let's move on to a different social network, okay. Dan Pelson and Jane Mount create a site that would have many social network elements to it, including a message board, had intend messaging. It linked together different folks through common interests, and it would later go on to incorporate things like internet audio and video, so it would evolve over time and increase the features of the site. And this was called Bolt dot com and it had a relatively decent run. And remember this one also launched mid nineties before the dot com bubble burst, so for about a decade things ran fairly well at Bolt dot com. Despite the dot com bubble burst. It stuck around, it survived that calamity, and initially Bolt was targeting teenagers as its user base. Here's the thing, though, when people join a network and they like the network and they form relationships on that network, they tend to stick around and it becomes an age user base. So the users were getting older and older uh and continuing to use Bolt and Bolt was not being super effective at attracting new users. This is a message that we will here repeated with Meta and Facebook in particular right that Facebook is a social network that has an enormous user base but has a real problem of attracting new users to the service and the existing users are just continuing to age well. In two thousand five, Bolt, through its parent company which was called Bolt Media, got into the video sharing business, and the original Bolt site, the social networking version of Bolt, kind of was pushed aside. It was shifted over to a new u r L which was Bolt to dot com. Two is in the number two ms actual numeral too. The original u r L Bolt dot Com became the host for this video sharing site, which more and more frequently wasn't so much about user generated videos but was more about sharing other videos, either created by Bolt Media or stuff like music videos. But then various media companies got really litigious because companies like Bolt were sharing music videos without you know, paying licensing fees, and the companies were getting sued, including Bolt Media getting sued for copyright infringement. Things got really rough for Bolt Media. So then a company called go Fish initially decides that it's going to acquire Bolt Media and Bolt to, the original social networking element for the company, turned off the quote unquote lights. It's shut down in two thousand seven, on April six at noon Eastern time. We actually have a specific time for when that site shut down. Asked for the acquisition, Well, that never happened. Go Fish got cold feet or cold fins or something. Anyway, Go Fish swam the heck away from this acquisition and Bolt Media the company went into bankruptcy. Now, the original Bolt had a brief revival in two thousand eight when a company called fund Bolt had secured the rights to the I P and a site very similar to the original Bolt or what became Bolt Too launched. But unfortunately this was only up for a few months before it once again had to close up shop, this time for good. Obviously, it was one of those issues where the costs were greater than any revenue being brought in, so Bolt was once again dead. So that one no longer around. Okay, next up, we have yet another nineties startup. This one is six degrees dot com. Now, interestingly, this emerged after people started playing the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's actually just based off this idea that any two people are only six degrees of separation between them. The Kevin Bacon version obviously is about linking actors together. Uh you know, Kevin Bacon is an actor for those of you who don't know this name. He's also Peter Quill's Christmas present. According to the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, which I watched recently and was delighted by. Anyway, Kevin Bacon has been in a ton of movies, and he's worked with a huge number of actors. So he's been around and worked with so many that it's possible to essentially link any two actors who have ever worked in Hollywood together, using Kevin Bacon as kind of the link king material between the two. If you move forward a couple of years into an entrepreneur named Andrew win Reich created a social network based off this idea that everyone is just six degrees of separation or less from everybody else, and that by mapping your social web, you can find connections to and between people that you never suspected, Like maybe you had that small world experience where you find out that two different friends you have happened to know each other. But the two friends you you know, they're in very different friends circles, right, Like maybe you know one from someplace you worked and one from a social circle, and it turns out these two people are also friends with each other, and you never knew that. You just have that strange experience. Well, that's the kind of thing that Winrich was kind of interested in exploring, and so he created six degrees dot com. And with six degrees, users would put in their information, and they would also include information about their contacts, right the people they knew, and users who listed one another would end up getting connected, and they could also put in folks who weren't on the network too, you know, as part of their connections. And then those folks would eventually get hounded by emails asking them to create a profile on six degrees dot com to build out the network further. This social web model would be kind of a foundation for future social networks like MySpace, which we will talk about in the next episode, and other ones like Facebook. Now, the original six degrees dot com was bought by another company in ninety five million dollars, and then we get to the old dot com bubble bursting, and like several of the other companies we've mentioned in this episode, the parent company for six degrees hit turbulence and didn't make it through, so the site shut down around two thousand. Now there is a six degrees dot com social network out there today. There is one that's active, but I have no idea who runs it at this point. I did some looking and didn't find a whole lot of information. The website has a copyright notice listed as so if that is when it was relaunched, it's pretty recent. I will say it is not an HTTPS link, so it's not secure. If you go to that site, it is not a secure site. I would say that means do not put identifiable information into that site, because anyone could be snooping and you wouldn't even know. I did check the contact us link to see if it would give me more information, but it just takes you to a little online form and it didn't have time to fill out something and get any information before this podcast. But I suspect that six degrees dot com of today has no common ground with the original incarnation, and it's just the general idea brought back around again. All right, we've got some more to cover before we finish out this particular episode. Before we do that, let's take another quick break. We're back okay. In and nine, we get a couple of online journal sites launching. Open Diary opened in and live Journals started journaling in nine. So these sites would allow users to create online journals and to share those journals, either publicly or with specific friends. They also introduced a feature that was really a Web two point oh idea. That was that they allowed other users to leave comments on posts, so your friends could actually comment on things you wrote. So, for example, I remember I used live journal once upon a time to post things like April Fool's jokes, and the comments would be uh. They would begin with people saying, Wow, that's incredible, and then with people saying, oh, I see what you did. And I would try to leave as many clues as possible that I was just joshing. But I eventually gave up April Fool's Jokes because I felt like I got too good at lying and I didn't like that. Anyway, The whole idea of leaving comments user generated comments on posts really became another foundational element in social networks moving forward, This is another basic building block that would be very important for social networks, and both open Diary and live journal would survive the dot com purge once the bubble bursts, so they both made it through that. Now an Open Diary case, the site would evolve over time. It introduced new features and new ways to interact with one another. But despite the fact that it was continuing to introduce these new features, the business side was really starting to struggle post two thousand ten, so the side actually shut down in February two fourteen. It had been struggling financially for a couple of years at that point, and it would remain offline until two thousand eighteen. But in two thousand eighteen it relaunched, this time as a subscription based journaling service, so if you wanted to join, you could get like a month free, but then you had to become a paid subscriber to use the service. But one thing that was really nice was that former users could then access their old journal entries, which otherwise we have just been lost right because the site went down, and all of those journal entries, according to the company, had been preserved during the four years that it was offline, so that was kind of cool. So yes, open Diary still exists, just in a different form than it was up to through two thousand and fourteen. Live Journal has its own bumpy history. The site launched in the spring of nineteen, and as I've indicated, I was a fairly active member early on, but I drifted away from live journal as other social networks emerged and grew. A company called six Apart purchased live Journal in two thousand five from its creator, Brad Fitzpatrick, and a year later a Russian company called sup Media licensed the live journal brand and then outright purchased live Journal in two thousand seven. This move was seen as a pretty big blow to the live journal community, particularly the community that was in Russia. It was really popular in Russia, but with a Russian company purchasing the live journal brand, its signaled a possible crackdown on Russian users. There were fears that the company would impose censorship on users and it would bring live Journal in line with other Russian operated sites and services. The transition to Russia continued over the following years. The site moved to Russian based servers in two thousand sixteen, and it now operates in accordance with Russian law, which does put a bit of a damper on free expression. Now that being said, live journal, like open diary, is technically still online. You could create an account and journal on live journal, but it is in a very different form from the one I remember from the early two thousand's and again is burdened by the restrictions that the Russian government places on online communications. Really, anything that would be critical of the Russian government, the Russian Federation and is probably not going to stick around for very long on the platform. Okay, moving on. In two thousand two, a guy named Jonathan Abrams began working on a new social networking site that was building on the ideas that fueled services like six degrees dot com. This site was Friendster, which some of you may have used. Some of you probably have heard the name, but maybe never actually used it. It appeared to be leaning a little bit on the notoriety of the peer to peer service Napster. Napster made a huge name for itself because lots of people used it to pirate music, and it was nuked to oblivion by the music industry in legislation or rather court cases that I think you could only describe as being over the top, but I've done episodes about that in the past. Anyway, Friendster would allow users to create friend circles, and thus people could start to see connections between friends and ways, similar to what six degrees had been doing. But by this point six degrees had been shut down, right, so that was gone, so Friendster was able to kind of take its place. So Abraham's launched Friendster in two thousand three, and it got fairly popular pretty early on because it came out before MySpace and Facebook, and it wasn't bogged down by all the baggage of the dot com era the way earlier networks had been, because it came out after all of that dust had settled. Now, within the first year of launch, Friendster already had a suitor, and it was none other than our old friend Google. Now reportedly, Google's proposed acquisition would have been for thirty million dollars in Google stock, which, as you can imagine, would mean that original deal would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I think even more than a billion dollars at this point if people had just taken that deal and held onto the stock. Because of how google stocks value has grown you know, considerably since the early two thousand's, but Friendster turned down the office. It was all a moot point, and I suppose that for users of the site that was probably for the best at the time, because Google has a very long history of acquiring and then subsequently shutting down services. Anyway, in two thousand four, the board of directors for Friendster handed Jonathan Abrams his walking papers. They essentially fired him as CEO and replaced him. Uh. There was kind of a revolving door for the leadership of Friendster for a little while, and a few years later, Friendster was losing most of its American user base as people were migrating to other service is, namely Facebook. The site continued to enjoy popularity in Asia, however, so while America was seeing you know, flagging results, Asia was doing much better. In two thousand nine, a Malaysian company called m O L Global acquired Friendster, or at least some of Friendster's technology. Facebook would end up buying the rest of Friendster's i P and a couple of years later, Friendster transformed into a social gaming service and all the stuff that made it a pure social network was ditched. The whole site would go dark in two thousand and fifteen. We'll hear similar stories about this as we go on. In two thousand three, we also saw the launch of a social network geared toward professionals, you know, employers and people seeking employment. And I am, of course referencing linked In, which i've lee is another site that survives to this day, and I am reminded of that pretty much daily because I get emails alerting me to the fact that folks have apparently visited my profile, which has to be really disappointing for them because I have not kept up with it for years. Anyway, LinkedIn really puts the network in social networks because it's primarily intended to be a networking tool, and it can be a really effective one. You know, it can help you get connected with the right people, or you know, if you're really bad at social media, it's really great at convincing folks you are absolutely not the person they should hire. So a little word of advice if you use LinkedIn, don't post photos of your wild night in Vegas on the site. That seems like that would be a no brainer, but there's always someone who does it. LinkedIn had connections with PayPal founders. You know that also makes sense the folks who were saying, how can we create financial transactions online? How can we illitate that having the same idea of how can we facilitate networking like professional networking online? Makes sense. So it operated as a private company until two thousand eleven. That's when it held its initial public offering when transformed into a publicly traded company, and it would continue as a publicly traded company on its own until two thousand sixteen, when Microsoft proposed a twenty six billion dollar acquisition. The company was offering almost two hundred dollars a share, and the shareholders of LinkedIn said yes please. Now, as I mentioned, LinkedIn is still very much alive. It is a Microsoft owned service to this day. You can create an account, you can fill out your education and employment history. You can network with colleagues and perspective employers or employees. And I see a lot of my peers getting a ton out of using it, like former co workers of mine are really leveraging LinkedIn. Well, I probably should be using it, but y'all, I hit social network fatigue hard a couple of years ago, and I have not recovered yet and here's another one, another site that is technically still around kind of so let me explain. We're gonna conclude on this one for this episode. This social network is called high five spelled h I and then the numeral five, and it originally launched in two thousand three, shortly before my Space would take the stage. Ramu Yala Manschi is the founder of high five. He earned a degree in computer science at the University of Illinois, and then he worked in different capacities at several different tech companies, including one that got acquired by our old friend c mg I before cmg I became that supply chain company. Now, the original High five was similar in many ways to my Space. Users would create profiles, they would seek out connections with other users. There was a focus on reconnecting with people you already knew. I r L again, I feel ancient saying that. Anyway, according to Yellomanchi, the site was profitable within its first year. Now, if that's true, that's incredible. I don't know if it's true, because the site would continue seeking out investment rounds moving forward, and I don't know what their method was to generate revenue. I assume it was advertising, but there's very little information available for the original incarnation of High five. Yellomanchi emphasized growing his user base beyond the United States, which was probably a good idea because there was a lot less competition outside the US. In time, people in Latin American countries really became loyal High five users. That became like the real ground swell of the user base was in Latin America, and it propelled High five to a dominent spot among social networks, or at least a little while. Now. I might one day need to do a full episode to really look into what happened at high five, because if you look at most articles mentioning the company, things changed really really fast, and in a way that that brings up questions and I don't have the answers to them. Supposedly, High five was a top social networking site in two thousand and seven, second only to my Space. So my Space is number one, despite the fact that it came out after High five. Then you have High five, you get to two thousand eight, things have changed already. It's now in third place because Facebook was really gaining traction in two thousand and eight. But still you would think that a social networking site, one that has a strong base in Latin America and is ranked third behind two of the Juggernauts, would still more or less be okay. Right, Like, this is a company that supposedly was profitable in its first hear it should be fine, but apparently it wasn't. So in two thousand nine, the company gets a new CEO and it switches focus. It drops the social network stuff, it gets out of the social network game. It turns into a social gaming company. Which you know, it's not the first time we've heard that, right, We already heard that before. The third largest social network company would no longer be a social network company, but it did stick around, so High five was still a thing. But in two thousand eleven things would change again. Tagged, which is a different social network company that I'll talk about in the next episode, acquired High fives assets. Some of the High five team then apparently went on to found a different social gaming site, but that one lasted less than a year, so social gaming was just a no go anyway. Tags version of High five would change a little bit. Initially, they just stripped the games that High five would run on its social gaming site and replace them with games that were developed by Tagged members. But there's always a bigger fish. So then Tagged gets scooped up by another company called the Meat Group m e et, not the Meat group like sausages and stuff, but meet like let's meet anyway. I'm sure I'll mention that again in the next episode when we talk more about Tagged itself. But anyway, high fives still stuck around. In fact, it's around today, but it's not a social gaming site, and it's not as much of a social network site either. It's really more about meeting new people with kind of an emphasis on online dating and flirting. That seems to be where the focus is now, So I think of it kind of more like Tender or Grinder, but as a social network as opposed to just strictly about meeting and king up. So it's less about reconnecting with folks you already know and more about meeting new people. So while the site is still around, it has a very different approach to the service that launched way back in two thousand three. And that wraps up this first part of kind of a history of social networks. It's not an exhaustive history. There are others that I have not touched on, some of which were popular in other parts of the world briefly, but I am gonna continue to cover the big ones and talk about what happened and how things unfolded. You know, we're starting to get into the years where we get the big names like my Space and Facebook and whatnot. But we'll pick up with that in our next episode, and until then, if you have suggestions for me reach out let me know. You can do so by downloading the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download and use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff in the search field. There's a little microphone icon. You can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length that way, or if you prefer, drop me a message on Twitter while it's still a thing. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W. I'll have alternatives lined up in the near future if you don't want to be on Twitter anymore. But that's it for this episode and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.