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The History of Social Networks: Pinterest to Snapchat

Published Dec 12, 2022, 11:19 PM

After the wave of microblogs, social networks started turning to some interesting places. You had image-oriented networks like Pinterest and Instagram. And you had Snapchat, which introduced the idea of content that only stays online temporarily before disappearing. Plus more!

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? Are you all right? Friends? We're soldiering on in our extremely long series about the history of online social networks. I believe this is the fifth episode in that series at this point, and by my reckoning, we have gone from the mid ninety nineties up to or so and so far. If you've been following this series, you've probably noticed there have been some waves of similarities in networks as they have emerged. So early on, we had really simple networks designed to either connect or reconnect people, with the emphasis gradually shifting to the reconnect for most networks as people were finding their real life friends and family in this strange new world of the Internet. Following that, we learned about some journaling sites that let users keep an ongoing weblog or blog about their lives and hopes and dreams and thoughts. It was part personal diary, part showcase for your work. A lot of those sites are still around today. Many of them have gone through massive changes, including changes of ownership, over the years. I'm looking at you. Live Journal owned by a Russian company at this point. Then we had an age where profiles became a really big thing, you know, like Facebook and MySpace really grew in this era, where people would create a sort of home base online and then they would reach out from that home base. There was also a surge of niche oriented social networks around this time that appealed to specific demographics, like dog owners or people who knit. I didn't really talk about ravelry, but that's another example of a social network that was catering to a niche audience. Also a really exclusive social network for a while, like it was invitation only anyway. Then we get to a bunch of services that focus on microblogging, you know, ditching the long journal format for short, you know, sometimes witty or pithy messages. This would be your Twitters, your Plurics, your Jaikus, and to a lesser extent, your Tumblers, because Tumbler obviously is more than just short blogs. And that was the next entry, really and now we're coming up to the latest in this series. We're up to about twenty ten, and we get to Pinterest, the picture perfect social network, at least on the surface. But like many of the companies we've already talked about in this series, Pinterest has a dark side as l and we'll get to that. But first, where did Pinterist come from? Well, it all began with Ben Silberman. He had worked for Google before he set off to go into business for himself, and first he attempted to create an e commerce app for the iPhone that he called Tote t O t E. But apparently users found the design of Tote too complicated. And I can believe that it sounds like something that can happen when you consider that Silberman came from Google, because we all know Google's projects are driven by engineers, and sometimes that shows. Not to say that the products are bad, but they work the way an engineer would put it together, and for people who aren't engineers, it can sometimes come across as needlessly complicated. Anyway, Tote fumbled the bag, as it were, and Silverman teamed up with Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra, who came out of Facebook and Radius Ventures l C. And together these three brainstormed and idea that would be around an image based social network like photograph based, not necessarily images that you took yourself. It could be, but didn't have to be, And it would be almost like a combination of scrap booking and social networks, where you could create image boards around themes. Maybe you create a board around the theme of Edwardian costuming. I can't tell you any of those I've visited, and I'm not being facetious. Maybe you create a different board for things like scenic overlook looks, places that just have a gorgeous view. Maybe you create a board that has interesting jewelry on it from various creators, or really anything else, if you if you like. So they worked on their idea throughout two thousand nine, and in March they launched the site with a closed beta, so just a small group of users who are testing and out making sure that everything marked the way it was intended. They opened this up slightly and then people in the beta program were allowed to send invites to others, but it was still otherwise a closed beta. And like we've seen with other entries in this series, that kind of exclusivity and controlled entry drove up interest. Like I said in previous episodes, everybody wants to get into the club that barely lets anyone in because you want to be one of the cool people. We'll hear that again before we're through with this series, because once upon a time I got to be a cool person. It um. It didn't stick, obviously, but we're still talking interest here. The team held back on opening up the floodgates, and growth was steady, but you know, fairly modest. You know, in three months they had three thousand users, and in nine months it was up to ten thousand, and by a year later, this little niche site was the talk of the social network industry, and Time magazine declared it one of the best sites in the world at that point. So the growth and users exploded, and over the years they grew tremendously. These days, the number of users are it's somewhere in the four hundred thirty million neighborhood, which is not bad. You know, it's not Facebook by a long shot, but four thirty million is a lot of people. From early on, Pinterest became a site that attracted brands to it because companies could create Pinterest accounts and boards and use these boards to showcase products in attractive ways. So it was kind of like getting access to a magazine and being able to turn every single page of that magazine into an ad. Companies loved this and they worked. Pinterest also became a social network that had far more women as members than men, which made it a real outlier. In fact, estimates say that women make up more than seventy percent of the user base on Pinterest, and it kind of tried to groom and cultivate a reputation for being a woman friendly and safe space. More on that in a moment too, now. An early obstacle for Pinterest came when folks actually did something no one ever does, and they read the terms of service because until the wording said that Pinterest would own all images uploaded to the website. Yeah, you might have taken the photo. If you upload it to Pinterest, Pinterest claims ownership of the image, not you, and in Pinterest committed to never selling those images. So you know, it was one of those complicated things. You think, well, I took the photo, I should have the copyright to that photo. But Pinterest was saying, we published the photos, so now we have the copyright and you agreed to it in the terms of service. So that that was a bit of a sticking point early in pinterest history. In twenty nineteen, skipping away ahead because I mean the company grows, the company gets lots more users, people begin to find really creative ways to use it. But there's no real point in in diving into all that because I've pretty much summed up what I would say. But in twenty nineteen, the team decided to hold an initial public offering. So when you go from being a privately held company to a publicly traded company, and it was bringing in a lot of revenue, but it had not yet become profitable. So again pinterest launched in in twenty nineteen, it's going to become a publicly traded company. But throughout its history, at this point, it had not once turned a profit. It was operating at a loss. So it's bringing in lots and lots of money, but it cost more just to keep in business. So this is not a huge surprise. It's not like it's an outlier for pinterest. We have seen lots of social networks follow this route because the first phase of a social network typically is all about building value by attracting a large user base. You know, you want to get as many people on your service as possible and grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. That is your goal. Then once you have a pretty large user base, you try to figure out how to make money off of them or with them, because typically your user base becomes your product and advertisers become your customers. Now, Pinterest would not host its first profit until twenty twenty one, which is last year when I'm recording this. Anyway, in twenty nineteen, the company went public. Now, at its height, the stock was valued at eighty five dollars per share. However, as of this recording, it's around twenty three dollars per share, which is a fairly drastic drop off. But we've got a bigger one later in this episode. Earlier this year, back in June two tho Ben Silberman stepped down as CEO. He had been in that position since and he stepped down. He is now the chairman of the board and a guy named Bill Ready has taken the helm of pinterest, And I guess you could say that Bill was prepared to do the job anyway. Ready comes from companies like PayPal and Google and has a long history and things like monetization. Silberman likely stepped down in part due to an issue with the company's stock price falling even as it was posting its first profits in company history. But then there's also this dark stuff that we need to talk about that came to light over the past couple of years. So in so two former pinterest employees came forward, two women who accused Pinterest of being a culture where things like racist and sexist behave ivir were running rampant within the company, and that there were issues with pay inequality, and that the company was known to take retaliatory actions against employees who spoke out about this kind of stuff. Then Francis Bower Brower, an executive with Pinterest, sued the company on the grounds of gender discrimination and retaliation. Shareholders began to sue the company as well. Because of these kind of issues, employees staged a digital walkout of pinterest. So my guess is like these actions collectively also contributed to Silberman's decision to step down. Now, Pinterest would settle Brower's lawsuit for twenty million dollars and had an additional two and a half million dollars earmarked for charities that help you know, women and people of color within the tech sector. Meanwhile, one of the women who stepped forward in twenty would end up working with California lawmakers to draft legislation that protects employees who speak out against their employers. So it's legislation that really comes down hard on things like retaliation. Then we have the matter of Christine Martinez. She claims she is the unacknowledged co founder of pinterest, that she worked as an unpaid consultant when Silverman and Skiera and Sharp were brainstorming on how pinterest would work. She filed a lawsuit that specifically named Silverman and Skiara, claiming that they they had listened to her advice. She had served as a mentor and the UH council for them when it came to designing a product that was really targeting women users. So she says, like they didn't know anything about appealing to women, so they turned to me and I gave them guidance. She claims to have been the person responsible for deciding that users would organize images on boards, and that she played a part in creating the terminology of connecting an image to a ward and calling it a an action of pen it like you pen it to your your bulletin board. Now, Unfortunately for Ms Martinez, she never had any sort of written contract with the creators. It's not like she was an official contractor or or uh consultant or anything like that. It was all more of a verbal agreement. She says. There was an understanding she would be compensated should the company ever become a success, and when pinterest went public in twenty nineteen and there was no check in the mail, she says she realized that she was not going to be compensated and that the co founders, she says, were engaged in idea theft. Thus she files a lawsuit against the company. Now, the lack of documentation makes it seemed to me like miss Martinez has a pretty tough case to make, even assuming everything she says is accurate. For the record, I have no reason to doubt her. It's just that there seems to be little in the way of corroborating evidence at this stage. But again I have not involved in the trial. There could be tons of stuff and I'm just not aware of it. So maybe that's the case. But at any rate, as of this recording, that lawsuit is moving forward. So Martinez originally filed this lawsuit back in September one, and then pinterest moved to dismiss the case in December one, and then June of this year, by being a judge ruled that the case can move forward. Justice is ever so swift here in the United States. Anyway. We'll have to see where this goes and whether Pinterest will defend itself or settle out of court. Okay, that's just one more in our line of social networks. We've got lots more to come, but first let's take a quick break. We're back. So our next social network also relates to images, but this time we're talking about Instagram. So we've already mentioned Instagram because you know, we covered Facebook and Facebook now known as Meta, acquired Instagram in for at the time a staggering one billion dollars that would positively be overshadowed by Facebook's subsequent acquisition of WhatsApp for sixteen billion dollars two years later. So we're just gonna talk briefly about Instagram's early years and how things changed post acquisition, because a lot of the stuff we talked about kind of feeds right into the Facebook entrigue that we already did earlier in this series. So before Instagram, there was an app called Bourbon, a developer named Kevin's Systrom created Bourbon, which was not a type of whiskey, but rather an app that let you check into new places and gave your friends the chance to see where you were from place to place. It was spelled bu, r, b, N, and uh. In many ways, this was similar to four square, the original version of four square, which had launched in two thousand nine. So we did get a little brief period of location based check in services that relates to social networks. Some of them would interact with social networks so that you can post your check ins to say, your Facebook account, that kind of stuff, and some of these would pivot to do other things. Four Square did this. Four Square pivoted away from the check in business, mostly because there were a lot of people who had safety and privacy concerns about these, and it became harder and harder to monetize those without falling into some potential traps when it comes to regulators, because I mean, obviously, anytime you're monetizing a person's location, that gets into some sticky situations. So a lot of those would end up moving away from the location based check in stuff. Anyway, System got some financial backing for Bourbon, and he brought on Mike Krieger to help build out the app, but over time they both realized that Bourbon was too similar to four Square and that their test users were actually sharing photos like crazy more than they were using the app to check into physical locations. So they decided they would switch rails and instead they would develop the app as a photo sharing social network. But they wanted to change the name as well, and they came up with the name Instagram because it's a play on the phrase instant camera and on the word telegram, which I'm guessing all of y'all already knew, but I thought I would just throw it in there for, you know, the sake of being complete now as Instagram. The app launched in October, initially just for iOS. Within three months, the app had more than a million users, so it was off to the races. A month and a half after that, they were up to two million users. The trajectory of growth outpaced earlier social networks like Facebook and Twitter. They were just on a rocket ship, really, and I'm guessing that's why Facebook would ultimately come forward with an offer to buy out Instagram, because, as anyone who has paid any attention to Facebook, slash Meta knows the company typically tries to do two things. If any other service starts to gain some traction against Facebook's other products, first thing they will try to do is buy it, and if that fails, they will try to copy it in an effort to keep people on Meta slash Facebook platforms, because we all know if you're spending time on someone else's service, well, then you're spending less time on Meta's services, and that's bad for Meta's bottom line. But we're not quite up to the acquisition just yet. The early Instagram allowed users to post images, to leave comments on other people's images, and to follow other users, and that was about it. A little less than a year after launch, Instagram would introduce options that would really change things up make things more attractive for Instagram. They included some digital filters and some image editing features. At the same time, iPhones cameras were improving, so it was kind of a perfect convergence of the hardware improving and the software giving more options that attracted new users. And now users could tweak their photos, even adding camera effects before sharing them with their followers, and it really made Instagram pop in popularity. In two thousand twelve, Android users would finally get a chance to use Instagram as there was now an Android version of the app, And not too long after the android version came out, Facebook announced its intent to acquire Instagram. Now, when Facebook bought Instagram for a billion bucks, the startup app company was really small, like there was a Baker's dozen worth of employees. And for those of you who aren't familiar with one of Baker's dozen, is that means thirteen. So imagine being one of thirteen people when the company you work for has been bought by by another company for a billion dollars. That had to be a heck of a day. So Facebook buys Instagram probably because of a combination of factors like a desire to scoop up competition because they didn't want the fact that, you know, Instagram was attracting younger users. Facebook was kind of already having an issue in attracting young users like the users they had they had in droves, but it's it was getting harder and harder to convince younger people to come into the service, whereas Instagram that was really attractive to a lot of young people. So one thing Facebook was doing was buying audience, but another reason was that they did not want some company like Google or Twitter to get hold of Instagram and potentially get a leg up on Facebook. Now. At the time, the folks that Instagram were assured that they would remain in charge and they wouldn't really have to worry about Facebook interfering with Instagram's operations too much. But as time would go on, the team of Instagram would see Facebook both direct Instagram to incorporate specific features as well as it would lift some of Instagram's functionality for other Facebook products and thus kind of make Instagram less special as a result. So Kevin's Systrom and Mike Kreeger both chose to leave Instagram in two thousand eighteen, which was coming in a tough time for Facebook, though you could argue not nearly as tough as this past year has been in many ways. So by two thousand eighteen, Facebook was already known as essentially celebrating the death of privacy, which it was getting flak four, but the company was also in the spotlight due to issues like Cambridge Analytica for an Intelligent scandals, concerns about misinformation campaigns, and more. Obviously, a lot of that has not changed in years since. In fact, some of it has just expanded to other types of misinformation, like when the pandemic broke out and COVID misinformation ran rampant on Facebook. Anyway, the initial word was that system and Krieger wanted to set out to make something new. And it was about a year after that, in two thousand nineteen, when publications like Wired and The Verge started to publish articles that gave more details into what may have driven the co founders to leave the company they created, and there were a lot of them. For one thing, apparently Instagram's popularity was a matter of resentment among certain Facebook staff because they were looking at Instagram as pulling traffic away from Facebook proper, and so it became kind of a territorial thing. Now, it is never good when you have this kind of animosity between different departments within the same company. I know there's some companies that try to foster a sense of competitiveness against each other in these departments. I personally find that to be uh counterproductive for the overall health of the company. But what do I know. I'm not a billionaire anyway, making matters worse, Zuckerberg would say in an earnings call that Instagram's success was largely due to the support it was getting from Facebook. But as we've already heard in this episode, Instagram was already on an adoption trajectory that was way more aggressive than Facebook's own history. So it was tough because for on one hand, Instagram staff were being hated on but because of their success, and on the other hand, they their success was being claimed by the same department that hated them for being successful. So it was kind of a double whammy in that sense. But another issue was that there was increased interference and restrictions coming from Mark Zuckerberg himself. In particular, there was a time when Kevin Sistram was giving interviews to the press, and Zuckerberg sequently passed an edict company wide saying no one would be allowed to talk to the press unless they first got permission from either Zuckerberg or from Cheryl Sandberg. And I'm sure that rubbed system the wrong way because it sends the message that he's not trustworthy, right, he can't represent the company well without permission. He's not towing the line. And y'all, I have been on that kind of situation in the past, not at iHeart, but in the past, I've been in that same situation, and I can definitely tell you it feels like an insult. Anyway, Like I mentioned before, Facebook was making demands on Instagram and lifting features for the core Facebook app, and all of that was just not what Systram and Krieger wanted, and so they split. Anyway, That's about all I have to say about Instagram as we did, as as I said, cover some of this stuff already in the Facebook entry. Obviously, we've seen Instagram change a great deal over time. There's been a greater emphasis on algorithms served content, so you're far less likely to see stuff that from your friends and family that you follow, and more likely to see stuff that Instagram thinks you want to see. So for some people that might be great because you're discovering stuff that you otherwise wouldn't know, but for others, it's very frustrating that you're not seeing the stuff you you joined Instagram to see. Right. Uh. Then, of course Instagram introduced reels back in twenty twenty. It was a pretty obvious attempt to copy TikTok and convince users not to jump ship to the younger social network, which had limited success, but it's another example. You know. Again, if Facebook can't buy it, they try to copy it. Uh. There's also the ongoing concern that Instagram's model is causing harm to younger users, particularly to young women. So back in late twenty one, Facebook whistleblower Francis Hogan shared internal documents from her former employer, and she shared them with journalists and lawmakers, and among those documents were discussions about how Instagram was potentially contributing to negative mental health conditions for young women in particular. Uh, that story is still unfolding. It prompted Facebook slash Meta to scrap, at least for the time being, their plans to launch a version of Instagram targeting younger users, which gets into some pretty dark stuff. But I'm going to save the rest for another time because I'm sure I'll do episodes about Instagram in the future where we'll really dive into all that. Now, the same year Instagram launched, there was a similar social network called Path that took the stage. So again we're seeing waves of similar networks hit at the same time. So this time we're talking about the centralized theme of a social network centered around sharing photos. Now, Path was founded by Dave Morin, a former product manager at Facebook and the Napster founder Sean Manning, and a former Napster engineer and future Slack designer named Dustin Moreau. In so, like Instagram, Path was a mobile based social network service. In fact, it remained mobile based throughout its history. It would never had a desktop site, and it let users share photos with their friends and family. But unlike Instagram, Path limited how far and wide users could connect. So originally the service would let users connect with up to fifty people max. And the implication was that Path is really something for users to rely upon with their close friends and family, but it's not trying to encourage you to share it with every casual acquaintance or friends of friends. This would eventually change over the course of the services life, which spoiler alert, would ultimately come to an end. Path is no longer a thing. A Path would later increase the cap to a hundred fifty connections, and then ultimately would remove the cap entirely because while their approach was meant to give people a sense that this is really for your actual community of friends and family, that limitation meant Path was inhibiting its own growth, and it ultimately meant the Path would not reach a level of success and would would fizzle out anyway. When it started off, Path had a similar feel to Instagram, which was the appeal for for many users um and yet it felt smaller than Instagram, and that also appealed to a certain group of users. They didn't have to worry about their photos being seen by total strangers because Path would limit sharing to just their own close contacts. Later, Path would incorporate other features that made it similar to some of its competitors. Users would be able to post updates that were kind of similar to tweets on Twitter. They could also use Path to check into locations, kind of like four Square or the aforementioned Bourbon But behind the scenes, things were not going particularly well. For one thing, in twelve, users became aware that Path was recording user phone contacts, So if you join Path, it really meant handing the company your network of contacts, and at no point to Path apparently alert users to this, let alone secure their permission, which you know that's a big no now, And so the US government got very interested in Path and what data the company was actually gathering from its users and how the company was using that data, so the US Federal Trade Commission or FTC, ultimately would find Path eight hundred thousand bucks due to the company storing data belonging to underage users in particular, and the US government ruled that Path would be subjected to review for every two years with regard to its privacy policies and practices. On top of that, Path was struggling to compete with other social networks like Instagram. It eventually hit a peak of around fifteen million users, which is decent, but the company still had a fraction of the users that were found on bigger social networks. A company called Cacao out of South Korea would acquire Path, and while past the usage continued to decline in America, it did enjoy a modest amount of popula already in Indonesia. However, even that would not be enough to keep Path going, and in the fall of Kal announced that Path would shut down, which it almost immediately did. Okay, we've got some more to get through before the end of this episode, but first let's take another quick break. Okay, we're back. We're up to eleven, and that's when we get a flagship product that would mark another concept in social networking, and this time it's the concept of disappearing content, as in, this product adopted the idea that people should be able to share information, and that information should have a limited lifespan and after a given amount of time, it disappears forever. And I am, of course talking about Snapchat now. Snapchat started off as a different named app. It was called Peekaboo p I c A b ooh. It was founded by three Stanford students, Avan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown. And in case you're wondering if the idea was always about trying to find ways to convince people to post nude and explicit photos and videos, the answers, yes, yes, that was the idea the whole time. So just as Facebook got its start as a way for Harvard students to score how hot their classmates were, Snapchat was all about how can we convince people to post risque photos of themselves. A lot of startup founders are happy to be privileged young men, white men in particular, and they are like the worst. And yes, I know I'm editorializing, but it's my show and I don't care anyway. The story goes that Reggie Brown thought up this idea. He thought, if you could make a site that would allow photos to only stay up for a given amount of time, uh, and then it would disappear forever, you could probably convince a lot more young women to post sexy photos of themselves. And so then he goes down the hall and he tells his buddy and his party partner, Evan Spiegel about it, because these guys were total party boys at Stanford, and they decided they would pursue this idea. They were like, this is a million dollar idea. By the way, my guess is Reggie was such a party bro that the other two co founders spotted how he might not quite fit in with their plans. So in eleven they pushed him out of the company. So the guy who allegedly came up with the idea of in the first place gets kicked out. He would later sue the two co founders. He successfully would be awarded more than a hundred fifty million dollars. But importantly that was in cash, not in a stake in the company, which really important because when the company would go public eventually in it turned the other co founders into billionaires. So he got a hundred fifty million, but the other two became billionaires. Uh that same Reggie Brown would later get into trouble with the law a couple of times for doing stuff like allegedly driving recklessly in luxury cars in South Carolina and also allegedly harassing neighbors. He even had a warrant out for his arrest at one point, but apparently had left South Carolina at the time. But I don't know much else about what's happened to him in the years since. Anyway, that's all gossipy stuff. Let's focus on the app itself. So Peekaboo launched for iOS in two thousand and eleven. Brown gets pushed out of the company not long after that. By September two thousand eleven, Peekaboo changed his names to Snapchat. A year later, Spiegel would write in the first blog post for the company, so this is two thousand and twelve a sort of pitch for the app, which has already been out for a while. And surprise, surprise, he left out the bit where the guys developed it in the hopes of seeing women take off their clothing. Instead, Spiegel said that quote, we're building a photo app that doesn't conform to unrealistic notions of beauty or perfection, but rather creates a space to be funny, honest, or whatever else you might feel like at the moment you take and share a snap end quote. So now the emphasis was really just on real time ephemeral photo sharing. A snap a photo, in other words, would stay open for one to ten seconds, depending on what the user had set for that photo, and then it would disappear, so you get a chance to see it and then it was gone. Snapchat launched for Android in two thousand twelve, and once again Facebook started to take notice of a startup that was one pulling focus away from Facebook properties and to attracting younger users, something that Facebook is always struggling with. Instagram had given Facebook access to a younger audience than what had been on Facebook, and Snapchat was giving access to an even younger crowd in the form of teenagers. So stories kind of conflict of this next bit. But the general sinse I get is that at some point early in Snapchat's history, probably around or so, Mark Zuckerberg made an offer to Evan Spiegel to acquire Snapchat, and Spiegel refused. So then Facebook goes and develops an app called Poke, which was named after the first in Facebook app. That app let users send a little poke message back and forth to each other. You would trade it off. If you received it, then you could send it back and Poke the app was a little different. It let users send images to each other, images that would automatically delete after viewing or after going unviewed after a certain amount of time. Essentially, it was copying what Snapchat was already doing. And again, if Facebook can't buy its competition, it tries to run them out of business by emulating them. Poke briefly got a lot of attention, but it was not long before folks kind of bailed on Poke and went to Snapchat. So while Zuckerberg I had to use the power of Facebook to squash Snapchat, at least according to some accounts, that effort failed. Allegedly, Zuckerberg then offered to purchase Snapchat for three billion with a B dollars, but Spiegel turned that offer down too, and then supposedly Google made a couple of offers to purchase Snapchat, with one in being for thirty billion dollars that's ten times what Zuckerberg had offered, and they still got a no thanks. Snapchat, the company which would later become Snap Incorporated, would introduce other features over time. Tons of camera effects would increase snapchats appeal among young users, who could make themselves look like, you know, puppies or monsters or I don't know, kids, I don't know what's wrong with these kids today? Kids who can understand anything they say that takes me back anyway. Users would eventually be able to send short videos to one another in addition to photos, also with the feature that the videos would disappear after viewing. Spiegel and team were aiming at teenagers, primarily, you know, kids who didn't want to be on Facebook because that's where their parents were, um, nor did they necessarily want the restrictions in place on Instagram. The immediacy and the temporary nature of snaps was what was attractive to its users. Snap would also introduce stories that let Snapchat users post a series of photos and videos to make, you know, a story. But the big difference here is that a Snap is something that a user could send to a specific person or group of people. So let's say you took a funny pick of your dog and you send it as a Snap to your friend who happens to love your dog, but you don't, you know, blasted to everybody else who couldn't give a crap about your dog. I like your dog, Don't get me wrong, I love dogs. Some of your friends are real jerks. But the story, on the other hand, becomes a series that anyone following your account can view. So a snap is kind of a one to one and a story is kind of a one too many. Snapchat also introduced a chat feature that doesn't keep an ongoing log for that chat, So when you do open up a chat, you can read the most recent messages, but nothing before that, and anything you post will go to the other person, but they also won't see the full history of the chat log. It provides a bit more privacy between the two communicators. Now, the US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, looked a little bit closer at Snapchat. It was suspicious that perhaps the site wasn't quite as diligent or as forthcoming about the disappearing nature of material on the service as it claimed to users. So the fear was that people were posting images and believing them to only be around temporarily, and thus there was no real risk to privacy when in fact those images might be sitting on servers somewhere, or there were third party tools that would allow people to record things that were posted to Snapchat, and Snapchat was not alerting users to this like it's You could argue, it's not Snapchat's responsibility to uh to to look after all these third party things, but you could argue it is that's responsibility to let users know, hey, this is an issue, and they weren't doing that. So the FTC argued Snapchat had deceived users with regard to the disappearing nature of the media that was shared on the service. So the FTC pointed out a few ways that snaps could outlast what Snapchat had claimed, and in the end, Snapchat agreed to pay a settlement to the FTC over these and other issues. Is including the fact that Snapchat was apparently harvesting location data from Android users while not disclosing that in terms of service. Snap would also introduce a tool called Discovery, which allowed brands to post content on Snapchat. I'm not gonna go further into that because I feel like that's really more of something I can chat about in a full episode about the company, and in Snapchat introduced spectacles. These are physical glasses that have built in cameras. In the frames, they the camera's face outward, obviously because who wants to just see, you know, the skin on the temple of the person wearing it, and they compare with a smartphone and thus record very short snippets of video. They were initially sold through a proprietary vending machine called snap Butt, but you could later pick them up online. When Snapchat, now known as Snap Incorporated, went public, the stock was to be priced at seventeen dollars per share. It would end up selling for more than that. Kind of had an up and down first day throughout the day, and it ended on twenty four dollars and forty cents per share, so above what they had planned. That's good news for a company at its peak in one shares traded at more than eighty dollars per share. Really good right. However, today, as I record this episode, they're selling closer to nine dollars forty cents per share, which is big, old youch Now, this is not the lowest that Snap has ever traded, I should add, but it ain't great. This past year, Spiegel sent on a memo to all employees, indicating that the company would be laying off around of the workforce and that it would also refocus on the three main areas of development, which are community growth, revenue growth, and augmented reality, with other areas receiving a reduced budget or being eliminated entirely. Recently, Evan Spiegel another message, letting employees know that he wants them back in the office for eight percent of the week, so four days out of the week for most folks. Spiegel has indicated that he thinks that the company isn't seeing as much collaboration as it needs to succeed. This is in line with what we've seen with a lot of other criticisms that we've heard about working remotely over the last year or so. Honestly, I'm not sure how realistic that is, Like, does that actually have the big impact that business owners think or are these other factors in the economy having a much larger impact on companies. And one of the places that business leaders look to blame a thing that they actually have control over is whether or not their employees have to come into the office. I again, this is me editorializing, but I feel like some business leaders fret if they don't have more control over their workforce, if they feel like their workers are not there for them to look in on and make sure that they're actually doing their job as opposed to, you know, slacking off or something. They just suspect that people won't do their jobs if they're not under the thumb of the boss at the office, which speaks very lowly of their opinion of their employees and my own estimation. Um, and I don't think that's necessarily the case. I do think because it's something they can have control over, they jump on it. Because even executives, even billionaires, realize there's stuff they have no control over and that is terrifying to them. For the rest of us, we deal with it every day because we're not billionaires, so we have less control over lots of stuff in our lives and we just cope. But billionaire's they're a delicate punch anyway. Um, they won't have to go back into the office until February of three, and then at that point they're expected to spend of the week they're I'm not sure what the reaction has been among Snapchat employees, because this is fairly recent news. As a record this episode, but I would imagine that a lot of people are not terribly happy about it anyway. UM, I should likely do a full episode about Snap and Snapchat really to dive into the whole thing. That's a quick overview of this odd social network. There's a lot more to say. I mean, there's a ton of of various criticisms have been directed at Snapchat, some in good faith, some not. Uh, there are lots of controversies around the service. I mean, it's targeting teenagers. But the nature of the app, and when you know that the creators, at least at some level, we're thinking about a way of encouraging women to take naked photos of themselves. That doesn't speak super well, right, Like, that's really problematic to put it lightly. But yeah, I'll leave all that for a future episode because there's multiple sides to the story. I don't want to oversimplify it and say that this is all a lest civy, this attempt to encourage people to take risk a photos. Uh. Snap has pointed out multiple times they actually have no way of seeing the content that's sent across their network, which is both important for user security and it's also important for the company's security because if anything ever is sent through Snapchat that ends up being dangerous. For example, let's say that you know, uh, bad actors, some terrorists, whether international or domestic, are using Snapchat to send information back and forth. Then the company has deniability right if they're not able to see what is being sent across the network, they cannot be held culpable for facilitating any of those communications. So you know, there's that too. It means that you know, if you if you want to be able to have that immunity from culpability, then you also can't have access to all the you know, risk a photos being sent back and forth. Okay, that's it, I'm done being a prude. Well, we'll sign off on this episode. We'll be back with more. We're coming up on a couple of other interesting entries and hopefully wrapping up this series. I hope in the next episode we'll see um and then the mean time, I'm still working on the end of the year episode as well, where I'm looking at some of the big stories that have broken across two in the text space. If there are any that you think I should definitively include that don't involve Twitter and elon Musk because obviously those are going to go in. Then reach out and let me know. There are a couple of ways you can do that. One as you can download the i Heart Radio app. It's free to download, free to install and use. Navigate to tech Stuff by putting tech Stuff in the little search field, and you can leave a voice message by clicking on the little microphone icon. Leave it up to thirty seconds and linked. If you like, you can let me know to use it in a future episode. Um, I won't do it unless you tell me too, or if you prefer, you can reach out to me via Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. YEA. 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.

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