Welcome to tex 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 Today. I'm finally going to wrap up our multi episode saga on the history of social networks. This would be the sixth entry in that series, So for those who are just joining now, clearly I've been talking about the history and evolution of various social networks, starting with some fairly primitive ones in the nineties, moving on to things like online journals and profile based networks of the early to mid two thousand's. Then I talked about the wave of micro blogging that would follow a few years later, where Twitter would stand on top of all the others. And in the last episode we left off with the emergence of snapchat and this concept of content that only stays visible for a short amount of time before it gets deleted. Now we're gonna pick up with Google's second big attempt at a social network. Now you might remember that the first go around for Google was ork It that was developed by one of Google's engineers named Orchit during their work week time, where employees of Google at the time, we're allowed to dedicate up to their work week two personal projects, or could grew out of that, or could actually got popular in places like Brazil and India, but didn't really get a lot of traction here in the United States, and ultimately Google would shut it down. Google had also attempted to make a dent in the social network space a couple of other times. In two thousand and eight, the company launched Google friend Connect, So rather than being a full social network on its own, Google friend Connect let users create a profile and rely on their open i d user name and password to log into compatible sites, and their Google friend Connect profile would be sort of a repository of information that these other websites could get access to. So it was kind of like having a little dossier on yourself, and then any site that integrated friend connect code in it could kind of scan that dossier. And that might sound a bit sinister, but the flip side is you didn't have to go through all the steps of building out your profile every single time you joined a new site or service because it could be populated based upon your Google friend Connect profile. So it's like it's like you're skipping character creation and going straight to the game for my gamers out there. Anyway, that project only lasted four years and Google ultimately shut it down. There are concerns about privacy and safety with Google friend Connect, and it ultimately didn't stick around, and um yeah, it joined so many other Google projects that subsequently got shut down so early. Was more social network adjacent than being a social network itself. Another tool that lasted for even less time than Google friend Connect was Google Buzz and this was kind of a messaging, blogging, and social networking tool that Google launched in It took the place of an older tool called Google Wave. Google Wave was meant for collaboration in real time, and I was one of the few people who actually really liked it, but my use case was very specific. Anyway, Buzz had some features similar to sites like Twitter and Facebook. It integrated into other Google products, so it wasn't really that much of a stand alone either. It was more like in conjunction with other stuff. But it also brought with it some massive privacy and safety problems. There was worries about people finding out that Buzz had automatically added people who were in their email contacts as followers, and in some cases that meant that, say, an abusive X might suddenly become very up to date on what their former partner is up to because they had been automatically, you know, added as a follower. Buzz did not last very long at all. It was shut down in two thousand eleven, just a year after its launch. Though some of the features would find their way into other Google products, which again not unusual for Google. But neither Buzz nor friend Connect were really full social networks on their own, but the same could not be said for a Google Plus. An earnest attempt to do Facebook better than Facebook, so Google announced the social network in the summer of two thousand eleven. Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz spearheaded this effort and proclaimed that the problem with sharing stuff online is that sharing was broken. It was too difficult to share stuff with subsets of friends without flooding everyone in your context list or having to painstakingly choose person after person in a long list of contacts. So Google Plus wanted to fix this by introducing the concept of circles. So the idea was that users would organize their contacts so their friends, their family, their coworkers, casual acquaintances, and they would organize them into groups that could be called circles, and you could designate specific circles to be specific things. Maybe you have one circle that you dedicate just for your family members, so you don't put anyone in there that's not family. Maybe you have another circle for your closest friends, like the people that you really hang out with the most and talk with the most. Maybe you have another circle just for your coworkers or your professional contacts. Maybe you even get more specific, maybe you create circles for folks that you like to play basketball with, or if you're me, maybe you make a circle with your geek friends that you hang out with at places like science fiction conventions or Renaissance fairs. And that really is true. I actually did have a circle on Google Plus just for the folks I knew from Renaissance fairs. For those who don't know, I used to be a street performer at the Georgia Renaissance Festival. That was a good time. I occasionally had tech stuff fans recognize me there, which, if you you know, you have to stay in character when you're when you're working as a street character at the Renaissance Festival. Let me tell you those days were some of the most fun and challenging days in my stay at a as a performer at the festival. Now, obviously some friends would fall into more than one circle, right, Like, I doubt that you have a friend out there that you think, this is my friend who does this and only this, and that's the only place they fit in my life. Maybe you do, in which case you are a far more compartmentalized than I am. But that's okay. If a friend fell into more than one circle, you could actually put them in as many circles as you needed to. So if your cousin also happens to be your co worker and also is the bard in your LARP group, you could put your cousin in all three of those respective circles. And the idea was that you would organize all your contacts in ways that reflected how they intersected with your life. Then when you wanted to post something, because you might say, well why would you, I mean, what's the point in organizing to this degree? Well, when you posted something on Google Plus, you could actually choose which circles saw that post. So maybe you wanted to post about something at work, but only your co workers would really care about it. Or alternatively, maybe you wanted to grouse about work, but you definitely didn't want any of your coworkers or your boss to see it. So you could select which circles would actually be able to see this post and everyone else would remain blissfully ignorant. So like, if you knew certain friends of yours loved your pet, then you could put them in a circle and every time you shared a pet photo, it would show up for them. But the people who couldn't care less about your pet, you know, bad people, they wouldn't see it at all. Still, getting everyone set up this way, you might think, especially if you have a lot of friends or acquaintances, it sounds like it's a lot of work, right, Like, man, there's nothing like sitting down to a brand new social network and then spending the next eight hours sorting people into different circles. But Google made this a little more fun by creating a drag and drop interface, So you would create a circle and then you would have all your context showing up as little photo icons so you can see pictures of your friends, and then you would just click on an icon and drag them to whichever circle you want to put them in. You could do that over and over again, which admittedly is more fun than just going through a checklist and clicking a little box to put a check mark next to it. Eventually, you would also be able to create a circle that would mute people in that circle, so you're essentially blocking people that way. So if there was someone who was harassing you or just irritating you, or maybe it was just someone that you're like, I don't want this person to ever be able to see my stuff, you could put them in that circle and then they would be kind of sequestered from all the stuff you were doing, which was handy. Another feature in Google Plus was called Sparks. This was a discovery tool to help people find content that they related to. Uh Sparks had topics divided up into categories, So you could go to the Sparks page and you would see categories like sports or fashion or movies or whatever, and you could click into those, or you could also search specific terms within the Sparks page and you would get results that way, which would include results of users who related to those search topics. And Google Plus gave us an early version of Hangouts a feature that would find its way into other Google products down the line. At one point it was a standalone feature, so Hangouts was its own thing. Then it got kind of pulled into Gmail and Hangouts became sort of an instant messenger um aspect of Gmail. Then it became phased out for Google Chat. It's just kind of the way Google products work is that they hop around a lot, and they morph into other things or eventually get phased out for some other service where there's too much overlap. Anyway, Hangouts would allow people to do video chats pretty early on, and it had a really cool suite of features. It could allow up to tend people to connect in a session, and the software kind of acted like a digital producer. I remember the first time I of Hangouts and how impressed I was because it would automatically switch to whomever was talking at a given moment. So let's say you're having a panel discussion and you've got five people on the panel. Whomever is talking would get highlighted and would become like the big picture on the screen and would as long as they were talking, they would be there. And then when someone else would take over, it would switch and yeah, this is second nature now, right. We see it in lots of tools like Microsoft Teams or in Zoom, but at the time it was a brand new thing and it was really impressive. It's probably one of the most impressive aspects of Google Plus, at least in my estimation. Now. When Google first announced this social network in the summer of two thousand eleven, it said that there would be, you know, a limited beta program, and so they were only going to let in a relatively small number of people and you would submit to be considered. And I was one of those folks who got let in at the very beginning. And let me tell you, I felt good. Like I recognize what a elitist kind of thing that is, Like I get it, Like I've seen it happen numerous times. And I have to say, when you experience it, you're like, oh, this is what it feels like to be part of an exclusive club. It feels nice. Uh, you know, from an objective point of view, I think it's a destructive feeling. But I have experienced it, and I gotta say it does feel good when it happens. It also meant that I was experiencing Google Plus when almost everybody who was on the platform was either a tech journalist or someone who worked in you know, tech communications to the public, or it was like entrepreneurs, it was like people who had been in charge of launching startups. And that meant suddenly I was in a social network with my professional peers, and you know, no one else was there. This meant I actually had the chance to interact with my professional peers way more than I typically would because I just, you know, I was I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm not in New York, and I'm not in San Francisco, so I'm not in one of the places or Los Angeles. I'm not in one of the places where there were these sort of a nexus of tech journalism. So this was great for me. I loved it. Unfortunately, it also meant that the aspect of Google Plus I liked most was the one that obviously was unsustainable, because you you could not keep Google Plus to this incredibly exclusive, limited social network. It would not have done well and it would have died anyway. To succeed, Google had to open this up to everyone. Otherwise, what's the point. But that would also mean that those of us who were you know, the the tight tech journalist folks kind of got pushed apart as more people flooded in, which, again, small price to pay. It doesn't it wouldn't have worked otherwise, but it lost its appeal for me pretty quickly, and I wasn't alone. Google Plus was kind of a flash in the pan, uh, one that a lot of people paid attention to early on, but that was mostly because it was so exclusive, and then you had a flood of people who joined as soon as they had the opportunity to. By the end of twenty eleven, there were something like ninety million users, but that still wasn't enough to build a sustainable momentum to keep Google Plus going, and interests began to fade fairly quickly. I'll talk more about that after we come back from this quick break. Okay, so Google Plus launches, It gets a lot of attention. Everybody wants to be part of the club. The doors open and then everyone rushes in, and then people say, oh, is this it? Like that's almost exactly what happened, right, Everyone finally got access to Google Plus, and then they were wondering what all the fuss was about. Because the thing that made Google Plus special for the early people who were there was the fact that they were able to chat with people they knew or at least knew of, and there was no one else there. That's what made it special. Well, if that's the only thing that makes it really special, then that goes away as soon as you opened up the gates. So it became kind of a paradox or catch twenty two. Now, one thing that was a really heavy contributor to Google Plus is decline was the company's insistence on users going by their real names, and Google would ban accounts that were formed under pseudonyms and handles. And because Google was consolidating services under a single log in, this would affect not just Google Plus, it also reached into stuff like Gmail and YouTube accounts. In fact, by two thousand thirteen, Google had made a policy that said anyone who wanted to be able to leave comments on YouTube videos must first have a Google Plus account. They wanted these to be tightly integrated services. Now that would mean that you would have to use your real name, so there was a lot of resistance. Now, on the one side, you could say, okay, I get it. This creates accountability, right, you can't just sit there and slag people off. If it's your real name and everyone knows who you are, you don't have the protection of anonymity to hide behind, So you're not going to be as nasty as some of these trolls are. Right, first of all, wrong, There are people who will be nasty no matter what name they're going by. But secondly, there were others who were pointing out that anonymity provided protection for people who were really vulnerable. Right, So, if you were part of a vulnerable population, or maybe you lived in a country that has like an authoritarian government or a really powerful religious like leadership organization that could a press you, then you don't want to be constricted, right You. You don't want you want to still be able to communicate, but you don't want to be punished for the way you communicate. And meanwhile, YouTube creators were protesting that their success was now being co opted by Google in an attempt to boost Google Plus membership numbers. They said, the only reason you're doing this is because we're getting hundreds of millions of views and you just want to convert that into Google Plus memberships, So you're restricting anyone from being able to to participate in YouTube unless they also have a Google Plus account. It got really ugly. Eventually Google would reverse that decision. Now, on top of all that, a lot of folks just didn't like the Google Plus experience. Like I've said before, a lot of Google products feel like they're made by engineers for engineers, and they can sometimes lack some of the UI and aesthetic that makes other products more user friendly and more welcoming. I am an Android user through and through, but even as an Android fanboy, I recognize how iOS is way more user friendly than Android is. In April two fourteen, Vic Gondotra left Google and that was the beginning of the dismantling of Google Plus. It kind of got scrapped for parts. Hangouts was pulled out of Google Plus. Uh, it's photo system was kind of pulled out and spun off into its own thing. Google Plus would limp along for a few more years, but Google had to admit that some buggy software also meant that potentially data belonging to thousands of users could have been leaked accidentally to third parties, and it was just too much Like that was kind of the death stroke against Google Plus. And in twenty nineteen, Google pulled the plug on the service. So now we're starting to get into kind of the slow down for social network launches. We do still have several to talk about, but they don't happen as frequently as they did earlier in this series. By late eleven, MySpace had completed its time when news Corps it got sold off. It had been purchased for five million dollars but then was sold for thirty five million and was just one representation of massive losses in the social network space. Meanwhile, LinkedIn was getting ready for its initial public offering, which would happen in late eleven. Facebook was getting ready for it's which would happen in But as far as launches go, things were starting to settle down a little bit. You had a few dominant players occupying specific places within the ecosystem, right You had Facebook sitting on top of the profile based general social network. You know, the thing that at least I always associate social network was something like Facebook. But that may also be because of the time that I got involved in social networks and I just associated with that because that's that's what social network meant to me. LinkedIn was clearly the destination for professionals looking to build out their professional network. Twitter was top of microblogging, Instagram was pretty much the dominant photo based social network. YouTube was the undisputed champion of user generated video at the time. Meanwhile, other networks were either getting acquired or shut down or both. But two thousand eleven was also when we would get the birth of Twitch now. Twitch actually spun off of an earlier live streaming video site called justin dot TV or just justin TV. That is an interesting story all on its own. I think I've even done an episode about justin TV many years ago. But anyway, justin TV started around two thousand seven, and it was a site that was a way to engage in the activity of life casting. That's where a user can broadcast their daily activities via online video live online video, and that idea really caught on. But before long there was a subcommunity of gamers who became the fastest growing section of this service. The trend puzzled some people, because who the heck wants to watch someone else play a video game? That's what the old people were saying. I was not saying that, not because I wasn't already old. I was. I was already old. But I was also a kid in the eighties who loved to go to the arcade and just watch people who are really good at specific games play those games. I loved watching that, So to me, this was just an evolution of something I had loved doing when I was a little kid, And so I was totally on board with the threat of this gaming community kind of overshadowing everything else on justin TV. The decision was made to spin it off into its own entity, and it was called Twitch. Now, of course Twitch would prosper and justin TV would not. It would ultimately shut down, so Twitch would survive and the little spinoff would actually become the dominant force. And oh how the turns have tabled. Twitch was attracting millions of visitors each month even in its early days, so by t after it's been up for like essentially a year, the numbers were up to twenty million visitors per month, which is a big old YAWSA. Communities would grow up around specific personalities or specific game titles. It would depend like you had some people who would follow multiple personalities who were all playing similar games, and then you had people who were just becoming like celebrities because of their skill or in some cases lack of skill for specific games. I will say it's way easier to become incredibly popular on which if you're incredible at a game, then it is. If you're terrible at a game, it's still possible if you're very entertaining as someone who is terrible at games. But people tend to gravitate towards the folks who do incredible feats while playing games. Anyway, it was not your typical social network, not like a Facebook or Twitter. Uh, it wasn't about you creating this network of context necessarily, but folks did form friendships in various streamer channels. You know, you had people who became friends and would send direct messages to one another and would continue to communicate outside of a streamers you know, streaming schedule, that kind of stuff. But it wasn't really designed to facilitate networking the same way as Facebook or even Twitter would. But it does fit into the the overall puzzle of social networks, and it also was money. By two thousand fourteen, you had some really big fish that we're eyeing Twitch as a potential acquisition, and the two biggest would be Google our old pal and then the Jeff Bezos money train known as Amazon. Now. Reportedly these two companies got into something of a bidding war against one another in an attempt to win over Twitch. Amazon obviously ultimately won that fight. Well, I say, obviously, if you're not familiar with Twitch, you may not know that Twitch is an Amazon property. It is. Amazon bought it in two thousand fourteen, and the final price was in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. So just imagine what the world would have been like if Google had bought Twitch instead of Amazon. My guess is that by two thousand nineteen, Twitch would have been dead. It would have been shut down just by just by going by the history of Google's acquisitions in the past. As its stands, Google would instead try to compete against Twitch by launching features and YouTube that would allow for live streaming, specifically game live streaming, and there was an attempt to kind of, you know, shift video game streaming there. And don't get me wrong, that is a thing on YouTube. It does exist. You can go to YouTube and watch live streaming of video games there. There are some players that I watch on occasion. They're all English because I only have time to watch it early in the morning and so it's afternoon over there. But yeah, that's um, that's still very much a thing on YouTube. So there it is competing against Twitch at least to a certain degree, but Twitch is still undisputably the the leader in that space. Facebook would also uh do the same sort of thing. It would try and create its own video game streaming arm because of course, Facebook will never let a good idea go uncopied. If there's anything that remotely threaten threatens to pull people's attention away from Facebook properties, the company is going to attempt to replicate that in order to get those eyeballs back on on its own properties. Amazon would incorporate some of its own features into Twitch, including giving Amazon Prime members the ability to pick a streamer and subscribe to that streamer as part of their Prime membership. The way to which works, uh, is that you can actually subscribe to streamers for a monthly fee and it's determined by level, and in return, you get access to streams and maybe some other stuff depending upon the streamer, like sometimes it's things like special emotes and that kind of stuff. And uh, the way it worked with Amazon is that if you're an Amazon Prime member, one subscription is included in your Prime membership. Um, if you want to subscribe to more than one streamer, then for every subsequent streamer you've got to pay up. But for that first one, you can use your Amazon Prime membership to subscribe. And yeah, that was one of the benefits of being an Amazon Prime Member and also being a user of Twitch now. Twitch is a very complex topic. There's tons of stuff to talk about throughout its history. There's controversial policy changes, there's disputes between streamers and Twitch itself with regards to stuff like compensation, there's issues around content itself. Just a conversation around hot tub streamers alone would be exhausting. And I promise I'll do a full episode or two about Twitch in the future to really kind of dig down into it. But since it only leans against social networks at least as how I traditionally define social networks, I'm gonna leave off at this point. I'll just say Twitch is still very much alive and well. It is, however, not doing as well as it was at the height of the pandemic. The un weak visitor numbers are down by a couple of million, But you know that's to be expected now. In late two thousand twelve, Twitter acquired a short form video product called Vine, which had not even launched at that point. The founders, Colin Crall, russ Yusuprov, and Dom Hoffman had only started to work on the Vine project in the summer of two thousand twelve, and then Twitter acquired them before the end of two thousand twelve. Their idea was to create a social network where people could build very short videos and share them. These videos would just last six seconds, and then they would loop back around to the beginning and just repeat endlessly until you navigated away from the video. It was the user video version of microblogging. The format would reward those who put really careful thought and work into their videos, and would even propel them to celebrity. I mean, six seconds is not a long time, but it's the perfect amount of time if you're really clever and you are patient, and you're able to create a video that just has a perfect punch to it. Moreover, creators planned to make vines easy to share across other social networks. So the idea was that, all right, not only will you be able to create these videos that will live on Vine, you'll be able to share them on other platforms, so you'll be able to share them on things like Facebook or Twitter where there are a lot of eyeballs, or at least send them back to your Vine page that they could see them there. Then Twitter bought the service for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty million dollars, which would be about like ten million per founder, which is a pretty sweet deal. The first version of Vine was available only for iOS devices. Android had to wait for another six months, and Vine was insanely popular at first. It became one of the most downloaded apps on iOS within those first six months. But under Twitter, things would not continue to move in the right direction. There were reported struggles between the Vine team and the parent company of Twitter. Rivals like Facebook's Instagram or snap Chat, which we talked about in the last episode, started to include features that kind of crept into Vine's wheelhouse. Content creators were getting increasingly frustrated that they could get millions of views, but there were no clear paths to monetization through Vine unless you landed some sort of sponsorship deal on your own, which would be despite Vine, not because of mine. In two thousand sixteen, Twitter, having failed to leverage Vine into some sort of silver bullet to solve all its woes, chose to shut Vine down. Not at the time, Twitter was looking around for a potential buyer. It would have to wait another six years for that to happen. The co founders for Vine had already left the company by twenty six and Twitter was shifting focus to Periscope, which is its live streaming service that got incorporated into Twitter itself. Vines Shine had worn off with people migrating to other platforms for short form video, and so it died. Now recently, Elon Musk has talked about potentially bringing Vine back, though things are so chaotic over at Twitter right now that I'm not sure if that's still high up on the priority list. I mean, I'm hearing that the company has stopped paying rent on its offices as a cost cutting measure. So things are all sorts of messy over there. All right, We're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, we will power through the rest of the history of social networks, at least as far as I have deigned to cover it. But first these messages. Okay, we're back and we're up to because, like I said, we're seeing fewer and fewer launches at this point. So in a service called yik yak launched. It incubated here in Atlanta. At one point I even had the task of interviewing the co founders of yak yak. That night was one of the low points of my career. Anyway. Yik Yek's pitch was that it was as an anonymous, regionalized message board of sorts. So logging into yik yak would show you messages that were left by people who were in your general area, like within five miles of where you were, but you didn't have, you know, persistent user names or anything like that to go by. You know. The idea was that you wouldn't be able to positively link a post to a specific person easily. The folks would figure out ways to do that using various tricks. So the idea was that you could have the equivalent of a local bulletin board, and you could leave stuff up on the bulletin board anonymously. And the service was mainly targeting places like college campuses. And if you think, hey, this sounds like it wouldn't take very much for folks to use this kind of service to heap abuse on each other. Well, you're right, now. That's not to say everyone using yik yak was doing so maliciously or with old terrier motives or anything like that, but the combination of anonymity and locality and vitably led to abuse. There were real issues with content moderation right off the bat, and folks who are already vulnerable were in a particularly bad place. Let me create a hypothetical situation to illustrate a potential problem with yak yak. Let's say there is a queer identifying student on a college campus, and that this student hasn't chosen to come out for whatever reason. But let's say an acquaintance of this student has learned about their sexual orientation and anonymously decides to blast that information on yik yak, you know, revealing this student's sexual orientation, even though they themselves have not chosen to do that. Now other folks in the area have learned of this very personal detail that our student didn't want to share for whatever reason, that could bring our hypothetical student into real danger, either from others or, depending on the circumstances, potentially from themselves. So the potential for harm was considerable, and this sort of stuff was actually playing out in various places. Not to say that every interaction on yik yak was bad, or even that most of them were, or that there weren't some really valuable interactions on yak kak. There were, It's just the potential for harm was one that was becoming increasingly undeniable. So on several campuses, yek yak was called out for a facilitating hate speech. Now, there is a good argument to be made that the students behind the hate speech are really the ones to blame, right, they're the ones at fault. However, yik yak was giving these students essentially a megaphone to amplify their hate, and to do so under the cover of anonymity. Yik yak incorporated geo fencing into the app, and this essentially would digitally erase certain areas, particularly around things like high schools and such, from yek Yak's service, and so it was an effort to cut back on harassment and bullying. It wouldn't allow you to post anything within those specific regions. You'd have to move out of the area before you could post something to yak kak. Now, yik Yak was controversial, but it also lost a lot of steam pretty quickly, partly because, in an effort to fight against the the pressure that the creators were getting from various outlets UH, they tried to tie identities to accounts, and once you stripped anonymity away, a lot of people said, oh, well, now I don't want to use it, and some something like users had dumped it by six So the following year, yek Yak would shut down, and Square Incorporated bought the assets of yek Yak for about a million dollars. Square was founded by Jack Dorsey of Twitter, which gives us another social network connection now in one. Some entity whose identity I do not know bought the yik Yak I p and a relaunched version of yik Yak came out in August of two thousand twenty one for iOS. Android users wouldn't get their version until twenty two this year. As I record this, the services again the subject of controversy. There have been incidents of harassment, there's been bullying problems. There's been a surprising number of bomb threats called at various college campuses following the launch of the app. So there's no telling how long this version of your cack will last. The company whoever is running it says that it has a one strike and you're out policy, saying that if you do anything to violate the terms of service, that's it. Your band, that's something. But it remains to be seen if that approach to content moderation is actually going to be enough to keep Apple and Google from pulling the app out of its stores, because they have done that in the past for other services. Okay, now we're up to two thousand fourteen, when a pair of Chinese developers, having struggled to build a product that would have a st on commercial value, developed an app that let users upload short video snippets of themselves lip syncing to popular music. This became a service called musical dot l Y or Musically, and it became a bit of a fad, just not in China now now, the place where Musically became a success was in America. Now, that early success shifted the team's focus to support services in the United States instead of in China. They weren't big enough to do both, and China just wasn't It wasn't taking off there, so they established an office in Santa Monica, California, and the app became pretty darn popular. You also started seeing these videos pop up on other social networks like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. From two thousand fourteen to two thousand seventeen, the app continued to enjoy success, primarily among American teenagers and renaissance festival performers. For some reason, and in two thousand seventeen, another Chinese company, this one with the name Byte Dance, would acquire Musically for several hundred million dollars. Some estimates made that as high as a billion. All right, now we have to switch gears for just a second because this next bit is part of Musically's story too, but it's a separate branch that converges with Musically. So we go back to two thousands sixteen, so before by Dance acquires Musically. At this point, Musically is doing well in the United States, and by Dance in China launches a service called daw Yan that's d o u y i n. Daw Yan is a short form video service giving users the ability to record videos ranging in length from just a few seconds to up to around ten minutes. Daw Yan saw rapid adoption in China. It was successful there, but Byte Dance also wanted to expand and into other markets. The company realized, like, in order to be really successful, we need to go to other places where there are you know, billions of other people. So this can be challenging for Chinese companies. So Bye Dances thinking, how do we expand, how do we build on the success we're seeing here in China in other places? And the answer came in the form of musically. So Byte Dance in acquires Musically. Then it's sort of mushed musically up with dow Yan. This created a new company, a new service called TikTok. So musically kind of grew a whole bunch of features and became TikTok. So Bye Dance then got access to musically He's American user base, and meanwhile musically as users got access to lots of daw Yan features like filters and lens effects and that kind of stuff, And that is the birth of TikTok, which dates to around now. TikTok obviously became incredibly popular. It attracted younger users, much to the chagrin of companies like Meta Slash Facebook, which desperately wants younger users in order to flesh out its steadily aging user base on its other platforms, and TikTok being the subsidiary of a Chinese company has become the subject of a lot of controversy here in the United States. Representatives from both sides of the political aisle, meaning both liberals and conservatives or Democrats and Republicans, have called for a ban on TikTok unless the company becomes a wholly owned and operated US company with no connections to a Chinese one. For its part, TikTok has repeatedly made changes to try and stay in operation while still remaining a byte Dance subsidiary. Uh, they migrated all of their data onto US owned and operated servers that are owned by Oracle, And they've also you know, crossed their hearts and hope to die and promise that the company is not some sort of intelligence gathering front for the Chinese Communist Party. But there's still a major concern in the United States that ranges from worrying that TikTok is in fact an intelligence gathering tool that's just funneling data about US citizens off to the Chinese government, to a really addictive social network that's ruining kids minds by having them focus on these short form videos, and now they can't pay attention to anything that's longer than ten seconds. If that's true, I'm doomed because, um, this episode is already more than forty minutes long, So no one's ever gonna listen to me right anyway, The fate of TikTok has yet to be decided. Like as we talk, there are uh lawmakers who are pushing forward proposed bills to ban TikTok, but there's no telling that that's actually going to become a thing. Meanwhile, Biden is actually looking President Biden in the United States is looking to come to an agreement with TikTok for a means of operation where there are assurances that national security is fine, that TikTok is not doing anything to endanger American citizens, and that it can continue to operate as it has been. So that this is still an unfolding situation. Uh, my guess is that if politicians do vote to ban TikTok, they're gonna upset a whole bunch of future voters. But I guess they figured that's a problem for future politicians. In two thousand fifteen, gamers, slash developers slash entrepreneurs stand Vishnevsky and Jason Citron launched Discord, which actually grew out of a failed attempt to make a compelling online multiplayer game. So the game didn't turn out so well, but one feature within the game was a big hit, and that was the chat feature built into the game system. And Citron and Vishnevskley realized that generally speaking, in game communication systems stink and worse yet, the tools that gamers were using to get around that also weren't that good because not every game has an in game communication system in the first place, and those that do have them a lot of them leave a lot to be desired. So these two come up with an idea, why not create a service that lets gamers create a virtual space, which that would be called a server that that's more of a term of convenience than of accuracy, You're not really talking about specific like physical server here, and then use that space to communicate with one another no matter what type of game they might want to play. And it took some time to work out the technical bugs and get voice chat to be really reliable, but by the spring of two thousand fifteen, Discord was starting to get attention in gaming circles. Over time, people would create Discord servers for all sorts of stuff, not just gaming. There are Discord servers that center around specific hobbies, specific communities, and specific creators or shows. I keep thinking I should really launch I think actually do have a Discord for tech stuff, but I don't have the time to maintain it properly. I need to get somebody to be able to do that for me, or at least with me, so that it doesn't overwhelm me and and prevent me from doing everything else I have to do for my job. But I keep thinking I need to have one, because I would love to have a nice, healthy tech stuff community of listeners who could chat with each other and suggest show topics and just get to know one another. I would love for that to happen. Um, I just haven't had the time to be able to dedicate it to make it a good place. So yeah, But anyway, Discord is another kind of al heternative to other social networks. And now we're in the home stretch and I don't have as much to say about these because they're all younger, So there's not that much history. Uh, in we got mastedon. Not the heavy metal band that Camp comes out of Atlanta, because they've been around since like two thousand. But I'm talking about the software people are using to create servers that kind of like an island of a social network. Um. Mastadon came out of the ideas of a German programmer named Eugene Rochko. He graduated university and came up with this idea. He liked Twitter, but he didn't like that a service could be subjected to the whim of a company, or, as we would discover in two, the whims of a temperamental billionaire. He wanted to approach social networks from a decentralized standpoint, and thus developed the idea of these independent social network islands, which are called servers and macedon. So when you join Mastadon, you actually have to choose a home server and that becomes your base of operations. But it doesn't limit communication to just other people who are also on that same server. Uh. It is easier to communicate and to find people who are on your own server than it is to find people and communicate with them who are on other servers. But it's still possible. It's still something that you can do. Each server has its own policies, so that's something to be aware of before you join one. You might want a server that has, you know, lots of protections in place for users, for example, or maybe you prefer one that's a little more loosey goosey. But unlike other social networks, massed on is not ad supported. It is community supported instead, so it might be attractive to folks who are tired of having their personal data harvested and sold all over the place. Massadon saw a big upsurge of membership when the drama over at Twitter really took off, as Elon must put control. I'll say that it's a little less user friendly than some other social networks, but you get out of it what you put into it. Now, let's wrap up around this time, around twenties sixteen or so, we started to see a rise of far right politics here in the United States. It's been going on all over the world, but in the US that's really when it started to become evident. Uh. The A few social networks have appeared and taken on the role of serving as a kind of foundation, like a meeting ground for people who share far right views. So these sites include ones like gab, which was founded in twenty sixteen by Andrew Torba and Ekram Buyuka. I'm sure of this pronounced his name or their name. I apologize. There was Parlor, which was founded in two thousand eighteen by John Matt's Jr. Jared Thompson, and Rebecca Mercer, and of course truth Social, founded in one by Donald Trump. Now, these platforms share some common goals, namely to serve as a place that is free from the perceived censorship found on mainstream platforms. I do say perceived censorship on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. There's a persistent but largely unfounded belief that the sites have a hefty anti conservative bias. Now, in my experience, the real issue is that content moderation policies bump up against certain extremist rhetoric like hate speech, misinformation, that kind of thing. So it's not so much that there's a problem with conservative points of view, but rather problems with things that people who will also identify themselves as conservatives sometimes employ. And this is a huge disservice to anyone who is a conservative but does not you know advocate for things like hate speech. I feel for you out there. I am not a conservative, but I feel for those conservatives who are consistently represented by people who are um hate mongers. That has to be exhausting anyway. Gab Parlor and truth Social have all been cited as serving as a home for hate speech and extremism. And again, I'm sure that people who identify as conservatives who don't adhere to those beliefs are sick and tired of that. So not great for those folks, but yeah, that that's the reputation they have. They've also had a really rocky reputation and history with Apple and Google and have often seen their services pulled from those stores. Boom, that's it. I'm done. That's the history of social networks as far as I'm concerned. I left some out, but I covered the big ones, and we saw the different waves of similarity, including this one of far right uh platforms. But that's it for this episode. I don't even have time to sign off. I'm just gonna go and have a cookie and I'll talk to you again really soon. 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