With Facebook set to go public and MySpace on life support, Custom Communication and SMI chart the history of social media hits and misses

1. Social Media Hits and Misses
With Facebook set to go public and MySpace on life
support, Custom Communication charts a history
of social media Next Big Things and asks: Where
are they now?

2. BLOGGING

3. The promise: Founded in April 1999, LiveJournal was the
first service to “productize” the trend of keeping a weblog
or online diary. Its first mover status was quickly eclipsed
by Blogger and then Six Apart, which bought LiveJournal to
add to its successful Movable Type and Typepad platforms.
Where are they now?: Six Apart sold
LiveJournal to Russian publishers in 2007.
First to Market But don’t write it off - Russian President
Dmitry Medvedev has one of its blogs.

4. The promise: Co-founded by Evan Williams in
August 1999, Blogger was bought by Google
in 2003 just as blogging caught the attention
of the mainstream.
Where are they now? Still part of
Google’s product portfolio but never
fulfilled its potential. Blogger was a
victim both of Google’s lack of social
media nous and of the cultural shift
Media Darling away from long-form blogging to social
networking and microblogging.

5. The promise: From humble beginnings in
2003 Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg and
his open source diaspora have quietly created
a powerful and adaptable publishing platform
to rival anything Google or Microsoft could
develop.
Where are they now? Arguably the
most popular content management
system in the world, Wordpress
The Innovator continues to provide the bedrock for
some of the world’s leading websites.

6. The promise: Blogging takes too much time
while Twitter leaves no space to express
yourself. Could blog/microblog hybrids like
Tumblr and Posterous be the happy medium
creative social media sharers crave?
Where are they now? Flaky technology seems to
Future Shock
be hindering Tumblr’s grab at greatness.
Posterous’ mobile publishing play may yet prove a
winner in a world where smart phones rule.

7. SOCIAL NETWORKS

8. The promise: Founded in 2002, Friendster
quickly established itself as the first social
network prompting much media frenzy even
though some would argue the UK’s Friends
Reunited was the true forerunner of social
networking.
Where are they now? After turning down a
$30 million acquisition offer from Google in
First to Market 2003, Friendster found itself losing friends as
it fell foul of the fickle nature of social
network community retention.

9. The promise: Rupert Murdoch’s great social
hope, MySpace was bought in 2005 by News
Corp. for a then whopping $580 million to
help realize the old media giant’s social media
potential.
Where are they now? On a death watch. Was
it News Corp.’s tin-eared approach to turning
MySpace into a global entertainment hub, the
Media Darling
chaotic design or simply the social smarts of a
certain other network that consigned MySpace
to the social media scrap heap?

10. The promise: More than a few people claim to
have recognised Facebook’s early potential
(some even have pending lawsuits to enforce
that claim) even if Goldman Sachs wasn’t one
of them.
Where are they now?: Now that Goldman
The Innovator
Sachs has decided FB is worth $50 billion, its
imminent IPO looks set to be the most hyped
tech event since the AOL-Time Warner merger.
What could go wrong?

11. The promise: China’s top two social networks
(of which Ren Ren has the most breakout
potential) have a combined membership of more
than 500 million users in a country where
Facebook is blocked by the government.
Where are they now?: The lessons of Friendster,
MySpace, Bebo, not to mention Yahoo, all demonstrate
Future Shock
the dangers in forecasting online hegemony. Ren Ren,
a direct clone of Facebook, has real growth potential
but who’s to say a new upstart won’t upstage the lot?

12. GROUP BUYING

13. The promise: Launched in 1999, Mercata got
the markets buzzing with its plan to
revolutionize e-commerce by aggregating
consumers and use that buying clout to attract
sellers willing to sell bulk deals at a discount.
Paul Allen and Bernard Arnault were part of a
team of investors that poured $90 million into
the venture.
Where are they now? Mercata collapsed following
the Nasdaq plunge of 2000, cancelled its planned
$100 million IPO in January, 2001 and closed
First to Market
down a few days later. Its assets and patents were
bought by Seattle entrepreneur Martin Tobias who
launched Tippr, a Mercata group-buying clone.

14. The promise: Mobshop (originally, Accompany)
launched about the same time as Mercata with a near-
identical business model. The similarities didn’t end
there. It too raised a mountain of cash with Marc
Andreessen, General Electric and Visa International all
on board. Another big believer: the U.S. government,
which awarded Mobshop in 2000 a contract to run its
e-procurement.
Where are they now? Mobshop ran out of
money in 2001 and closed up shop not long
after Mercata went bust. Mobshop founders
held onto their patent for demand-aggregation
Media Darling e-commerce - keeping hopeful investors
wondering about a comeback.

15. The promise: That comeback is today called
Groupon, which shrewdly bought the Mobshop
patent years later and opened its own group-
buying business in November, 2008. Today it
boasts 50 million users and operates in 35
countries, exorcising the group-buying
demons of the late 90s.
Where are they now? Even before raising
$950 million, Forbes crowned Groupon “the
fastest growing company ever.” The
mainstream press is so dazzled by this
innovative wonder it rarely evokes the M-word.
The Innovator And they never ask Paul Allen what he thinks
of the idea.

16. The promise: There is one kink in the group-
buying model, it is so easily replicated.
Groupon shrugs off the hundreds of copycats
out there, but it cannot ignore the one player
that’s already getting great returns on the
crowd-sourcing retail model: Walmart.
Where are they now? Launched on Facebook
in October, Walmart’s CrowdSaver is going
Future Shock great guns, easily amassing thousands of
buyers per week, per offer.

17. PHOTO SHARING

18. The promise: Today the strongest social
media currency is undoubtedly visual imagery
but back in 2001 - the year Picasa launched -
uploading images to the web was still a niche
(and somewhat arduous process).
Where are they now? Picasa was part of the
great photo service landgrab which saw it
being acquired by Google, Photobucket, ahem,
snapped up by Fox and Flickr by Yahoo. Picasa
First to Market is still going strong helped by a popular
Android mobile app.

19. The promise: In an era of daft web 2.0
company names Flickr kinda made sense.
Certainly its smart “badge” integration with
blog platforms at just the time blogging hit
the big time helped. Flickr galleries were a
revelation for many blog and mainstream
online publishers.
Where are they now? Flickr was always more than
just a photo sharing service. It promised a
community network in its own right and still
remains a favorite of photo folk. How long it can
Media Darling prosper in the decaying Yahoo empire remains to
be seen.

20. The promise: Facebookers love sharing
photos even if they often fail to check their
privacy settings before uploading. Members
uploaded 750 million photos on New Years
Eve 2011.
Where are they now? On a relentless march
to social photo domination along with much of
The Innovator
the rest of the social footprint we choose to
share with Facebook and the major brands
that salivate over its advertising potential.

21. The promise: Did we mention the marketing
making/busting power of smart phones? Both
Picplz and Instagram aim to capitalise on our
desire to snap on the move and share.
Where are they now? Perhaps poised for
greatness? Perhaps to shoot and burn. We’ve
been writing about the coming mobile
revolution for over a decade but 2011 might
Future Shock
just be the year it fulfils the dream. When it
does the demand for a killer photo sharing
service will explode.

22. SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

23. The promise: Delicious launched back in 2003
when folksonomy was a hip buzzword. The
brainchild of former Wall Streeter, Joshua
Schacter, Delicious became the bookmarking
bible for social media early adopters, a status
that didn’t diminish when Yahoo bought it in
2005.
Where are they now? Hanging by a knife edge
as Yahoo goes through yet another crisis of
personality. Late last year techland was abuzz
with news that Yahoo was going to kill
First to Market Delicious. Now it seems the portal just wants
to sell the service....as soon as possible.

24. The promise: There was a time, halfway
through 2006, when social bookmarking was
being hyped as the new search and Digg was
being afforded the status of YouTube and
MySpace. Founder Kevin Rose found himself
on the cover of Business Week with this
caption: “How this kid made $60 million in 18
months.”
Where are they now? Digg still gets some 8.5
million visits a month but its attempts at
media curating and community building never
rivaled the pure play social networks. In 2008
Digg was reported to be losing money and
narrowly missed out on being snapped up by
Media Darling Google. By late 2010 Rose had resigned as
CEO following a decidedly rocky revamp of the
site.

25. The promise: Twitter might not seem an
obvious social bookmarking service but it can
lay a strong a claim to that role as it does
social network or microblogging platform.
Indeed you could argue that Twitter’s superior
sense of community and follower connectivity
is what makes its social site referrals more
valuable to its users even without the
folksonomy tools.
Where are they now? Gulp, okay, we’re going
to say it. Despite its power as a referral
engine/network/microblogging platform
Twitter still hasn’t worked out its raison
d’etre. That might give it flexibility to evolve
The Innovator but if it only succeeds as a social bookmark
tool then there will be a lot of VC red faces.

26. The promise: Facebook’s potential lies both in
the intimacy it affords friendship communities
and also the mammoth scale of its network.
That’s a boon for information distribution and
referrals of services and links based on
personal trust.
Where are they now? New research shows that
Facebook is now the number 2 online
Future Shock
information referral and retrieval source going
neck and neck with Google. It’s secret weapon
- that ubiquitous “like” button.

27. VIDEO

28. The promise: With broadband penetration
finally reaching meaningful numbers, Tel Aviv-
based Metacafe launched its video-sharing
community in 2002 operating under the
indisputable premise: TV programming execs
are lame; its your buddies’ hard drive that
contains all the must-view videos.
Where are they now? An attempt to lure big-
name film and TV producers to produce
original content for the Web bombed, but the
First to Market community still ticks along. The fact it’s never
been prudish about NSFW fare helps.

29. The promise: In 2004, tech pundits crowned
“vlogging” as the next big thing and pointed to
Rocketboom with its video news dispatches
riffing on digital life delivered daily by darling
of the geek boys, Amanda Congdon.
Newsweek hailed her refreshing “youthful,
Web-savvy insouciance”.
Where are they now? Amanda left in 2006
and the term “vlogging,” thankfully, didn’t
survive much longer. Rocketboom still lives,
Media Darling with another comely blonde presenter reading
the script to an audience no bigger than your
typical TV news broadcast.

30. The promise: The future of video on the web
is not about watching a young babe read a
round-up of cool stuff. It’s about letting all of
us post video at will, creating the world’s
largest search-able archive of films. YouTube
may not have conceived this idea, but it
teamed with the only company on the planet,
Google, that could make it a reality.
Where are they now? In November, nearly
146 million Americans watched video on
YouTube, a figure that continues to grown
steadily month-on-month. YouTube’s recent
embrace of advertising hasn’t hurt one bit
either. Google was telling analysts last year
The Innovator the video-sharing site was close to posting its
first profit.

31. The promise: The good old tube has taken its
knocks, but it’s soaring again thanks to HDTV,
PVRs and digital media players. Why else
would Google and Apple be investing so much
in a technology from the 1920s?
Where are they now? The latest Zenith Media
forecast says the global TV advertising market
will top $202 billion by 2012, accounting for
41% of the entire global ad market. And with
Google TV and Apple TV set-top boxes soon to
Future Shock be proliferating, even the younger generations
will find something cool to watch on the tube
again.

32. GEOLOCATION

33. The promise: Long before 3G arrived in lower
Manhattan, super-popular NYU student Dennis
Crowley developed in 2000 a computer
program enabling him to text multiple friends
at once where he was hanging out around
town. That innovation became Dodgeball, the
first mobile social network. Sort of.
Where are the now? Despite the fact early
Dodgeball users had to manually provide their
location to get information on nearby cool
stuff, the idea had its fans. One was Google,
First to Market
which bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it
down four years later. It lives today as Google
Latitude.

34. The promise: While at Stanford University,
Sam Altman dreamed of an application that
would tell him what all his friends were up to
once he stepped out of class. This was the
idea that launched Loopt in 2005 in the pre-
iPhone age. Three years later, Steve Jobs
himself demoed Loopt on stage when he
introduced to the world the cool possibilities
of the 3G iPhone.
Where are the now? Loopt today boasts 4
million users and is available on every major
US mobile network, and, crucially, the Web.
Despite Jobs’ sterling endorsement, it’s
Media Darling
survived by opening up, allowing users to post
their updates to more populous social
networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

35. The promise: It’s only fitting that Dennis
Crowley, founder of Dodgeball should usher
geolocation into the social networking era.
Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai launched
Foursquare in 2009, a geo-based social
network that awards “badges” to those who
“check-in” to literally any imaginable place,
office and living room included.
Where are they now? In under two years,
Foursquare has leap-frogged older rivals in
signing up 5 million users. Even extremely rich
people in Switzerland are fans. The World
The Innovator Economic Forum will crown Foursquare one of
its Technology Pioneers for 2011.

36. The promise: Asia rules the mobile airwaves.
Always has, always will. The mobile-mad
Japanese are old pros at using the most
advanced cel networks in the world to check-
in, meet up, upload and crowdsource. Mixi
was born in 2004, giving Japanese mobile
users a place to build communities based on
their particular interests.
Where are they now? At 10 million users,
Mixi is Japan’s favorite mobile social network,
generating millions of pageviews per day. It
may not be able to crack the U.S. market, but
Future Shock it’s got a lock on the most advanced and
utilized market of them all.

37. Custom Communication is an editorial and
social media consultancy that draws on many
years experience in the world of journalism.
We’ve spent the last decade charting the rise
of dot coms and now social media companies.
We provide editorial consultancy services to
large and small companies and we run
editorial and social media training.
Contact info@customcommunication.co.uk or
visit www.customcommunication.co.uk to
learn more about our work.

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