Piczo
Piczo was an online youth network with 28 million members. The German offshoot had around two million members.
It was developed by Piczo, Inc. ( San Francisco , USA ) with the function of a social network and static elements such as a friend list, shoutbox (see guest book ) and profile pages. Since the Piczo network was based on the Ajax platform "Funtigo", the user pages could be created without any knowledge of HTML . Use of the Piczo network was governed by the laws of the state of California .
In their official blog , the Piczo crew announced on October 31, 2012 that the domain would be given up in the near future due to the high server costs. By the end of 2012 had the user time to make a backup to create their websites. Since the beginning of 2013, a message has appeared on the homepage that Piczo has now finally been switched off. Up until October 2014 it was still possible to access the customers' old websites, but this was changed in October 2014. Since then, all sublinks on the Piczo.com page have been redirected to another external website.
Companies
Piczo, Inc. was founded in 2004 by Jim Conning and is led by a six-person board of directors. As a result of the hiring of Chris Seth in September 2006 and the simultaneously announced expansion into the European market, Piczo, Inc. localized its product on April 18, 2007 for both the German, French and Spanish markets. The German area was looked after by Fabian V. Thobe until it was sold to Stardoll (Swedish internet company with a focus on teenagers) in March 2009. According to the managing director of Star Doll Holding Mattias Mischke in the Times, the combined company should be profitable from the start. Piczo financed itself primarily through advertising, the Stardoll products through digital goods .
target group
The main group of Piczo users were young people between the ages of 13 and 17. In a presentation in March 2007, CEO Jeremy Verba assessed its users and the target market as follows: “ These are markets that can be monetized. These are advertising and sponsor-based markets ”. According to Verba, the amount of money spent by young people themselves or influenced by young people in the USA in 2004 was 3.1 billion US dollars. In his talk, Verba put the amount that 13 to 17-year-old young people spend on the Internet each year at 745 million US dollars.
In July 2007 Piczo, Inc. announced the establishment of "Piczo Insiders". It was a special group of users that, as the “world's largest teenage understanding and influencer group”, was supposed to give sales professionals and market researchers access to what was considered to be the difficult market for young people.
Piczo services
Piczo offered the possibility to create your own websites for free - HTML knowledge was not necessary for this. The URL of these websites was always structured as follows: www. name .piczo.com or www.piczo.com/ name . There were many extras for creating these websites: glittering texts , background music or so-called shoutboxes (a kind of guest book). Piczo also made it possible to upload images. Every Piczo user had the opportunity to add other users to his "friends list". To do this, however, they first had to accept an invitation and agree to it. This created a network of linked sites.
communication
From January 2009 Piczo, in cooperation with meebo, offered a service that was displayed to all logged-in members. This was a small bar at the bottom of the screen that enabled the user to write messages to his confirmed friends, view their profiles and other things.
Protection of users
There were several ways to protect your Piczo website:
- Allow only Piczo members on their website.
- Protect your website with a password .
- “ Under construction ”: However, this means that other people cannot view the page.
- " Friends only ": Only confirmed Piczo friends can access the website here.
Problem
All information on the platform could easily be falsified. When registering, the email address of the parents or legal guardians had to be given. The code that was sent to you should then be communicated for confirmation.
Another problem was that since Piczo was approved for ages 13 and over, some younger children reported their incorrect ages.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Spiegel Online: "Did you say Heagggdl tenderly today?"
- ↑ Closing Down Piczo!
- ↑ Lecture by CEO Jeremy Verba, u. a. to "monetizable markets" and the expected sales volume
- ↑ Press release from Piczo, Inc. about the introduction of Piczo Insiders ( Memento of the original from June 8, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
