The dot-com bubble was a stock market bubble caused by excessive speculation of Internet-related companies in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet.
Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and is a subsidiary of Kakao.
Dotdash is an American digital media company that publishes articles and videos about various subjects across categories including health, home, food, finance, tech, beauty, lifestyle, travel and education. It operates brands including Verywell, Investopedia, The Balance, Byrdie, MyDomaine, Brides, The Spruce, Simply Recipes, Serious Eats, Liquor.com, Lifewire, TripSavvy, TreeHugger, and ThoughtCo. The digital media company competes with other online resource sites. In August 2012, Dotdash became a property of IAC, owner of Ask.com and numerous other online brands, and its revenue is generated by advertising. Dotdash has offices in New York, Chicago and Edmonton.
Friendster was a social networking service based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003. Later the company became a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages, and comments with other members via profiles and networks. It is considered one of the original social networks.
StumbleUpon was a discovery and advertisement engine that pushed web content recommendations to its users. Its features allowed users to discover and rate Web pages, photos and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing, social-networking and advertising principles. The service shut down in June 2018.
Myspace is an American social networking service. From 2005 to 2008, it was the largest social networking site in the world.
South Park is a small urban park and eponymous neighborhood in the larger South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, California, consisting of 0.85 acres of public ground. The neighborhood centers on the small, oval-shaped park and South Park Street, which encircles the park. South Park is bounded by Second, Third, Bryant, and Brannan streets.
AdBrite, Inc. was an online ad exchange, based in San Francisco, California, which was founded by Philip J. Kaplan and Gidon Wise in 2002. Founded as Marketbanker.com, the site was relaunched as AdBrite in 2004 as an advertising network and then in 2008 as an ad exchange.
Meebo was an instant messaging and social networking service provider. It was founded in September 2005 by Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg, and Elaine Wherry, and was based in Mountain View, California. Initially the company offered a web-based instant messenger service, extending its offer in more general online chat and even social networking directions. In June 2012, Google acquired Meebo to merge the company's staff with the Google+ developers team.
Bolt was a social networking and video website active from 1996 to 2007 before reopening in April 2008. It was shut down for a period of one year due to copyright violations leading to bankruptcy. It was acquired by new owners on January 4, 2008 and operated successfully for several months before announcing plans to go offline in October 2008.
Jeff Taylor is an American businessman who founded the online jobs site Monster.com.
ViacomCBS Streaming is an American media division of ViacomCBS that oversees the operations of its streaming services and Internet brands. It is an online content network for information and entertainment. Its websites and apps cover entertainment, news and sports. It is headed by Tom Ryan.
Disney Games and Interactive Experiences, originally established as Disney Interactive, Disney Interactive Media Group and Walt Disney Internet Group, is an American company that oversees various websites and interactive media owned by The Walt Disney Company and its subsidiaries.
Bebo is an American social networking website that originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013, and relaunched in February 2021. The site relaunched several times after its bankruptcy with a number of short-lived offerings, including instant messaging and video streaming, until its acquisition by Amazon in July 2019 when it was shut down. It was announced in January 2021 that it would be returning as a new social media site the month after.
Clive Ng is a media sector financier and executive. He has focused primarily on Asian business opportunities and has been instrumental in several joint-venture partnerships between American companies and Asian firms, particularly during the Internet and e-commerce boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. He has also been a founding shareholder in Asian new media firms such as MTV Japan and E*TRADE Asia.
Timothy M. Armstrong is an American business executive. He is the Founder and CEO of Flowcode, the offline to online company, building direct connections for brands and consumers through next generation QR technology. He was formerly the CEO of Oath Inc., a subsidiary of Verizon Communications that serves as the umbrella company of its digital content subdivisions, including AOL and Yahoo!. Previously, he was the CEO of AOL Inc. from 2009 until its purchase by Verizon in 2015.
Nextdoor is a hyperlocal social networking service for neighborhoods. The company was founded in 2008 and is based in San Francisco, California. Nextdoor launched in the United States in October 2011, and is currently available in 11 countries. Users of Nextdoor are required to submit their real names and addresses to the website; posts made to the website are available only to other Nextdoor members living in the same neighborhood.
Fnbox Ventures, Inc. is a Latin American technology company primarily organized as a holding company that manages various online businesses.
The social media bubble is a hypothesis stating that there was a speculative boom and bust phenomenon in the field of social media in the 2010s, particularly in the United States. The Wall Street Journal defined a bubble as stocks "priced above a level that can be justified by economic fundamentals," but this bubble includes social media. Social networking services (SNS) have seen huge growth since 2006, but some investors believed around 2014-2015 that the "bubble" was similar to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Bruce Cannon Gibney is an American writer and venture capitalist. He was one of the first investors at PayPal, and went on to work for PayPal founder Peter Thiel's hedge fund Clarium and his venture capital company Founders Fund. His first book, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, was published by Hachette in 2017.
