Piczo
Piczo was an online network for young people with 28 million members. The German branch had about two million members.
It was developed by the Piczo, Inc. (San Francisco, USA ) with the function of a social network and static elements such as friends list, shoutbox (see guestbook) and profile pages. Since the Piczo network built on the Ajax platform " Funtigo ", the user pages without knowledge of HTML were buildable. The use of the network Piczo subject to the laws of the State of California.
In its official blog, the Piczo crew was on 31 October 2012 announced that the domain will be due to the high server costs given in the near future. By the end of 2012, the users had time to create a backup (backup) of their websites. Since the beginning of 2013 will appear on the home page a notice that Piczo is now finally shut down.
Business
Piczo, Inc. was founded in 2004 by Jim Conning and managed by a six -member board. As a result of carried out in September 2006 setting by Chris Seth and simultaneously announced expansion into the European market Piczo, Inc. localized their product on April 18, 2007. Both the German and the French and Spanish markets The German area was supervised until its sale to Stardoll (Swedish Internet company with a focus on teens) in March 2009 by Fabian V. thobe. According to the manager of Stardoll Mattias Holding Mischke in the Times, the combined company should be profitable from the start. Piczo was financed primarily by advertising here, the Stardoll products by Digital Goods.
Target group
The main group of Piczo users put young people aged 13 to 17 years. In a lecture in March 2007 CEO Jeremy Verba estimated its users and the target market as follows: "These are markets that can be turned into cash. These are advertising and sponsor -based markets. " The amount of money that was spent by young people themselves or by young people affected in 2004 in the U.S., according to Verba was 3.1 billion U.S. dollars. The amount that the 13 to 17 year old adolescents spend a year alone in the Internet, Verba figured in his lecture at 745 million U.S. dollars.
In July 2007, Piczo, Inc. announced the establishment of " Piczo Insiders " known. She was a special group of users, which should allow as " world's largest teens understanding and Beeinflussergruppe " sales professionals and market researchers access to their assessed as difficult youth market.
Services by Piczo
Piczo provided the opportunity for free to create your own websites - HTML skills were not necessary for this. The URL of the sites was constructed always as follows: www.name.piczo.com or www.piczo.com / name. For the creation of these sites, there were many extras: glitter text, background music, or so-called Shout boxes ( a kind of book ). Piczo also allowed uploading of images. Each Piczo users had the opportunity in his "friends list " accommodate other users. For this purpose, however, this had to accept an invitation and agree to it. This created a network of linked pages.
Communication
As of January 2009 offered Piczo in cooperation with meebo a service that was shown to all logged in Members. It was a small bar at the bottom of the screen, which allowed the user to confirm his friends to post messages, and view their profiles and more.
Protecting users'
There were several ways to protect its Piczo website:
- Allow only Piczo members on its website.
- Protect His website with a password.
- " In construction ": The result, however, that other people can not view the page.
- "Just Friends ": This only confirmed Piczo friends can access the website.
Problem
All information on the platform could easily be faked. When registering the e- mail address of the parents or guardians had to be specified. In the course should the code that was sent to them, shall be notified to confirm.
Another problem was that, since Piczo was released from 13 years, younger children partially specified her age wrong.