Pebble (formerly T2) was an American

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

platform founded by former

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

employees Sarah Oh and Gabor Cselle. It provided an authenticated network where users could make posts and interact in communities before shutting down on 1 November 2023. One day before the shutdown, Cselle launched a

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instance of the same name. It closely resembles the look and feel of the old site.

Background

Prior to founding T2, Cselle oversaw the incubation of new consumer products in

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’s since-shuttered

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incubator. Cselle had also been a Group Product Manager at Twitter from 2014 to 2016, where he worked on the consumer product, and relaunched Twitter’s logged-out homepage and mobile trends. Sarah Oh had previously worked as an executive in Trust and Safety at Twitter and

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

. On the day Oh was laid off from twitter, Cselle called her to offer his condolences, and to offer Oh a position at T2 to aid in creating a new social media platform. Cselle announced the development of T2 in November 2022. In early 2023, T2 hired former

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Senior Director of Engineering Michael Greer as its chief technology officer. On 15 September 2023, the platform was rebranded as ''Pebble''. On 24 October 2023, the platform announced its shutdown on 1 November 2023, approximately one year since it started. On 30 October 2023, Cselle launched the mastodon-instanc
pebble.social

Platform

Pebble is one of several social media platforms conceived as an alternative to X (formerly Twitter) after its takeover by

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The Bori ...

. The platform allows 280 characters on user posts. Cselle has expressed a desire to keep the platform as similar to the original Twitter platform as possible. It also emphasizes security and safety features such as user authentication. Pebble's moderation is planned to make use of both human review and artificial intelligence features. On 25 April 2023, the platform's invite system launched, allowing its current community of around 1,000 users to invite their friends to the service instead of requiring users to join a waitlist. Each member of the platform has been allowed up to 5 invites with the ability to request more invites if required. Currently, the platform is a web-based app only. Pebble offers checkmark verification, similar to X. Verification is done through Persona and a $5 charge is invoiced to offset the cost of verification. Unlike rival X Blue, the payment is one-time.

External links

Official website

References

{{reflist Defunct social networking services American social networking websites Real-time web Text messaging Microblogging services