Wallop is an American software company that was spun off from Microsoft in 2006 to provide a social networking service, and from 2008 made Adobe Flash-based applications for other social networks.
History
Wallop was originally designed around 2003 as an Internet social networking service from
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...
.
As a startup, the company behind Wallop was backed by $13 million from Microsoft and venture capitalists including
Norwest Venture Partners
Norwest Venture Partners (Norwest) is an American venture and growth equity investment firm. The firm targets early to late-stage venture and growth equity investments across several sectors, including cloud computing and information technology, ...
,
Bay Partners and
Consor Capital. The company was later spun off of Microsoft.
While the Wallop team was working on launching their website, however, the expansion of other social networks and their opening up of APIs led to Wallop's changing directions. Instead of trying to compete with these already established social networking providers, the company scrapped their Beta application and, as stated in their website, "Wallop retooled their product and focused on developing cutting-edge applications for leading social networking platforms like
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 ...
, and
Bebo
Bebo ( ) was an American Social networking service, 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 ...
". As of 2008, the company left its social networking service model and went into creating applications for other social networking sites instead.
Products
Around 2009, Wallop had two products they called ''Cool Cards'' and ''Party On!''. These applications were hosted by Wallop, and built using Facebook and Bebo APIs, thus supporting those two social networking platforms by default, but could also be posted to other sites by embedding
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...
applications into HTML.
''Cool Cards'' is a simple Adobe Flash-based application to display card-like graphics that users can customize before posting in someone's social networking site profile. ''Party On!'' is also an Adobe Flash-based application which can also be posted in the user's profile, and allows users to create a customized invitation that will keep track of guest lists, making a place for people to plan parties inside such a profile.
Social network
As a social networking provider in its beta release, Wallop, with its application accessible through the
domain name
A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...
wallop.com, provided users with the basic features a social networking site provides, such as creation of personalized profiles where users can put the personal information, establishing links with other users as "friends", and being able to react to other users' profiles by being able to leave comments. Additional features such as ability to upload and show image files, creation of
blogs
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
, and a fully functional music player where users can upload audio files within their accounts and put restrictions as to who can play these files, were also built into the application.
Aside from being supposedly a social networking application, Wallop was originally designed also as an online market place for mods that are to be made and sold by its users. It was stated that these mods, as they used to call the software members will develop and sell to the community, will allow users to add characters, graphics, games, backgrounds, and more to put on their profiles, with price ranging from $0.99 to $4.00. The concept gave a lot of possibilities for users on what applications, such as a calendar or a flash game, to put on their account profiles. The beta release already had a sandbox and a developer API established, before Wallop suddenly changed course to instead becoming a company providing users of then competitors the ability to add Wallop's applications to their profiles.
Public reception
With the site's front-end functionality generally depending in
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...
technology, it was at that aspect different from prevailing social networks, such as
Friendster
Friendster was a social network game based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003.Eric Eldon, August 4, 2008.Friendster raises $20 million, nabs a Googler to be CEO VentureBeat. Retrieved December 4, 2 ...
and
MySpace, which by that time at 2003, was mostly rendered as traditional
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
pages. Using Adobe Flash gave the site
aesthetics
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed thr ...
unique to its contemporaries, but making it not functional with
browsers
Browse, browser or browsing may refer to:
Programs
* Web browser, a program used to access the World Wide Web
*Code browser, a program for navigating source code
* File browser or file manager, a program used to manage files and related objects
* ...
having no Adobe Flash installed.
One aspect of Wallop's beta release that most people react about, is its continued usage of the invite-only account creation strategy, wherein users will only be able to sign up for the site if an existing member invites them. It may be argued that it might have been only intended to be so in the beta release and that signups would have been open to all visitors afterward, nevertheless some felt that the approach long abandoned by other social networks, such as
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 ...
in October 2006, somehow contributed to its failure to get as much user-base possible.
Having started as a
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...
project, the
beta release
A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...
of Wallop social networking site was moderately covered among tech savvies, with several articles written about it in technology related news websites. Several of such articles and some blogs speculated that Wallop would be Microsoft's answer to then growing demand in the social networking arena. Some entities, such as the internet-based community behind stonerocket.net who created the now defunct wallopmodding.com, even made sites dedicated to making Wallop mods with the aim of making business out of Wallop users. Nonetheless, time has proved these speculations false as Microsoft unveiled
Windows Live
Windows Live is a discontinued brand name for a set of web services and software products developed by Microsoft as part of its software-as-a-service platform. Chief components under the brand name included web services (all of which were exposed ...
services and with Wallop eventually leaving its goal as a main player in the social networking scene.
References
External links
Slashdot article, 2006
{{Microsoft Research
Microsoft websites
Defunct social networking services
Microsoft Research