Yuku was an upgraded version of ezboard, Inc.'s internet forums. Yuku described itself as "Message Boards 2.0". This tagline was most likely derived from the

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...

features of Yuku message boards, such as tags and

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

. Yuku ceased to exist as a separate entity in 2017, following an acquisition by Tapatalk and subsequent migration to the Tapatalk platform.

History

Yuku was first revealed at DEMOfall 2005 in September 2005, at which time it was in

alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...

. At the DEMOfall launch, Robert Labatt (CEO of ezboard, Inc.) explained that advertising revenues would be shared with the individual board owners. Labatt estimated that "an average large community" could receive $3,000 to $5,000 (speculated) a month. The launch was reported by media outlets such as

Computerworld ''Computerworld'' (abbreviated as CW) is an ongoing decades old professional publication which in 2014 "went digital." Its audience is information technology (IT) and business technology professionals, and is available via a publication website ...

USA Today ''USA Today'' (stylized in all uppercase) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth on September 15, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headquarters in Tysons, Virgini ...

Bloomberg Bloomberg may refer to: People * Daniel J. Bloomberg (1905–1984), audio engineer * Georgina Bloomberg (born 1983), professional equestrian * Michael Bloomberg (born 1942), American businessman and founder of Bloomberg L.P.; politician and ma ...

and

CNN Money CNN Business (formerly CNN Money) is a financial news and information website, operated by CNN. The website was originally formed as a joint venture between CNN.com and Time Warner's ''Fortune'' and ''Money'' magazines. Since the spin-off of Time ...

. More

demos Demos may refer to: Computing * DEMOS, a Soviet Unix-like operating system * DEMOS (ISP), the first internet service provider in the USSR * Demos Commander, an Orthodox File Manager for Unix-like systems * plural for Demo (computer programming) ...

were given at the New York City BlogOn 2005 event where it was selected as a "BlogOn 2005 Social Media Innovator". Another demonstration was given in November 2006 at a monthly technology networking event in San Francisco: SFWIN 1.10. Instead of the revenue feature mentioned at DEMOfall 2005, only combining message boards and blogs with multiple profiles per person were discussed. Yuku was acquired by

KickApps KickApps is a hosted platform for creating social networks and adding social software features, video players and widgets to websites. More than 100,000 sites use KickApps, including major media companies (e.g. NBC Universal, The BBC, H&R Block, ...

on February 13, 2008, and later sold to Inform Technologies Inc. on December 24, 2010. On September 8, 2011, Crowdgather, Inc. publicly announced acquiring the domain name, website and assets related to yuku.com including the ezboard domains and its integrated forums. Then in 2016, Yuku was acquired by Tapatalk, which migrated the contents of all its boards to their own platform in July 2017 and switched from a forum to a group style of format.

Pricing

As with

ezboard ezboard, Inc., based in San Francisco, California, United States, was a provider of free and paid hosted Internet forums. Description ezboard was a provider of a free hosted message board for use by webmasters and message board administrators wh ...

, free Yuku boards are supported through

advertisement Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...

Features

Some of the key features of Yuku are listed below.

Profiles, message boards and blogs

Yuku's user profiles are interactive and similar to those at other

Social Networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

web sites. Friends can be added or removed, comments can be posted, and private messages exchanged between users. Each account offers the possibility of having five profiles. Profiles, message boards and blogs can be personalized via pre-made themes in the skins library, or custom-built using

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 ...

and

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

. The ''Mini Profile'' provides basic user information, e.g. name, location, age etc. The rest of the profile comprises blocks that can be turned on, moved up and down, or removed. The available blocks include a location block, which displays the location of the user's

ISP An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

using

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

; favorite links; media; blog; tags; friends; recent posts; comments; and empty blocks, which can be customised using HTML.

Image hosting

Each user gets 30MB of free image hosting, with 100MB of image hosting available for paid accounts. The profiles offer members image galleries with slideshows.

Points

Kudos was changed to points in September 2010. Points, earlier called kudos, forms the basis of a simple

reputation system Reputation systems are programs or algorithms that allow users to rate each other in online communities in order to build trust through reputation. Some common uses of these systems can be found on E-commerce websites such as eBay, Amazon.com, and ...

. User-based points is accumulated across Yuku - it is not specific to individual boards. Topic-based points allows users to give positive ratings to good topics. This also gives a small fraction of points to the user who started the topic. The Yuku Hall of Fame shows the top 100 profiles on Yuku, ordered by points.

Feature voting

The Feature VoterLogin to Yuku: - Yuku
/ref> allows users to vote on which features will be developed in the future. Photobucket integration is an example of a feature that was developed ahead of other features based on user feedback.

Technology

Server-side processing is handled via

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

. On the client-side, Yuku makes heavy use of

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...

. With JavaScript disabled, Yuku is still functional, but some features are simplified. For example, rather than a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

posting editor, non-javascript users are presented with a simple

text area type=search placeholder=An example text box, which can be used to search the English Wikipedia. A text box (input box), text field or text entry box is a control element of a graphical user interface, that should enable the user to input ...

instead. As some menus are hidden using JavaScript, these are displayed in full.

References

External links

* {{Official site, http://www.yuku.com/ Internet forum hosting American social networking websites Companies based in San Francisco Internet properties established in 2005 Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Defunct software companies of the United States