Piczo was a social networking and blogging website for teens. It was founded in 2003 by Jim Conning in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. Early investors included Catamount, Sierra Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, and Mangrove Capital Partners. In March 2009, Piczo was acquired by Stardoll (Stardoll AB with CEO Mattias Miksche). After the acquisition Piczo was led by Stardoll's CEO Mattias Miksche and his Stardoll team. In September 2012, Piczo.com was acquired by Posh Media Group (PMGcom Publishing AB with CEO Christofer Båge). In November 2012, Piczo.com shut down. Their eponymous service, also called Piczo (Piczo.com), was an online photo

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wi ...

builder and

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, ...

, which was for the generation of free advertising-supported websites. Launched in 2005 Piczo allowed users to add images, text, guestbooks, message boxes, videos, music and other content to their site using plain text and

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 JavaSc ...

. Partners included

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VideoEgg Say Media (formerly VideoEgg) is a technology and advertising firm. The company provides a publishing platform (Tempest) to professional publishers and sells advertising across that platform and extended network of sites. Say Media has offices ...

, Photobucket, Flock,

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& PollDaddy. When it began, the company's focus was individual web-page design, and blogs were not included as a feature. In addition to the website development aspect of the site, Piczo once had a

User Generated Content User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...

repository (the Piczo Zone) where users can browse, post, and consume content that they or others have used on their site. Later on, Piczo remodelled the entire site, and this along with many other features were no longer available. One of the features that stayed is "The Board" where Piczo informs users about

and Internet safety, though most pages are designed for the old Piczo. In August 2010 Piczo announced "Piczo Plus", a feature that allows users to buy an "ad-free" site, which is no longer available to purchase.

Popularity

Piczo saw around 10 million unique visitors a month. While primarily offering services in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

and

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, Piczo was also available in French, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Japanese, and Korean BETA versions. The service was very popular with a teenage audience in Britain, much like

Bebo Bebo ( ) was 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, ...

. Its popularity waned as social networking services 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 Mosk ...

, with the ability to create a profile, began to grow more popular than those where one would create a full-blown website.

References

External links

* {{Online social networking Web hosting Defunct social networking services