Tagged.com
Encyclopedia
Tagged is a social networking site based in San Francisco, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, founded in 2004. Tagged allows members to browse the profiles of other members, play games, and share tags and virtual gifts. Tagged says it has 100 million members. , Quantcast reports Tagged monthly unique user
Unique user
According to IFABC Global Web Standards, a unique user is "An IP address plus a further identifier. The term "unique visitor" may be used instead of "unique user" but both terms have essentially the same meaning...

s at 5.9 million U.S., and 18.6 million globally. Tagged has acquired the social and instant messaging client Digsby
Digsby
Digsby is a freeware proprietary multiprotocol instant messaging application developed by dotSyntax, LLC. Digsby is written in Python and uses wxPython as its widget toolkit and WebKit for rendering...

 and the gaming application WeGame. Michael Arrington
Michael Arrington
J. Michael Arrington is the founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere...

 wrote in April 2011 that Tagged is most notable for the ability to grow profitably during the era of Facebook.

In 2009, Tagged was criticized for sending deceptive bulk mail and paid $1.4 million dollars in legal settlements regarding those practices. The company has since adopted privacy reforms and changed its invitation processes. The New York State Attorney General Cuomo has also criticized Tagged for its alleged failure to respond promptly to complaints about child pornography
Child pornography
Child pornography refers to images or films and, in some cases, writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child...

.

Tagged is an Inc. 500 company ranking #476 on the 2010 Inc. list of fastest growing independent U.S. private companies.

Company history

Tagged Inc. was co-founded in mid 2004 by entrepreneurs Greg Tseng
Greg Tseng
Greg Yuchang Tseng is a controversial American Internet entrepreneur. He is co-founder and current CEO of social networking website Tagged...

 and Johann Schleier-Smith, who wanted to build a "Teen Yahoo or the next MTV". The pair had formerly co-founded internet incubator
Business incubator
Business incubators are programs designed to accelerate the successful development of entrepreneurial companies through an array of business support resources and services, developed and orchestrated by incubator management and offered both in the incubator and through its network of contacts...

 Jumpstart Technologies, which was later fined $900,000 for alleged violations of the CAN-SPAM Act
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 , signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 16, 2003, establishes the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and requires the Federal Trade Commission to enforce its provisions...

, then the largest ever penalty for spam.

In September 2005 the company raised $1.5 million in angel investor
Angel investor
An angel investor or angel is an affluent individual who provides capital for a business start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity...

 funding, and three months later raised an additional $7 million from Mayfield Fund
Mayfield Fund
Mayfield Fund is one of the oldest venture capital firms in the US, focusing on early-stage to growth-stage investments in information technology companies with a focus on enterprise software, Internet consumer & media services, and communications....

, a venture capital firm.

Originally an under-18 site, Tagged allowed users of any age to join from October 2006.

In March 2008, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 announced a commercial partnership with social networking sites Tagged, Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, LinkedIn
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. , LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French,...

, Bebo
Bebo
Bebo is a social networking website launched in July 2005. It is currently owned and operated by Criterion Capital Partners after taking over from AOL in June 2010....

, and hi5
Hi5 (website)
hi5 is a social networking website based in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2003 by Ramu Yalamanchi. By 2008, comScore reported that hi5 had become the third most popular social networking site in terms of monthly unique visitors....

 regarding email contacts APIs which has since been implemented. Other past and current Tagged partnerships have included Slide
Slide
-Fiction:*Slide, a fictional creature in the Sword of Truth book series-Music:*Slides , an album by Richard Harris *Slide , an album by Lisa Germano*Slide , a single by the Goo Goo Dolls...

, RockYou
RockYou
RockYou is a developer of social games and advertising solutions for social media. RockYou is focused on the development of social game titles, including Gourmet Ranch and the Zoo World franchise...

, PhotoBucket
Photobucket
Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007....

, Meebo
Meebo
Meebo is a social platform connecting users with their friends across the web. It began in 2005 as a browser based instant messaging program which supported multiple IM services, including Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, ICQ, MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, CafeMom and...

, Razz and Jangl. In February 2009, following complaints from the public Tagged was blocked
Internet censorship
Internet censorship is the control or suppression of the publishing of, or access to information on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations either at the behest of government or on their own initiative...

 in Qatar
Qatar
Qatar , also known as the State of Qatar or locally Dawlat Qaṭar, is a sovereign Arab state, located in the Middle East, occupying the small Qatar Peninsula on the northeasterly coast of the much larger Arabian Peninsula. Its sole land border is with Saudi Arabia to the south, with the rest of its...

 by the only ISP, Qtel, due to inappropriate content that Qtel could not selectively filter. Tagged.com had been one of the 10 most visited sites in Qatar.

In January 2010, Tagged announced that it was donating $50,000 to the Yéle Haiti Earthquake Fund, partly stemming from user donations. In the same month, Tagged won a $200,000 judgment against Erik Voegler, who was spamming other Tagged users.

In May 2010, Tagged was named in Lead411's "2010 Hottest San Francisco Companies", a list of the fastest-growing companies in the software, wireless, internet, and media industries, and in October 2010, Tagged ranked #100 on Deloitte's list of the top 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America.

In April 2011, Tagged acquired Digsby
Digsby
Digsby is a freeware proprietary multiprotocol instant messaging application developed by dotSyntax, LLC. Digsby is written in Python and uses wxPython as its widget toolkit and WebKit for rendering...

, a multi-protocol instant messenger and social network
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...

 notification client for Windows with 3 million registered users. In September 2011, Tagged made a second acquisition, WeGame, an application for gamers.

As of October 2011, Tagged employs a staff of 150, having grown from 55 at the beginning of 2011. CEO Greg Tseng continues to interview employees, cater lunch and dinner, and hold officewide meetings every Friday. Tagged is a member of the Social Media Advertising Consortium, a trade industry association that aims to increase advertising revenue and to facilitate collaboration among social networking sites, advertisers and marketing researchers. It has been identified as a possible candidate for an IPO by 2013.

Bulk email invitations

In June 2009, Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

magazine columnist Sean Gregory called Tagged "The world's most annoying website". Tagged had asked users for their email username and password, retrieved email addresses from their address books, and repeatedly sent email invitations to people who were not registered on Tagged, falsely stating that they have been "added as a friend" or that the inviter had sent them photos on Tagged. This process has been labelled an "e-mail scam" by consumer anti-fraud advocates and drawn criticism in the technology press and from users. The emails were discussed as possible spam
E-mail spam
Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...

 by Black Web 2.0 and the resemblance to a virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...

 was noted by urban legend site Snopes.com. The New York Times referred to the practice as "contact scraping
Contact scraping
Contact scraping is the practice of obtaining access to a customer's e-mail account in order to retrieve contact information that is then used for marketing purposes....

".

In July 2009 New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo
Andrew Cuomo
Andrew Mark Cuomo is the 56th and current Governor of New York, having assumed office on January 1, 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the 64th New York State Attorney General, and was the 11th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development...

 announced his intention to sue Tagged for "deceptive email marketing and invasion of privacy". Tagged reached a settlement in which it agreed to pay $500,000 and to modify its promotional practices.
Simultaneously, Tagged settled an enforcement action by the state of Texas, agreeing to pay $250,000 in penalties and fees. Conditions of the settlement included "clear and conspicuous" disclosure of the use of information in the user's email address book, providing a clear method to skip the step and display to users the specific emails to be sent. Tagged has adopted these reforms and changed its invitation processes.

In February 2010, Tagged settled a class action lawsuit about its former registration process with California residents Miriam Slater and Sara Golden and awarded them $10,000 each. Tagged also agreed to destroy email addresses that were collected from users between April and June 2009, if those users did not mean to invite their contacts to the site.

In April 2010, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris
Kamala Devi Harris is an American attorney. She is the 32nd and current Attorney General of California following the 2010 California state elections. Harris has worked as an author and a politician and has served as District Attorney of San Francisco since 2004...

 announced that Tagged agreed to pay $650,000 to settle claims of deceptive emails. This settlement related to emails sent from April 2009 through June 2009.

Website

After registering a free account, Tagged users can customize their profile page, to which they can post a biography about themselves and their interests, post status updates to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions, upload photos and albums, and send and receive messages from other users. Users can see which other users have recently viewed their profile. They can also sort videos by most viewed, top rated and most liked, and send send virtual gifts
Virtual good
Virtual goods are non-physical objects purchased for use in online communities or online games. They have no intrinsic value and are intangible by definition....

 to their friends. Virtual gifts are bought with "gold
Virtual currency
Virtual currency is used to purchase virtual goods within a variety of online communities; which include social networking websites, virtual worlds and online gaming sites....

" which users buy with actual money or receive by completing special offers or tasks. There are chat rooms where users engage in real time online chat according to their age and mood. Designed to facilitate relationships and dating, Tagged allows users to send and receive notifications for "Luv", "Winks" and "Meet Me", a rating engine that allows users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted by others. On October 30, 2009, Tagged announced a simpler signup process.

Mobile versions

Tagged developed a mobile version of its site in April 2011, making Tagged more usable by smartphones with a mobile internet browser. This version allows users to send and receive friend requests, play games, and send messages. This mobile version also offers location-based, real-time chat for users. Tagged began offering an iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

 application from July 2010, which was downloaded more than 100,000 times in its first week. Tagged's Android application became available in March 2011. By April 2011, the Android versions, had slightly more users than on the iPhone application, and in May 2011 it was the number three social networking application on the Android. In the latest update of their iOS and Android Apps, Tagged has added the capability of refreshing data by using the "pulling down" gesture and loading more data by using the "pulling up" gesture. In June 2011 Tagged launched its first BlackBerry
BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a line of mobile email and smartphone devices developed and designed by Canadian company Research In Motion since 1999.BlackBerry devices are smartphones, designed to function as personal digital assistants, portable media players, internet browsers, gaming devices, and much more...

 application. Being a native application, it runs on a mixture of HTML and the device systems.

Social games

Social games on Tagged differ from those on other social networking services, because players are encouraged to make new friends through the games. In May 2010 Tagged opened its own in-house gaming division. Leading the division is Andrew Pedersen, former vice president of the Pogo division of Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...

. Tagged plans to create more social games, several of which are already in development. Together with its acquisition of Digsby, Tagged's focus on social games signals an attempt to add more social communication options to its platform.

Launched in 2008, Pets was Tagged's first game and, as of May 2011, remains the most popular. Similar to a fantasy sports league, players earn virtual cash to "own", "buy" and "sell" other players as pets. Virtual cash can be earned by players in several ways, such as frequently logging in to Tagged or by converting Tagged gold at the Pets Cash Bar into Pets Cash.

Farm was introduced in May 2011. Unlike Zynga's Farmville
FarmVille
FarmVille is a farming simulation social network game developed by Zynga in 2009. It is similar to Happy Farm, Farm Town,, and older games such as the Harvest Moon series...

on Facebook there is no animation or farmer. Advancement is based on virtual money earned by harvesting plants and animals in the game. Other games on Tagged include Zynga
Zynga
Zynga is a social network game developer located in San Francisco, United States. The company develops browser-based games that work both stand-alone and as application widgets on social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace....

 games such as Poker and Crowdstar
CrowdStar
CrowdStar is a developer of Facebook & mobile games, based in Burlingame, California, United States. One of its most popular titles is "Happy Aquarium" and "Happy Pets". Founded by Suren Markosian and Jeff Tseng, it is ranked 4th among developers with the most monthly active users for Facebook...

's Happy Aquarium.

Child safety

Initially targeted at US teens, Tagged was opened to users worldwide aged 13 and older in October 2006 and still maintains security measures for users under 18. Users over 16 and the public cannot view the profiles of 13 and 14 year olds, and profiles for 15–16 year olds are private to the public and to users over 18. The only way to add teens as friends is by knowing the email address or surnames to request the friendship, and the younger user must accept the friendship request. However, the security measures are not entirely successful. In February 2009, a high school teacher was arrested after having sex with a 14 year old girl he met on Tagged. The 32 year old, who was not listed on either state or national sex offender websites, had over 100 female friends below the age of 17.

In December 2009 New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo
Andrew Cuomo
Andrew Mark Cuomo is the 56th and current Governor of New York, having assumed office on January 1, 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the 64th New York State Attorney General, and was the 11th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development...

 announced that Tagged and 13 other social networking sites agreed to remove registered sex offenders under the New York Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act. Nevertheless, a 2010 undercover investigation by Cuomo's office found that graphic images of children being sexually abused are readily accessible on Tagged. Investigators registered accounts at Tagged and reported inappropriate content to Tagged administrators following procedures described on the site. They found "significant lapses" in Tagged's response to these reports. For example, a slide show with images of children engaged in sex acts with other children was reported in April 2010 and remained online nearly two months later; some of the children in this slide show appeared to be under 5 years old. Cuomo stated his office would sue Tagged if these issues were not resolved within five days. At a news conference, Cuomo referred to Tagged as "one of the worst social networking sites that we've encountered."

User demographics and site traffic

, Alexa rankings suggest the popularity of Tagged peaked in early 2009 and has been declining since. Each month Tagged is visited by 5.9 million US users and 18.6 million users worldwide. Hitwise data shows that between December 2008 and December 2009 Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 drove category growth, and the only other site to grow in market share during that period was Tagged, which increased its share by 35%. In September 2009, Tagged had a 2.38% share of the United States social networking site market, based on monthly visits.

Though originally a teen-only site, Tagged now has more members in the 35–49 year old group than in any other; teens in the US now account for 10% of its members. Sixty-four percent of users earn under $60,000 per year and 60% have less than a college education. In the US, users of Tagged are more likely than internet users in general to be female or African American.

Eighty percent of Tagged users also use Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

. According to ComScore
ComScore
comScore is a Internet marketing research company providing marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses. comScore tracks all internet data on its surveyed computers in order to study online behavior....

December 2009 data, users spent 2 minutes longer on average on Tagged than Facebook users do on Facebook.

In May 2010, ComScore reported that Tagged entered the top 10 U.S. Online Display Ad Publishers for the first time. Tagged.com was ranked at number 10 with a 0.6% share of the total market, having served 6.8 billion ads in the U.S. in the first quarter 2010.

In September 2010, Tagged surpassed 100 million registered members of which one quarter to one third are active monthly. Revenue has grown to over $30 million, and 2011 revenue is predicted by Tseng to be over $50 million.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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