Wallop
Encyclopedia
Social network service
A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. A social network service consists of a representation of each user , his/her social...
tracing its origins from Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...
. 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 Venture Partners is a global, multi-stage investment firm focused on investments in early to late stage venture and growth equity investments in U.S...
, Bay Partners and Consor Capital.
While the Wallop team was working on launching their website, however, the expansion to platforms of other social networks and their opening up of APIs lead 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
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...
, and 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....
". As of 2008, the company left its social networking service model and went into creating applications for other social networking sites instead.
Wallop products
Currently, Wallop has three products they call Cool Cards, Glittering Killer Bazooka Banana Monkeys Filled of Orange Marmalade 2.0, and Party On!. These applications are hosted by Wallop, and are built using Facebook and Bebo APIs, thus supporting those two social networking platforms by default, but can also be posted to other sites by using the regular method of embedding Adobe Flash applications into HTML.Cool Cards is simple Adobe Flash-based application to display card-like graphics that users can customize before posting in someone's social networking site profile. Glittering Killer Bazooka Banana Monkeys Filled of Orange Marmalade 2.0 is an application used for education purposes. (it helps people learn french and tell fact from bad translations) Party On!, on the other hand, 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, therefore making a place for people to plan parties inside such a profile.
History as a social network
As a social networking provider in its beta release, Wallop, with its application accessible through the domain nameDomain name
A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System ....
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, 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 FlashAdobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...
technology, it was at that aspect different from prevailing social networks, such as Friendster
Friendster
Friendster is a social gaming site that is based in Malaysia, KL. The company now operates mainly from the three Asian countries namely in the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore....
and MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
, which by that time at 2003, was mostly rendered as traditional HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
pages. Using Adobe Flash gave the site aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
unique to its contemporaries, but making it not functional with browsers
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
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
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...
in October 2006, somehow contributed to its failure to get as much user-base possible.
Being started as a Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...
project, the beta release 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
Windows Live is the collective brand name for a set of services and software products from Microsoft, part of their software plus services platform. A majority of these services are Web applications, accessible from a browser, but there are also client-side binary applications that require...
services and with Wallop eventually leaving its goal as a main player in the social networking scene.