May 30, 2025 • 45 mins
Vibecoding is everywhere—and it feels like anyone can launch an app. So we’re revisiting one of our favorite episodes: a look back at some of the biggest apps to crash and burn. Jonathan Strickland dives into the nostalgia—spotlighting programs that once seemed unstoppable, until they weren’t.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
Hey, it's care Price host of tech Stuff. We're taking
a week off, but we'll have a fresh episode for
you next Wednesday. You're not gonna want to miss Oz's
conversation with the CEO of Colossal Biosciences. I know, I
was surprised by just how close we may be to
bringing back the Wooly Mammoth and what that could mean
for our planet. So definitely check that out next week.
(00:34):
In lieu of headlines today, we wanted to share an
episode of tech Stuff from February twenty twenty four about
some of the biggest apps to ever flop. The tech
industry moves really fast. It always has, but now it
feels like it's moving in hyper speed given the popularity
of vibe coding programs like Cursor, Codex, and Copilot. With
(00:54):
these tools, you no longer have to be an expert
software engineer to write code, and now you have to
be a designer either. Last week, Google launched Stitch, a
program that can help you build web or mobile app
front ends. But just because you can, it doesn't mean
you should. In the episode you're about to hear, Jonathan
Strickland reminds us that not every pitch is a promise,
(01:17):
and sometimes the most compelling apps can fail. Take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the
tech are yet? So, once upon a time, we used
to have these things called programs. And I say that
(01:47):
because now we don't call programs programs anymore. We typically
call programs apps. I think that really started to become
a thing upon the ascent of the consumer smartphone, which
was sparked by Apple, which was then cranked up by Android,
and that we really had the era of the app.
At that point. We used to, like I said, call
(02:08):
them programs. Now they are applications, whether it's for a
phone or a computer. I guess app stores sounds better
than program emporium anyway. For thousands of entrepreneurs, the dream
is to build an app and to become rich beyond
your wildest dreams. Right, You design an app and then
(02:28):
the money rolls in. Maybe it's because some bigger fish
out there, like some Google or Apple or Meta, decides
that you're just too good to be left unacquired. And
then they spend a bucket load of cash on you,
hopefully ten times more than what you're actually worth. Or
maybe you actually figure out how to be profitable all
(02:50):
on your own, you actually have a business plan and
you have a way of generating revenue. You would be
the rare Silicon Valley project that actually works as a
business business on its own. That again is the dream.
But dreams don't always come true, and sometimes even apps
that seem to be strapped to a rocket for success
(03:11):
end up blowing up and going up in flames. So
this episode is about apps that fall into that category,
apps that at one time seemed like they were a
sure thing, only they flamed out down the line. One
of the apps I originally planned to put on this
list was four square, but as it turns out, that
app and the company behind it is still chugging along,
(03:34):
just in a slightly different role than it was before.
See I remember when four square launched and folks would
use it to check in to locations that they were
visiting in the real world. So some places would even
start to offer special discounsel right, like twenty percent off
your first drink if you check into the bar via
(03:54):
four square. Because it was seen as a kind of
viral marketing. Other folks were worried about the privacy issues
of this kind of behavior. In fact, some folks created
a website called Please rob Me, and this site satirically
would scrape data off Twitter for four square check in notifications,
(04:14):
so please rob Me would then list people who were
saying they were not currently at home. Now, the whole
point wasn't to actually inspire a wave of burglaries, but
rather show why it's dangerous to broadcast your location to
the world in general. Then it might not be a
good idea, and maybe people should think harder about their
(04:36):
personal privacy. In twenty fourteen, for Square actually changed dramatically.
The company launched a companion app called Swarm Now. This
app contained all the social networking features that for Square
used to have, so all the check in stuff, all
the geolocation stuff that was kind of seen as the
(04:59):
critical element of four square and the one that you
should be worried about that went to Swarm. For Square
meanwhile became four Square City Guide, which became a discovery
and recommendation app, and it would help you figure out
places that maybe you should visit based upon your past experiences, right,
It would say, Okay, I see that you're in downtown
New York, and because of the places that you used
(05:22):
to go to in your hometown, here are some places
we think you should probably check out because you'll really
like them. You didn't have to use both of the
apps if you didn't want to, but they did compliment
one another, So if you used Swarm, four Square would
tap into that check in data to help inform what
recommendations it should give you. Those apps are still available today.
(05:45):
Like I just thought that four Square had come and
gone because I haven't personally used it in a decade,
But the fact is it's still a thing. One really
interesting thing to me is that forour Square's business largely
involves licensing its technology to other companies, which include Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat,
(06:07):
and lots more. The check in feature that four Square
developed powers numerous other apps. So while our perception was
that four Square was a relic of the past, that's
just not true. That's totally my misconception there, and again
it's because I haven't really paid attention to four Square
in a decade. But it is interesting to me that
(06:27):
you know, they found success in a different way than
what they set out to do. I still don't have
any real desire to read download either four Square or Swarm. However,
on a related note, there is also the story of
yik Yak. Now, this app actually did flame out, but
then it was resurrected again just a few years ago,
(06:47):
so for those of y'all who do not know the story,
A couple of guys launched an anonymous location based messaging
platform back in twenty thirteen, and the way it worked
was that you would open the app and you would
connect via putting in your phone number. This would end
up allowing you to post to the platform, but you
(07:08):
would only be able to read messages that had been
posted by people within a certain distance of your physical location,
such as within a five mile radius, and you could
post a message anonymously, and again only people who were
in a five mile radius of your location would be
able to read your message, So as you would travel around,
you would see new messages, while ones that were now
(07:29):
out of physical range would disappear from view. The focus
on geolocation, coupled with anonymity, made the app extremely popular
with school campuses, and Yakyak largely catered to that audience.
This also meant there was a lot of abuse. There
was no accountability, right, There was no connection to a
specific person, so people could post the platform and they
(07:52):
could bully other folks or worse. So there were these
stories popping up all around the United States about how
the app was bringing out the absolute worst in people
and endangering folks right Like, let's say that you belonged
to a minority population in a particular campus university of
Even if someone's not specifically calling you out, it might
(08:15):
be easy to figure out who people are talking about,
which could definitely hurt your mental health, or they could
even be calling for more extreme acts that could endanger
your physical health. So pressure built against the company, and
eventually yaikyak cave to it. So in twenty fifteen, Yayik
made a massive change and required users to register a
(08:35):
handle with the site. So all messages now would be
attributed to a handle. They wouldn't be fully anonymous. Now,
it was still a handle, not your name, so it
wasn't exactly the same thing as signing your name to
your own words, but it was a lot closer than
what had come before. Hardcore users hated this change, and
eventually yak Yak kind of backed off a bit and
(08:58):
made it an optional feature, but by then the user
base had been alienated and had dwindled, and in twenty seventeen,
the company announced that the app was shutting down due
to that dwindling user base. They actually did a sell
off Square, the company that is behind online payment systems.
They purchased essentially the IP but really more like they
(09:20):
purchased the engineering talent of YikYak and brought them on board,
and it was for reportedly like just a million dollars,
which is still a lot of money. Don't get me wrong.
A million dollars is a lot, but it's nothing compared
to what yik yak was valued at a few years earlier.
And so yak yak effectively stopped being a thing in
(09:41):
twenty seventeen, and it stayed in the grave for four years.
But then in February twenty twenty one, a group of
new owners who remained mysterious and unnamed. Like everywhere I
look to find out who the heck owned yaikyak between
twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three, didn't have information
about that anyway, They purchased yak Yak and announced plans
(10:02):
to relaunch, and sure enough, late in the summer of
twenty twenty one, the app came back. Now two years later,
in twenty twenty three, another company called side Chat scooped
up yik Yak now side chats. Shtick was essentially the
same as yak yak. Sidechat had an anonymous posting platform
that largely was targeting college campuses. Side Chat was not
(10:25):
as popular as yak yak. A lot of yak yak
users felt that Sidechat's user interface was inferior, and initially
yak yak users were getting messages where they were being
urged to migrate to side chat and they hated it.
Eventually that would change, where yik yak would remain a thing,
but effectively transformed into side chat. You know, its interface
(10:49):
became more of side Chat's interface. By the way, I
based this all off of blog posts and articles and
message boards because I wasn't onn yik yak at the time,
so I had no idea of what was going on.
But while the initial yik yak was popular with campuses,
this new version specifically focused on university students, like almost
(11:09):
like exclusively, as opposed to it being a community based
thing or a regional based thing. It was specifically a
campus based thing, and occasionally it sounds like it would
even make mistakes and accidentally assign someone to a university
that was not the one they actually went to, which
could be really hairy, right because if I were to
join Yak Yak and it suggested I was a student
(11:31):
at Georgia Tech, that's fighting words because I attended the
University of Georgia. Now that probably means nothing to most
of you, but just know those two schools have had
a long standing rivalry that goes between being you know,
good natured ribbing and genuine, deep seated loathing. So if
you had one student misidentified as going to the other school,
(11:51):
that could be fighting words. Now, I should say that
Yak Yak currently is only back for iOS users, as
I record the podcast. Now, the relaunch did at one
point include Android, and apparently it was only active for
a very short while before in the spring of twenty
twenty three, the company said that they were shutting down
(12:14):
Android support in order to focus on building out features
for the iOS version. Now, again, I can't check this
app out. I'm an Android user. Plus I'm not a
college student, so I have to rely on articles and
Reddit posts to read up on it, and it sounds
to me that in the past you could register for
yik yik just with your phone number, but now since
the side chat acquisition, you have to supply a university
(12:37):
email address to create an account university or college email address,
and if you don't have one of those, you can't
have an account, and that has upset a lot of
users because it meant that they're one. If they're not
in college, they can't be part of this anymore. Though honestly,
I don't see why you would necessarily want to be,
but then that's probably because I feel a lot of
(12:57):
empathy for the folks who were bullied, but it all
so is a reason. One reason they don't want to
do it anymore is because their actual identity would be
associated with their account, maybe not directly, like the actual
posts would be anonymous, but the site would know who
you were because you would have an email address tied
to your identity to register for the site. Arguably, you
(13:20):
could say the same thing is true because for the
old version, because you had to supply a phone number,
So unless you're buying burner numbers just for yekiyak, it
would be pretty easy to figure out who you were.
But it also means that if you're not a college student,
or you're not on faculty or staff, then you're completely
out of the loop. There's a lot of competition in
the anonymous message board space these days. Seems to me
(13:43):
that a lot of the companies behind these apps typically
will reach a level of success that brings more attention
to their activities and perhaps their flaws, let's say, and
then they feel pressure to change things in order to
make their apps less prone to abuse because now people
are paying attention to them and calling them out. And
(14:03):
then subsequently, after making these changes, the apps decline in
popularity because it turns out the user base the stuff
that they really liked happened to be the same stuff
that also facilitated abuse. Not to say that users all
enjoyed and piling on folks and abusing people, but that
the same features that made it easy to abuse folks
(14:26):
were also the features that people just really liked. That
kind of seems to be the life cycle for these
kinds of applications. They launch, they go viral, they get
really big folks notice that sometimes really awful people are
using that app to do really awful things. The app
then ends up making changes in an effort to not
(14:46):
be held accountable for these things, and then it alienates
the user base, both the good and the bad users.
It then declines in popularity, then it fades into memory,
your rents and you repeat. Now, I can't say for
certain that's what's happening with ya Yak. There are a
lot of users who say that it's not as good
as it used to be, that they don't see the appeal.
The fact that it doesn't it's not available for Android
(15:08):
users is a huge thing. It means that a large
amount of the population can't even access it. Maybe the
company will manage to relaunch for Android and regain some momentum,
or maybe it's on the path back toward obsolescence. Okay,
we've got more failed apps to talk about. Before we
do that, let's stop for a moment and thank our sponsors. Okay,
(15:37):
we're back. So no list of failed apps would be
complete without Quibbi. Holy cats, this was a massive whiff
with a whole lot of money and some really heavy
hitters in both the entertainment and tech industries at the wheel,
and it's still crashed and burned. It was the brainchild
(15:59):
of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had forged a legendary career in Hollywood.
You know, he became really well known at Disney and
then created dream Works. And Quibi was hoping to tap
into that same magic that Hollywood success and also the
same magic that TikTok moosts. That was the key was
(16:21):
can we make something inspired by the success of TikTok,
and that was namely short form content, And in the
case of Quibi, the short form would be videos that
would last ten minutes or less. However, unlike TikTok, Quibi
productions would have some serious money behind them. We're talking
about really high production values, stuff that you would see
(16:44):
that would be akin to a television or film studio.
And if TikTok could knock him dead with diy shorts
created by just any Yahoo out there, surely an entertainment
app with serious Hollywood credentials could make a killing right now.
On the tech side, former HP CEO Meg Whitman was
(17:05):
on board, and Whitman and Katzenberg brainstormed the structure and
execution of Quibbi. They also are argued a lot Witman
would later essentially say that Katzenberg would undermine her decisions
and was micromanaging, and there seemed to be a lot
of bad blood at the top levels at Quibbi, which
was just one of many problems. But the company signed
(17:26):
on various actors, directors, writers, and associated people to create
content for the site. They poured approximately a billion dollars
to that effect. Some of the content created consisted of
standalone short videos right like it was just a one
and done ten minutes or less video, but some were
(17:48):
actually serialized. They were longer pieces and divided up into
ten minute long chapters. This in turn was a really
tricky because, like, if you're gonna divide a movie into
ten minute long chapters a way to entice people to
continue after a chapter is over, and in my opinion,
it becomes like a Dan Brown novel where every chapter
(18:09):
ends in a cliffhanger to try and incentivize people to
go to the next chapter. And personally, I find that
kind of narrative exhausting and not very satisfying. I am
not a Dan Brown fan, nothing against him, I just
it doesn't appeal to me to end every few pages
with another cliffhanger. Anyway, they also made a really odd
(18:33):
decision when it came to framing, because the whole point
of Quibi was that it was intended to be consumed
on smartphones. And as I'm sure you're aware, we're used
to watching television programs in landscape format, that is, the
picture is wider than it is tall, right, But for phones,
we often hold phones in portrait mode, where it's taller
(18:57):
than it is wide. Otherwise you have to turn the
dang phone on its side, and there's a chance you'll
end up watching a tiny video with huge black bars
above and below it. So one choice Quibi's founders made
is that all content should be viewable in full screen,
whether the user was holding their phone in portrait or
landscape mode, and that you could switch back and forth.
(19:20):
So you could hold it in portrait mode and then say,
you know what, I don't want to see this in
wide screen, turn your phone landscape. It would switch, and
in both versions the image would completely fill the screen
of your phone. That's a big deal, even though it
might not sound like it, because if you're a director
or cinematographer, part of your job is making sure all
(19:40):
the important information for the viewer is available within the frame.
Obviously that's going to be different if the finished product
is to be viewed in portrait mode rather than landscape.
You need to figure out how are you going to
frame the image so that it works in both formats,
or you might have to use things like pan and
scan or switching view to get the information across. Right, Like,
(20:01):
you might have a scene where you have two characters,
one far left and one far right on the screen.
They're talking to each other, and then landscape mode, that's fine,
you can see it, but you switch into portrait mode
and now there's not enough room on the screen to
get both characters in frame. What do you do? Do
you have an empty frame where both characters are off screen,
(20:23):
one off screen left and one off screen right. Do
you just focus on one character and then you switch
whenever the dialogue changes so that you get a different
view when character one speaks versus character two? Do you
pan back and forth? Which is that swimmy effect you
often get if you watch like old old home video,
not home video, but you know videos that were made
(20:44):
for home video use, you will often get that scanning feature.
Because televisions were in the old four to three aspect
ratio and they couldn't incorporate a wide screen picture unless
they did the bars at the top or bottom or both,
and a lot of people hated them. They wanted to
have the image take up the whole screen. So you
end up having this digital panning, which I absolutely detested. Well,
(21:08):
you have to make those decisions, or do you end
up blocking all of your shots so that all the
relevant information can be seen in one view, even if
it's portrait, in which case you might just have a
lot of unused space, like negative space in the frame
if you're watching it widescreen, or maybe you shoot with
multiple cameras so that way, one camera is taking the
(21:30):
landscape version of the shot, one camera's taking the portrait
version of the shot. Like, there's a lot of complex
things you have to think of behind the scenes from
a content creator standpoint, beyond just the technology of if
you turn your phone, you want the frame to be
completely full. So this was a real issue that goes
(21:50):
a technical challenge, and they did not have enough time
to figure out how to deal with that in a
way that was satisfying anyway. That whole design decision became
a big hurdle. But another hurdle was that Quibi was
meant to be mobile only by design. It was not
intended to be an app that you would access on
a computer or smart television or streaming box or anything
(22:12):
like that, and something that was outside the control and
not predicted by the folks at Quibi when they were
putting together their business plan was the COVID nineteen pandemic,
which took a lot of us totally by surprise. So
Quibi was really intended to be used for a world
that was on the go, right. The use case was
(22:32):
that you would be out in the real world and
you would have time to kill. Maybe you're waiting in
line of the bank, or maybe you're sitting on a
subway and you're on your way to work and you
just need something to distract you from the tedium of life. Boom.
Quibi is there to save the day. High production value,
scripted entertainment or you know, like game shows or whatever,
(22:53):
but still high production value, not the type of stuff
you would see typically on a site like TikTok. Except
the app launch just as the world was shutting down
and going into quarantine in twenty twenty, so the use
case for the app was no longer relevant at least
not for the several first months of the app's existence.
Plenty of critics said that even without the pandemic, Quibi
(23:15):
would have just totally failed. But certainly the lockdown was
a massive blow to the service when there were plenty
of other options folks could access when they were at home.
Why use Quibi if you have access to Netflix or
one of the billion other streaming services that are out
there now. The Verge has an article going through other
reasons why Quibi flopped. The writer Julia Alexander argues in
(23:39):
that piece that one big reason is that none of
the shows on Quibi were particularly good, and that is
a really tough problem. It is hard to convince folks
to flock to your streaming service if the stuff you're
streaming isn't very entertaining or compelling. Alexander actually says, quote
most titles felt like jokes straight out of thirty Rock
(24:02):
end quoteff if you don't know what that means. Thirty
Rock was this sitcom, a satirical sitcom about creating a
late night comedy variety show akin to Saturday Night Live,
and often the show was joking about different shows that
the network was launching, and they were always ridiculous, and
(24:24):
you know, you would never really expect to see such
a show in the real world. Well, Quibi apparently brought
those kinds of shows to the real world. Initially, Quibi
offered a free subscription for a few months to early users,
kind of a trial period, but once that trial period
ran out, users were then given the option to subscribe
to the service either for five dollars a month, which
(24:44):
was an ad supported experience, or eight dollars a month
if you wanted to be free of ads. But since,
as Alexander points out, there really wasn't much compelling content
on the streaming service, most folks declined the offer once
it stopped being They were like, that's it, I'm out,
there's nothing here to keep me here. Julia Alexander also
(25:04):
argues that Quibi was doomed even if there had never
been a pandemic, and it's quite possible that she was right, because,
as we do know, Katzenberg and Whitman were at odds
with each other. There was a lack of good content
on Quibi, there were a lot of other competing services
already out there, and there weren't a lot of good
(25:26):
arguments to say why use Quibi when there are these
other alternatives, right, And to Alexander's point, the people at
Quibi never really settled on what Quibi actually was, or
what it was for, or what its mission was. And
because there was this lack of clarity, there was really
little chance of success. Now we'll never know if Quibi
(25:49):
would have succeeded had there not been a pandemic, or
if it would have survived, but we do know that
Quibi launched on April sixth, twenty twenty, and it was
shut down by December of twenty. It didn't even make
it a full year. And considering how much money was
behind that app, like, remember, this is an app that
spent a billion dollars just on the content, that's not
(26:11):
even on the engineering or anything else. Well, that's a
massive flop, like big time flop in the tech world.
And while we're on the subject of short form entertainment,
let's talk about a precursor to TikTok, something that kind
of was forging the path that other services like TikTok
(26:32):
or Instagram reels would follow. And I'm talking about the
venerable and missed app Vine, at least it's missed by
some people, including me. So in twenty twelve, Don Hoffman,
Colin Krol, and russ Yusupov developed and launched the app Vine. Now,
for those of y all who have never experienced Vine,
(26:53):
it was a short form video app where you could
record and then post a six second video clip and
it would automatically loop once it reached the end, so
it would play out the six seconds or however long
it was. It could be less than six seconds, and
then once it was at the end, it would start
over again until you scrolled to the next you know, Vine.
(27:16):
And this made the app ideal for meme worthy content,
so it was great for stuff like pranks or funny
visual gags or amazing feats of skill, like if someone was,
you know, shooting a basketball from half court and sinking
it perfectly, nothing but net perfect Vine, right. And it
(27:38):
also meant that folks started to get really creative. They
started to look at Vine as sort of a challenging
platform and they wanted to create content specifically for it,
and they would create six second long stories, typically comedic. Right.
You'd have a setup and then a punchline and it
would all take place in six seconds, but sometimes it
(27:58):
would include things like scene changes. This was not easy
to do in Vine because there were no real editing
tools to speak of within the app. You could record,
then you could pause recording, and then you could start
recording again. But you had just that six seconds to
do everything, and you couldn't cut and edit clips together.
(28:18):
So if you had like a really good take in
the first three seconds of one version and a really
good conclusion in the last three seconds of another version,
you couldn't pair those together. You had to get it
all done in one go, which meant if you made
a mistake, your options were either post the imperfect version
or keep trying till you got it right. Even so,
(28:39):
with these restrictions, folks flocked to Vine to make some
pretty amazing short videos, and they ranged all over the place.
I mostly think of the comedic ones, but there were
other ones too. There were some that weren't, you know, comedic.
They were like heartwarming or you know, they might make
you weepy, depending upon the content. Vine was a phenomenon
shortly after launching in of twenty twelve, and it was
(29:01):
enough to convince Twitter to acquire the company in October
of twenty twelve for thirty million smackaroos, which is not
bad for a newly launched app. A couple of years later,
in twenty fourteen, some successful Vine creators all banded together
to move into an apartment complex which became kind of
a ragtag collaborative studio in a sense, and they found
(29:25):
further exposure on mainstream media. Like their success on Vine
translated to larger platforms like classic ones on television. But
even by twenty fourteen, things were starting to get rocky
for Vine. One major reason is that Vine was in
trouble due to hefty competition. You see, the same year
(29:46):
that Vine launched, back in twenty twelve, Meta which at
that point was just known as Facebook, acquired Instagram for
a billion smack aarreous that's really a princely sum. And
then in twenty thirteen, Instagram introduced the ability to post
video clips of up to fifteen seconds in length, so
already more than twice as long as a Vine. Instagram
(30:10):
also already had a huge user base, which was made
even larger by Facebook's integration, and it took a big
old gulp of Vine's milkshake as a result. Now, this
move should not have surprised anyone, because even Back then,
Facebook already had a reputation for scooping up companies that
could otherwise distract Facebook users. Instagram was actually a great
(30:32):
example of this. Instagram was one of those acquisitions where
Facebook says, Oh, this other app is starting to get
people's attention, which means their attention isn't on our website,
which means we're not making money from them. I don't
like that. Let's fix it. And Facebook typically had one
of two ways that they would fix this problem. They
would buy the company and incorporate it into Facebook's corporate structure,
(30:56):
and thus it became a bonus. It was added to
Facebook's value, it was no longer taking away. Or they
could copy it, and if they copied it, then they
could undermine their competitor. And in the case of Vine,
Facebook shows that option. They would just mimic the defining
(31:22):
features of the competitor, either in Facebook or in one
of their other properties, and they would try to sap
the user base back over to Facebook without having to
buy the competition. That's kind of what was going on
with Vine, and it worked. The money began to shift
from Vine to Instagram, and that money was largely coming
out of marketing departments. So brands were partnering with popular
(31:46):
creators in an effort to manufacture some viral marketing campaigns.
And these could be really cost effective, right, Like, if
you're a creator, a deal might land you a ton
of money, but that ton of money would still be
tied up compared to what a traditional mainstream marketing campaign
would cost a company. So then there you go. That's
(32:07):
where the money was for Vine. But then Instagram was
offering a longer form factor, right, more than twice as
long as what a Vine was, and that was far
more attractive to a lot of marketers out there. Like
when you're talking fifteen seconds, you're talking half of a
traditional television commercial. So the shift of money and influence
meant that creators would also jump ship from Vine to
(32:27):
Instagram or in some cases to other platforms like YouTube. Now,
not everyone did it, but it was really challenging to
go in for that small pool of money that was
still available for Vine creators. And it was also scary
to port your work from one platform to another because
there was no guarantee the audience would follow. Right. Just
(32:47):
because you were popular on Vine doesn't mean you're going
to find the same success If you move over to
Instagram or to YouTube. You know, some folks could do that,
and maybe they would lose some of their audience, but
they would have enough to be able to not lose
too much momentum. For others, it would mean having to
start from scratch, and there's no guarantee that you'll strike
gold twice. But since that pool of money was getting
(33:09):
smaller and smaller over at Vine, most creators didn't need
a lot of convincing they had to switch or else
they weren't going to make any money anyway. So Vine
went into further decline, and in twenty sixteen, Twitter announced
it was going to shut down Vine, which happened in
early twenty seventeen. And we can still feel the influence
of Vine today in the form of Instagram reels and
(33:30):
TikTok videos, and it's possible that neither of those things
would have happened without Vine. And I know lots of
folks who to this day lament the loss of Vine.
So farewell Vine. We hardly knew Yee, Okay, we're going
to take another quick break. When we come back, We've
got a couple more examples I really want to talk about, Okay,
(33:58):
let's talk about some more fails, and this next one
is one that I absolutely loved, even as I recognized
that it was a hot mess from the get go
and it probably wasn't a practical solution for ninety nine
percent of the population out there. So I'm talking about
Google Wave, And honestly, I could do a full episode
(34:20):
just about Google apps that have come and gone, and
in fact, I actually have done that at least once
or twice in the past. But Google Wave has a
special place in my heart. So Google launched this bizarre
app back in two thousand and nine, and it was
a real time online collaborative tool, and it was kind
of like a Frankenstein's Monster of features. There were elements
(34:42):
of email worked in there, Instant messaging was worked in there,
online word processing, and lots more.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
So.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
You could create a document in Google Wave, you could
invite online collaborators and all of you could work within
that document at the same time, and you would be
able to see what others were doing in the document,
like word by word. You could watch as they made
typos and corrected and stuff. It was all going at
the same time, and the app would also keep a
history of all the changes made to the document. So
(35:13):
maybe someone's going off the rails right and you're like, no, wait,
we can't none of this is working for this document.
You could actually wind things back to an earlier version. Now.
I only used Google Wave with one other person, who
was my former co host, Chris Pillette. We used Google
Wave to build out a run of show for a
streaming video series we used to do way back in
(35:36):
the day. So once a week we would do a
streaming video that was kind of like a tech news
program live on TV in the middle of the day
Eastern time, and we would use Google Wave to organize
our show and even to make changes on the fly
while streaming our video content. And it was an ideal
tool for that situation. The trouble was, I couldn't figure
(35:57):
out any other use case where it would really makes
sense for me, just this one thing I would do
once a week for my job. For a lot of
folks out there, they never found a good use for
Google Wave. By the way, I really miss that streaming
video show. One of the fun things that we used
to have and that show is that occasionally either Matt Frederick,
(36:19):
one of the hosts of Stuff they don't want you
to know would do this, or sometimes Tyler Klaig, who's
now like the head of our podcast production. Both of
them are still with the company. I would do a
tweet of the week segment and they would hold up
a little bird on a stick. They would be out
of frame and they would poke a bird out stick
to be in front of my face and they would
(36:39):
make a tweet sound, which just shows how far those
guys have come since we were doing the streaming news show. Anyway,
features in Google Wave would eventually find their way into
lots of other Google applications, but Google Wave itself was
just not very long for this world. Google supported it
for about a year. Then they essentially he said, you
(37:00):
know what, this isn't working for us, and they shifted
it off to the Apache Software Foundation in twenty ten.
Folks suggested that Google's decision was due to lots of
converging reasons, ranging from just a confusing interface that was
turning away new users to internal conflicts that were happening
within the development team, especially at the leadership level. There
(37:21):
were stories that there were leaders who were disagreeing on
what Google Wave was even supposed to be, which meant
that the development team was put in this really difficult
position in the middle to try and create all things
for all people, which was impossible, so they ended up
creating something that was for nobody. But even the Apache
Wave version is no more. The nonprofit group had Wave
in an incubator status for almost a decade, but in
(37:45):
twenty eighteen the Wave became still waters because development ceased
and Wave just never graduated out of that incubator status. Now,
I can't say that I would still be using Wave
to this day if it were still around, but that's
mostly because tech stuff is a pretty simple project. I research, write,
and record all the episodes, and then super producer Tari
(38:06):
she edits and publishes the episodes, so there is collaboration there.
Tari and I do collaborate, but it's divided really neatly
into a production phase and a post production phase. Perhaps
if I were more actively working on shows that had
multiple collaborators, I would feel Waves loss more keenly. But
I really liked using it, even while I recognized how
(38:29):
weird and janky it was. Now this list could go
on much much longer, but I figure I'll conclude with
a rock Star like story, and that story involves a
company called pay by Touch. While most of the apps
I've talked about so far were ones that you would
either use on your phone or on your computer, pay
by Touch was different. Okay, it was an app that
(38:51):
was a service, and this service would let you pay
for purchases at a point of sale, primarily in places
like supermarkets here in the United States. You had to
do was swipe your finger on a fingerprint sensor at
the cash register, and your biometric data would correspond to
your pay by Touch account, and an electronic transaction would
(39:11):
take care of your grocery bill by deducting it from
your checking account or from a credit card, and you
could go on your merry way without ever having to
hand over cash or write a check or use a
credit card physically. Just swipe your finger, good to go.
This was the future, and it was all in two
thousand and two. The idea of having your financials directly
tied to your own identity was one that had been
(39:34):
around for a while but not really accomplished. So again,
it was really considered to be convenient, and you could
even tie your biometrics to things like a store loyalty account.
So by using your fingerprint. You could then apply discounts
or coupons to whatever it was you were buying. And
(39:54):
this was coming out in two thousand and two, you like,
five years before we would get the first iPhone, So
these d You know, obviously, we have lots of contactless
payment solutions, mostly tied to mobile phones, but back in
two thousand and two, this was really revolutionary. Now, the
services did face challenges. One big one was that folks
were a little anxious about having their money tied to
their fingerprints. There seemed to be something invasive about that. Heck,
(40:18):
if you're the type of person who prefers to use
cash for your transactions, it absolutely goes against your preferences. Also,
the thought of a third party company potentially having insight
into your purchase history seemed creepy. But despite the slow
going and low adoption rate, pay by Touch did grow
and got lots of investors. It expanded its business into
various supermarket chains. But then the company would ultimately declare
(40:40):
bankruptcy in two thousand and eight. So what happened, Well,
part of what happened was a failure to communicate to
the public the benefits of this system. Just really bad
marketing and education the concept again including things like tying
biometrics to loyalty programs and stuff that just didn't really
get communicated effectively in most locations, and some stores were
(41:03):
just using the system for loyalty programs and customers would
still pay for their purchases using more traditional means. So
there was this element of distrust that the company was
never able to overcome, possibly for good reason, because another
big reason for the company's failure was in its leadership.
The CEO of the company was a guy named John P. Rogers,
and he had had some trouble with the law that
(41:25):
largely went unnoticed when he was getting investments for his company.
At least a couple of women had accused him of
violent behavior, one saying that he had abused her, the
other saying he had trashed her home. Both of them
had been connected romantically with him. He had also been
pulled over by police and arrested on suspicion of driving
under the influence of cocaine, and apparently he was known
(41:50):
to have had issues with drug addiction. Investigation suggested that
Rogers had been rather extravagant with corporate funds that he
had spearheaded efforts to convince those with really deep pockets
to invest in Pay by Touch that paid off in dividends.
He raised around three hundred and forty million dollars, but
by two thousand and eight the coffers were empty, and
(42:12):
the investigation suggested that one reason for this was that
Rogers appeared to have been dipping into corporate funds to
pay for an extravagant lifestyle, complete with drug use. And
when I say extravagant, I mean that the investigation suggested
he was burning around eight million dollars a month, which
is a lot of money. And it would turn out
(42:32):
that Rogers had a history of failed businesses, something that
no one had really noticed when Pay by Touch was
just getting off the ground. He had managed to keep
his history kind of out of the spotlight, and investors
didn't ask any tough questions. They just were excited about
this potential opportunity to completely revolutionize the way we pay
for stuff at retail locations. Obviously that was key to
(42:55):
him securing investments. Ultimately, pay by Touch went could put.
Some investors pursued civil litigation against the company and against Rogers,
but he never faced criminal charges. For how things went
down which is kind of wild. I wasn't there, so
I don't know. Maybe the evidence was all circumstantial, maybe
there was not a solid case against him, But it
(43:16):
does seem to fall in line with the perception that
the rules are different depending upon who you are and
your station in life. I don't know if that's actually
the case in this particular instance, but on the surface
it seems to reinforce that idea anyway. That is just
a quick list of some major apps that received a
(43:37):
lot of attention but ultimately flamed out. As I said,
we could go on much much longer with this list.
There are tons of other examples, and I'll probably do
more episodes about them in the future. And you should
expect these kind of things, right because again, creating an
app is seen as one of those gateways toward insane
(43:59):
so excess in Silicon Valley, like it seems like everyone
in Silicon Valley is behind some sort of app, and
we might only hear about a small percentage of them.
Some of those cases are because the app is just
so incredible and useful that it's undeniable how valuable. It is.
In other cases, it might be that it's a peculiarity,
(44:21):
and it gets some momentary notice, and then ultimately that
doesn't stand the test of time, and in a few
cases it may just be notorious and infamous, as I
would argue the pay by Touch story ultimately became once
the history of Rogers became more public knowledge. Anyway, I
hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you are all well,
(44:45):
and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech
Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's care Price host of tech Stuff. We're taking
a week off, but we'll have a fresh episode for
you next Wednesday. You're not gonna want to miss Oz's
conversation with the CEO of Colossal Biosciences. I know, I
was surprised by just how close we may be to
bringing back the Wooly Mammoth and what that could mean
for our planet. So definitely check that out next week.
(00:34):
In lieu of headlines today, we wanted to share an
episode of tech Stuff from February twenty twenty four about
some of the biggest apps to ever flop. The tech
industry moves really fast. It always has, but now it
feels like it's moving in hyper speed given the popularity
of vibe coding programs like Cursor, Codex, and Copilot. With
(00:54):
these tools, you no longer have to be an expert
software engineer to write code, and now you have to
be a designer either. Last week, Google launched Stitch, a
program that can help you build web or mobile app
front ends. But just because you can, it doesn't mean
you should. In the episode you're about to hear, Jonathan
Strickland reminds us that not every pitch is a promise,
(01:17):
and sometimes the most compelling apps can fail. Take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the
tech are yet? So, once upon a time, we used
to have these things called programs. And I say that
(01:47):
because now we don't call programs programs anymore. We typically
call programs apps. I think that really started to become
a thing upon the ascent of the consumer smartphone, which
was sparked by Apple, which was then cranked up by Android,
and that we really had the era of the app.
At that point. We used to, like I said, call
(02:08):
them programs. Now they are applications, whether it's for a
phone or a computer. I guess app stores sounds better
than program emporium anyway. For thousands of entrepreneurs, the dream
is to build an app and to become rich beyond
your wildest dreams. Right, You design an app and then
(02:28):
the money rolls in. Maybe it's because some bigger fish
out there, like some Google or Apple or Meta, decides
that you're just too good to be left unacquired. And
then they spend a bucket load of cash on you,
hopefully ten times more than what you're actually worth. Or
maybe you actually figure out how to be profitable all
(02:50):
on your own, you actually have a business plan and
you have a way of generating revenue. You would be
the rare Silicon Valley project that actually works as a
business business on its own. That again is the dream.
But dreams don't always come true, and sometimes even apps
that seem to be strapped to a rocket for success
(03:11):
end up blowing up and going up in flames. So
this episode is about apps that fall into that category,
apps that at one time seemed like they were a
sure thing, only they flamed out down the line. One
of the apps I originally planned to put on this
list was four square, but as it turns out, that
app and the company behind it is still chugging along,
(03:34):
just in a slightly different role than it was before.
See I remember when four square launched and folks would
use it to check in to locations that they were
visiting in the real world. So some places would even
start to offer special discounsel right, like twenty percent off
your first drink if you check into the bar via
(03:54):
four square. Because it was seen as a kind of
viral marketing. Other folks were worried about the privacy issues
of this kind of behavior. In fact, some folks created
a website called Please rob Me, and this site satirically
would scrape data off Twitter for four square check in notifications,
(04:14):
so please rob Me would then list people who were
saying they were not currently at home. Now, the whole
point wasn't to actually inspire a wave of burglaries, but
rather show why it's dangerous to broadcast your location to
the world in general. Then it might not be a
good idea, and maybe people should think harder about their
(04:36):
personal privacy. In twenty fourteen, for Square actually changed dramatically.
The company launched a companion app called Swarm Now. This
app contained all the social networking features that for Square
used to have, so all the check in stuff, all
the geolocation stuff that was kind of seen as the
(04:59):
critical element of four square and the one that you
should be worried about that went to Swarm. For Square
meanwhile became four Square City Guide, which became a discovery
and recommendation app, and it would help you figure out
places that maybe you should visit based upon your past experiences, right,
It would say, Okay, I see that you're in downtown
New York, and because of the places that you used
(05:22):
to go to in your hometown, here are some places
we think you should probably check out because you'll really
like them. You didn't have to use both of the
apps if you didn't want to, but they did compliment
one another, So if you used Swarm, four Square would
tap into that check in data to help inform what
recommendations it should give you. Those apps are still available today.
(05:45):
Like I just thought that four Square had come and
gone because I haven't personally used it in a decade,
But the fact is it's still a thing. One really
interesting thing to me is that forour Square's business largely
involves licensing its technology to other companies, which include Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat,
(06:07):
and lots more. The check in feature that four Square
developed powers numerous other apps. So while our perception was
that four Square was a relic of the past, that's
just not true. That's totally my misconception there, and again
it's because I haven't really paid attention to four Square
in a decade. But it is interesting to me that
(06:27):
you know, they found success in a different way than
what they set out to do. I still don't have
any real desire to read download either four Square or Swarm. However,
on a related note, there is also the story of
yik Yak. Now, this app actually did flame out, but
then it was resurrected again just a few years ago,
(06:47):
so for those of y'all who do not know the story,
A couple of guys launched an anonymous location based messaging
platform back in twenty thirteen, and the way it worked
was that you would open the app and you would
connect via putting in your phone number. This would end
up allowing you to post to the platform, but you
(07:08):
would only be able to read messages that had been
posted by people within a certain distance of your physical location,
such as within a five mile radius, and you could
post a message anonymously, and again only people who were
in a five mile radius of your location would be
able to read your message, So as you would travel around,
you would see new messages, while ones that were now
(07:29):
out of physical range would disappear from view. The focus
on geolocation, coupled with anonymity, made the app extremely popular
with school campuses, and Yakyak largely catered to that audience.
This also meant there was a lot of abuse. There
was no accountability, right, There was no connection to a
specific person, so people could post the platform and they
(07:52):
could bully other folks or worse. So there were these
stories popping up all around the United States about how
the app was bringing out the absolute worst in people
and endangering folks right Like, let's say that you belonged
to a minority population in a particular campus university of
Even if someone's not specifically calling you out, it might
(08:15):
be easy to figure out who people are talking about,
which could definitely hurt your mental health, or they could
even be calling for more extreme acts that could endanger
your physical health. So pressure built against the company, and
eventually yaikyak cave to it. So in twenty fifteen, Yayik
made a massive change and required users to register a
(08:35):
handle with the site. So all messages now would be
attributed to a handle. They wouldn't be fully anonymous. Now,
it was still a handle, not your name, so it
wasn't exactly the same thing as signing your name to
your own words, but it was a lot closer than
what had come before. Hardcore users hated this change, and
eventually yak Yak kind of backed off a bit and
(08:58):
made it an optional feature, but by then the user
base had been alienated and had dwindled, and in twenty seventeen,
the company announced that the app was shutting down due
to that dwindling user base. They actually did a sell
off Square, the company that is behind online payment systems.
They purchased essentially the IP but really more like they
(09:20):
purchased the engineering talent of YikYak and brought them on board,
and it was for reportedly like just a million dollars,
which is still a lot of money. Don't get me wrong.
A million dollars is a lot, but it's nothing compared
to what yik yak was valued at a few years earlier.
And so yak yak effectively stopped being a thing in
(09:41):
twenty seventeen, and it stayed in the grave for four years.
But then in February twenty twenty one, a group of
new owners who remained mysterious and unnamed. Like everywhere I
look to find out who the heck owned yaikyak between
twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three, didn't have information
about that anyway, They purchased yak Yak and announced plans
(10:02):
to relaunch, and sure enough, late in the summer of
twenty twenty one, the app came back. Now two years later,
in twenty twenty three, another company called side Chat scooped
up yik Yak now side chats. Shtick was essentially the
same as yak yak. Sidechat had an anonymous posting platform
that largely was targeting college campuses. Side Chat was not
(10:25):
as popular as yak yak. A lot of yak yak
users felt that Sidechat's user interface was inferior, and initially
yak yak users were getting messages where they were being
urged to migrate to side chat and they hated it.
Eventually that would change, where yik yak would remain a thing,
but effectively transformed into side chat. You know, its interface
(10:49):
became more of side Chat's interface. By the way, I
based this all off of blog posts and articles and
message boards because I wasn't onn yik yak at the time,
so I had no idea of what was going on.
But while the initial yik yak was popular with campuses,
this new version specifically focused on university students, like almost
(11:09):
like exclusively, as opposed to it being a community based
thing or a regional based thing. It was specifically a
campus based thing, and occasionally it sounds like it would
even make mistakes and accidentally assign someone to a university
that was not the one they actually went to, which
could be really hairy, right because if I were to
join Yak Yak and it suggested I was a student
(11:31):
at Georgia Tech, that's fighting words because I attended the
University of Georgia. Now that probably means nothing to most
of you, but just know those two schools have had
a long standing rivalry that goes between being you know,
good natured ribbing and genuine, deep seated loathing. So if
you had one student misidentified as going to the other school,
(11:51):
that could be fighting words. Now, I should say that
Yak Yak currently is only back for iOS users, as
I record the podcast. Now, the relaunch did at one
point include Android, and apparently it was only active for
a very short while before in the spring of twenty
twenty three, the company said that they were shutting down
(12:14):
Android support in order to focus on building out features
for the iOS version. Now, again, I can't check this
app out. I'm an Android user. Plus I'm not a
college student, so I have to rely on articles and
Reddit posts to read up on it, and it sounds
to me that in the past you could register for
yik yik just with your phone number, but now since
the side chat acquisition, you have to supply a university
(12:37):
email address to create an account university or college email address,
and if you don't have one of those, you can't
have an account, and that has upset a lot of
users because it meant that they're one. If they're not
in college, they can't be part of this anymore. Though honestly,
I don't see why you would necessarily want to be,
but then that's probably because I feel a lot of
(12:57):
empathy for the folks who were bullied, but it all
so is a reason. One reason they don't want to
do it anymore is because their actual identity would be
associated with their account, maybe not directly, like the actual
posts would be anonymous, but the site would know who
you were because you would have an email address tied
to your identity to register for the site. Arguably, you
(13:20):
could say the same thing is true because for the
old version, because you had to supply a phone number,
So unless you're buying burner numbers just for yekiyak, it
would be pretty easy to figure out who you were.
But it also means that if you're not a college student,
or you're not on faculty or staff, then you're completely
out of the loop. There's a lot of competition in
the anonymous message board space these days. Seems to me
(13:43):
that a lot of the companies behind these apps typically
will reach a level of success that brings more attention
to their activities and perhaps their flaws, let's say, and
then they feel pressure to change things in order to
make their apps less prone to abuse because now people
are paying attention to them and calling them out. And
(14:03):
then subsequently, after making these changes, the apps decline in
popularity because it turns out the user base the stuff
that they really liked happened to be the same stuff
that also facilitated abuse. Not to say that users all
enjoyed and piling on folks and abusing people, but that
the same features that made it easy to abuse folks
(14:26):
were also the features that people just really liked. That
kind of seems to be the life cycle for these
kinds of applications. They launch, they go viral, they get
really big folks notice that sometimes really awful people are
using that app to do really awful things. The app
then ends up making changes in an effort to not
(14:46):
be held accountable for these things, and then it alienates
the user base, both the good and the bad users.
It then declines in popularity, then it fades into memory,
your rents and you repeat. Now, I can't say for
certain that's what's happening with ya Yak. There are a
lot of users who say that it's not as good
as it used to be, that they don't see the appeal.
The fact that it doesn't it's not available for Android
(15:08):
users is a huge thing. It means that a large
amount of the population can't even access it. Maybe the
company will manage to relaunch for Android and regain some momentum,
or maybe it's on the path back toward obsolescence. Okay,
we've got more failed apps to talk about. Before we
do that, let's stop for a moment and thank our sponsors. Okay,
(15:37):
we're back. So no list of failed apps would be
complete without Quibbi. Holy cats, this was a massive whiff
with a whole lot of money and some really heavy
hitters in both the entertainment and tech industries at the wheel,
and it's still crashed and burned. It was the brainchild
(15:59):
of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had forged a legendary career in Hollywood.
You know, he became really well known at Disney and
then created dream Works. And Quibi was hoping to tap
into that same magic that Hollywood success and also the
same magic that TikTok moosts. That was the key was
(16:21):
can we make something inspired by the success of TikTok,
and that was namely short form content, And in the
case of Quibi, the short form would be videos that
would last ten minutes or less. However, unlike TikTok, Quibi
productions would have some serious money behind them. We're talking
about really high production values, stuff that you would see
(16:44):
that would be akin to a television or film studio.
And if TikTok could knock him dead with diy shorts
created by just any Yahoo out there, surely an entertainment
app with serious Hollywood credentials could make a killing right now.
On the tech side, former HP CEO Meg Whitman was
(17:05):
on board, and Whitman and Katzenberg brainstormed the structure and
execution of Quibbi. They also are argued a lot Witman
would later essentially say that Katzenberg would undermine her decisions
and was micromanaging, and there seemed to be a lot
of bad blood at the top levels at Quibbi, which
was just one of many problems. But the company signed
(17:26):
on various actors, directors, writers, and associated people to create
content for the site. They poured approximately a billion dollars
to that effect. Some of the content created consisted of
standalone short videos right like it was just a one
and done ten minutes or less video, but some were
(17:48):
actually serialized. They were longer pieces and divided up into
ten minute long chapters. This in turn was a really
tricky because, like, if you're gonna divide a movie into
ten minute long chapters a way to entice people to
continue after a chapter is over, and in my opinion,
it becomes like a Dan Brown novel where every chapter
(18:09):
ends in a cliffhanger to try and incentivize people to
go to the next chapter. And personally, I find that
kind of narrative exhausting and not very satisfying. I am
not a Dan Brown fan, nothing against him, I just
it doesn't appeal to me to end every few pages
with another cliffhanger. Anyway, they also made a really odd
(18:33):
decision when it came to framing, because the whole point
of Quibi was that it was intended to be consumed
on smartphones. And as I'm sure you're aware, we're used
to watching television programs in landscape format, that is, the
picture is wider than it is tall, right, But for phones,
we often hold phones in portrait mode, where it's taller
(18:57):
than it is wide. Otherwise you have to turn the
dang phone on its side, and there's a chance you'll
end up watching a tiny video with huge black bars
above and below it. So one choice Quibi's founders made
is that all content should be viewable in full screen,
whether the user was holding their phone in portrait or
landscape mode, and that you could switch back and forth.
(19:20):
So you could hold it in portrait mode and then say,
you know what, I don't want to see this in
wide screen, turn your phone landscape. It would switch, and
in both versions the image would completely fill the screen
of your phone. That's a big deal, even though it
might not sound like it, because if you're a director
or cinematographer, part of your job is making sure all
(19:40):
the important information for the viewer is available within the frame.
Obviously that's going to be different if the finished product
is to be viewed in portrait mode rather than landscape.
You need to figure out how are you going to
frame the image so that it works in both formats,
or you might have to use things like pan and
scan or switching view to get the information across. Right, Like,
(20:01):
you might have a scene where you have two characters,
one far left and one far right on the screen.
They're talking to each other, and then landscape mode, that's fine,
you can see it, but you switch into portrait mode
and now there's not enough room on the screen to
get both characters in frame. What do you do? Do
you have an empty frame where both characters are off screen,
(20:23):
one off screen left and one off screen right. Do
you just focus on one character and then you switch
whenever the dialogue changes so that you get a different
view when character one speaks versus character two? Do you
pan back and forth? Which is that swimmy effect you
often get if you watch like old old home video,
not home video, but you know videos that were made
(20:44):
for home video use, you will often get that scanning feature.
Because televisions were in the old four to three aspect
ratio and they couldn't incorporate a wide screen picture unless
they did the bars at the top or bottom or both,
and a lot of people hated them. They wanted to
have the image take up the whole screen. So you
end up having this digital panning, which I absolutely detested. Well,
(21:08):
you have to make those decisions, or do you end
up blocking all of your shots so that all the
relevant information can be seen in one view, even if
it's portrait, in which case you might just have a
lot of unused space, like negative space in the frame
if you're watching it widescreen, or maybe you shoot with
multiple cameras so that way, one camera is taking the
(21:30):
landscape version of the shot, one camera's taking the portrait
version of the shot. Like, there's a lot of complex
things you have to think of behind the scenes from
a content creator standpoint, beyond just the technology of if
you turn your phone, you want the frame to be
completely full. So this was a real issue that goes
(21:50):
a technical challenge, and they did not have enough time
to figure out how to deal with that in a
way that was satisfying anyway. That whole design decision became
a big hurdle. But another hurdle was that Quibi was
meant to be mobile only by design. It was not
intended to be an app that you would access on
a computer or smart television or streaming box or anything
(22:12):
like that, and something that was outside the control and
not predicted by the folks at Quibi when they were
putting together their business plan was the COVID nineteen pandemic,
which took a lot of us totally by surprise. So
Quibi was really intended to be used for a world
that was on the go, right. The use case was
(22:32):
that you would be out in the real world and
you would have time to kill. Maybe you're waiting in
line of the bank, or maybe you're sitting on a
subway and you're on your way to work and you
just need something to distract you from the tedium of life. Boom.
Quibi is there to save the day. High production value,
scripted entertainment or you know, like game shows or whatever,
(22:53):
but still high production value, not the type of stuff
you would see typically on a site like TikTok. Except
the app launch just as the world was shutting down
and going into quarantine in twenty twenty, so the use
case for the app was no longer relevant at least
not for the several first months of the app's existence.
Plenty of critics said that even without the pandemic, Quibi
(23:15):
would have just totally failed. But certainly the lockdown was
a massive blow to the service when there were plenty
of other options folks could access when they were at home.
Why use Quibi if you have access to Netflix or
one of the billion other streaming services that are out
there now. The Verge has an article going through other
reasons why Quibi flopped. The writer Julia Alexander argues in
(23:39):
that piece that one big reason is that none of
the shows on Quibi were particularly good, and that is
a really tough problem. It is hard to convince folks
to flock to your streaming service if the stuff you're
streaming isn't very entertaining or compelling. Alexander actually says, quote
most titles felt like jokes straight out of thirty Rock
(24:02):
end quoteff if you don't know what that means. Thirty
Rock was this sitcom, a satirical sitcom about creating a
late night comedy variety show akin to Saturday Night Live,
and often the show was joking about different shows that
the network was launching, and they were always ridiculous, and
(24:24):
you know, you would never really expect to see such
a show in the real world. Well, Quibi apparently brought
those kinds of shows to the real world. Initially, Quibi
offered a free subscription for a few months to early users,
kind of a trial period, but once that trial period
ran out, users were then given the option to subscribe
to the service either for five dollars a month, which
(24:44):
was an ad supported experience, or eight dollars a month
if you wanted to be free of ads. But since,
as Alexander points out, there really wasn't much compelling content
on the streaming service, most folks declined the offer once
it stopped being They were like, that's it, I'm out,
there's nothing here to keep me here. Julia Alexander also
(25:04):
argues that Quibi was doomed even if there had never
been a pandemic, and it's quite possible that she was right, because,
as we do know, Katzenberg and Whitman were at odds
with each other. There was a lack of good content
on Quibi, there were a lot of other competing services
already out there, and there weren't a lot of good
(25:26):
arguments to say why use Quibi when there are these
other alternatives, right, And to Alexander's point, the people at
Quibi never really settled on what Quibi actually was, or
what it was for, or what its mission was. And
because there was this lack of clarity, there was really
little chance of success. Now we'll never know if Quibi
(25:49):
would have succeeded had there not been a pandemic, or
if it would have survived, but we do know that
Quibi launched on April sixth, twenty twenty, and it was
shut down by December of twenty. It didn't even make
it a full year. And considering how much money was
behind that app, like, remember, this is an app that
spent a billion dollars just on the content, that's not
(26:11):
even on the engineering or anything else. Well, that's a
massive flop, like big time flop in the tech world.
And while we're on the subject of short form entertainment,
let's talk about a precursor to TikTok, something that kind
of was forging the path that other services like TikTok
(26:32):
or Instagram reels would follow. And I'm talking about the
venerable and missed app Vine, at least it's missed by
some people, including me. So in twenty twelve, Don Hoffman,
Colin Krol, and russ Yusupov developed and launched the app Vine. Now,
for those of y all who have never experienced Vine,
(26:53):
it was a short form video app where you could
record and then post a six second video clip and
it would automatically loop once it reached the end, so
it would play out the six seconds or however long
it was. It could be less than six seconds, and
then once it was at the end, it would start
over again until you scrolled to the next you know, Vine.
(27:16):
And this made the app ideal for meme worthy content,
so it was great for stuff like pranks or funny
visual gags or amazing feats of skill, like if someone was,
you know, shooting a basketball from half court and sinking
it perfectly, nothing but net perfect Vine, right. And it
(27:38):
also meant that folks started to get really creative. They
started to look at Vine as sort of a challenging
platform and they wanted to create content specifically for it,
and they would create six second long stories, typically comedic. Right.
You'd have a setup and then a punchline and it
would all take place in six seconds, but sometimes it
(27:58):
would include things like scene changes. This was not easy
to do in Vine because there were no real editing
tools to speak of within the app. You could record,
then you could pause recording, and then you could start
recording again. But you had just that six seconds to
do everything, and you couldn't cut and edit clips together.
(28:18):
So if you had like a really good take in
the first three seconds of one version and a really
good conclusion in the last three seconds of another version,
you couldn't pair those together. You had to get it
all done in one go, which meant if you made
a mistake, your options were either post the imperfect version
or keep trying till you got it right. Even so,
(28:39):
with these restrictions, folks flocked to Vine to make some
pretty amazing short videos, and they ranged all over the place.
I mostly think of the comedic ones, but there were
other ones too. There were some that weren't, you know, comedic.
They were like heartwarming or you know, they might make
you weepy, depending upon the content. Vine was a phenomenon
shortly after launching in of twenty twelve, and it was
(29:01):
enough to convince Twitter to acquire the company in October
of twenty twelve for thirty million smackaroos, which is not
bad for a newly launched app. A couple of years later,
in twenty fourteen, some successful Vine creators all banded together
to move into an apartment complex which became kind of
a ragtag collaborative studio in a sense, and they found
(29:25):
further exposure on mainstream media. Like their success on Vine
translated to larger platforms like classic ones on television. But
even by twenty fourteen, things were starting to get rocky
for Vine. One major reason is that Vine was in
trouble due to hefty competition. You see, the same year
(29:46):
that Vine launched, back in twenty twelve, Meta which at
that point was just known as Facebook, acquired Instagram for
a billion smack aarreous that's really a princely sum. And
then in twenty thirteen, Instagram introduced the ability to post
video clips of up to fifteen seconds in length, so
already more than twice as long as a Vine. Instagram
(30:10):
also already had a huge user base, which was made
even larger by Facebook's integration, and it took a big
old gulp of Vine's milkshake as a result. Now, this
move should not have surprised anyone, because even Back then,
Facebook already had a reputation for scooping up companies that
could otherwise distract Facebook users. Instagram was actually a great
(30:32):
example of this. Instagram was one of those acquisitions where
Facebook says, Oh, this other app is starting to get
people's attention, which means their attention isn't on our website,
which means we're not making money from them. I don't
like that. Let's fix it. And Facebook typically had one
of two ways that they would fix this problem. They
would buy the company and incorporate it into Facebook's corporate structure,
(30:56):
and thus it became a bonus. It was added to
Facebook's value, it was no longer taking away. Or they
could copy it, and if they copied it, then they
could undermine their competitor. And in the case of Vine,
Facebook shows that option. They would just mimic the defining
(31:22):
features of the competitor, either in Facebook or in one
of their other properties, and they would try to sap
the user base back over to Facebook without having to
buy the competition. That's kind of what was going on
with Vine, and it worked. The money began to shift
from Vine to Instagram, and that money was largely coming
out of marketing departments. So brands were partnering with popular
(31:46):
creators in an effort to manufacture some viral marketing campaigns.
And these could be really cost effective, right, Like, if
you're a creator, a deal might land you a ton
of money, but that ton of money would still be
tied up compared to what a traditional mainstream marketing campaign
would cost a company. So then there you go. That's
(32:07):
where the money was for Vine. But then Instagram was
offering a longer form factor, right, more than twice as
long as what a Vine was, and that was far
more attractive to a lot of marketers out there. Like
when you're talking fifteen seconds, you're talking half of a
traditional television commercial. So the shift of money and influence
meant that creators would also jump ship from Vine to
(32:27):
Instagram or in some cases to other platforms like YouTube. Now,
not everyone did it, but it was really challenging to
go in for that small pool of money that was
still available for Vine creators. And it was also scary
to port your work from one platform to another because
there was no guarantee the audience would follow. Right. Just
(32:47):
because you were popular on Vine doesn't mean you're going
to find the same success If you move over to
Instagram or to YouTube. You know, some folks could do that,
and maybe they would lose some of their audience, but
they would have enough to be able to not lose
too much momentum. For others, it would mean having to
start from scratch, and there's no guarantee that you'll strike
gold twice. But since that pool of money was getting
(33:09):
smaller and smaller over at Vine, most creators didn't need
a lot of convincing they had to switch or else
they weren't going to make any money anyway. So Vine
went into further decline, and in twenty sixteen, Twitter announced
it was going to shut down Vine, which happened in
early twenty seventeen. And we can still feel the influence
of Vine today in the form of Instagram reels and
(33:30):
TikTok videos, and it's possible that neither of those things
would have happened without Vine. And I know lots of
folks who to this day lament the loss of Vine.
So farewell Vine. We hardly knew Yee, Okay, we're going
to take another quick break. When we come back, We've
got a couple more examples I really want to talk about, Okay,
(33:58):
let's talk about some more fails, and this next one
is one that I absolutely loved, even as I recognized
that it was a hot mess from the get go
and it probably wasn't a practical solution for ninety nine
percent of the population out there. So I'm talking about
Google Wave, And honestly, I could do a full episode
(34:20):
just about Google apps that have come and gone, and
in fact, I actually have done that at least once
or twice in the past. But Google Wave has a
special place in my heart. So Google launched this bizarre
app back in two thousand and nine, and it was
a real time online collaborative tool, and it was kind
of like a Frankenstein's Monster of features. There were elements
(34:42):
of email worked in there, Instant messaging was worked in there,
online word processing, and lots more.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
So.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
You could create a document in Google Wave, you could
invite online collaborators and all of you could work within
that document at the same time, and you would be
able to see what others were doing in the document,
like word by word. You could watch as they made
typos and corrected and stuff. It was all going at
the same time, and the app would also keep a
history of all the changes made to the document. So
(35:13):
maybe someone's going off the rails right and you're like, no, wait,
we can't none of this is working for this document.
You could actually wind things back to an earlier version. Now.
I only used Google Wave with one other person, who
was my former co host, Chris Pillette. We used Google
Wave to build out a run of show for a
streaming video series we used to do way back in
(35:36):
the day. So once a week we would do a
streaming video that was kind of like a tech news
program live on TV in the middle of the day
Eastern time, and we would use Google Wave to organize
our show and even to make changes on the fly
while streaming our video content. And it was an ideal
tool for that situation. The trouble was, I couldn't figure
(35:57):
out any other use case where it would really makes
sense for me, just this one thing I would do
once a week for my job. For a lot of
folks out there, they never found a good use for
Google Wave. By the way, I really miss that streaming
video show. One of the fun things that we used
to have and that show is that occasionally either Matt Frederick,
(36:19):
one of the hosts of Stuff they don't want you
to know would do this, or sometimes Tyler Klaig, who's
now like the head of our podcast production. Both of
them are still with the company. I would do a
tweet of the week segment and they would hold up
a little bird on a stick. They would be out
of frame and they would poke a bird out stick
to be in front of my face and they would
(36:39):
make a tweet sound, which just shows how far those
guys have come since we were doing the streaming news show. Anyway,
features in Google Wave would eventually find their way into
lots of other Google applications, but Google Wave itself was
just not very long for this world. Google supported it
for about a year. Then they essentially he said, you
(37:00):
know what, this isn't working for us, and they shifted
it off to the Apache Software Foundation in twenty ten.
Folks suggested that Google's decision was due to lots of
converging reasons, ranging from just a confusing interface that was
turning away new users to internal conflicts that were happening
within the development team, especially at the leadership level. There
(37:21):
were stories that there were leaders who were disagreeing on
what Google Wave was even supposed to be, which meant
that the development team was put in this really difficult
position in the middle to try and create all things
for all people, which was impossible, so they ended up
creating something that was for nobody. But even the Apache
Wave version is no more. The nonprofit group had Wave
in an incubator status for almost a decade, but in
(37:45):
twenty eighteen the Wave became still waters because development ceased
and Wave just never graduated out of that incubator status. Now,
I can't say that I would still be using Wave
to this day if it were still around, but that's
mostly because tech stuff is a pretty simple project. I research, write,
and record all the episodes, and then super producer Tari
(38:06):
she edits and publishes the episodes, so there is collaboration there.
Tari and I do collaborate, but it's divided really neatly
into a production phase and a post production phase. Perhaps
if I were more actively working on shows that had
multiple collaborators, I would feel Waves loss more keenly. But
I really liked using it, even while I recognized how
(38:29):
weird and janky it was. Now this list could go
on much much longer, but I figure I'll conclude with
a rock Star like story, and that story involves a
company called pay by Touch. While most of the apps
I've talked about so far were ones that you would
either use on your phone or on your computer, pay
by Touch was different. Okay, it was an app that
(38:51):
was a service, and this service would let you pay
for purchases at a point of sale, primarily in places
like supermarkets here in the United States. You had to
do was swipe your finger on a fingerprint sensor at
the cash register, and your biometric data would correspond to
your pay by Touch account, and an electronic transaction would
(39:11):
take care of your grocery bill by deducting it from
your checking account or from a credit card, and you
could go on your merry way without ever having to
hand over cash or write a check or use a
credit card physically. Just swipe your finger, good to go.
This was the future, and it was all in two
thousand and two. The idea of having your financials directly
tied to your own identity was one that had been
(39:34):
around for a while but not really accomplished. So again,
it was really considered to be convenient, and you could
even tie your biometrics to things like a store loyalty account.
So by using your fingerprint. You could then apply discounts
or coupons to whatever it was you were buying. And
(39:54):
this was coming out in two thousand and two, you like,
five years before we would get the first iPhone, So
these d You know, obviously, we have lots of contactless
payment solutions, mostly tied to mobile phones, but back in
two thousand and two, this was really revolutionary. Now, the
services did face challenges. One big one was that folks
were a little anxious about having their money tied to
their fingerprints. There seemed to be something invasive about that. Heck,
(40:18):
if you're the type of person who prefers to use
cash for your transactions, it absolutely goes against your preferences. Also,
the thought of a third party company potentially having insight
into your purchase history seemed creepy. But despite the slow
going and low adoption rate, pay by Touch did grow
and got lots of investors. It expanded its business into
various supermarket chains. But then the company would ultimately declare
(40:40):
bankruptcy in two thousand and eight. So what happened, Well,
part of what happened was a failure to communicate to
the public the benefits of this system. Just really bad
marketing and education the concept again including things like tying
biometrics to loyalty programs and stuff that just didn't really
get communicated effectively in most locations, and some stores were
(41:03):
just using the system for loyalty programs and customers would
still pay for their purchases using more traditional means. So
there was this element of distrust that the company was
never able to overcome, possibly for good reason, because another
big reason for the company's failure was in its leadership.
The CEO of the company was a guy named John P. Rogers,
and he had had some trouble with the law that
(41:25):
largely went unnoticed when he was getting investments for his company.
At least a couple of women had accused him of
violent behavior, one saying that he had abused her, the
other saying he had trashed her home. Both of them
had been connected romantically with him. He had also been
pulled over by police and arrested on suspicion of driving
under the influence of cocaine, and apparently he was known
(41:50):
to have had issues with drug addiction. Investigation suggested that
Rogers had been rather extravagant with corporate funds that he
had spearheaded efforts to convince those with really deep pockets
to invest in Pay by Touch that paid off in dividends.
He raised around three hundred and forty million dollars, but
by two thousand and eight the coffers were empty, and
(42:12):
the investigation suggested that one reason for this was that
Rogers appeared to have been dipping into corporate funds to
pay for an extravagant lifestyle, complete with drug use. And
when I say extravagant, I mean that the investigation suggested
he was burning around eight million dollars a month, which
is a lot of money. And it would turn out
(42:32):
that Rogers had a history of failed businesses, something that
no one had really noticed when Pay by Touch was
just getting off the ground. He had managed to keep
his history kind of out of the spotlight, and investors
didn't ask any tough questions. They just were excited about
this potential opportunity to completely revolutionize the way we pay
for stuff at retail locations. Obviously that was key to
(42:55):
him securing investments. Ultimately, pay by Touch went could put.
Some investors pursued civil litigation against the company and against Rogers,
but he never faced criminal charges. For how things went
down which is kind of wild. I wasn't there, so
I don't know. Maybe the evidence was all circumstantial, maybe
there was not a solid case against him, But it
(43:16):
does seem to fall in line with the perception that
the rules are different depending upon who you are and
your station in life. I don't know if that's actually
the case in this particular instance, but on the surface
it seems to reinforce that idea anyway. That is just
a quick list of some major apps that received a
(43:37):
lot of attention but ultimately flamed out. As I said,
we could go on much much longer with this list.
There are tons of other examples, and I'll probably do
more episodes about them in the future. And you should
expect these kind of things, right because again, creating an
app is seen as one of those gateways toward insane
(43:59):
so excess in Silicon Valley, like it seems like everyone
in Silicon Valley is behind some sort of app, and
we might only hear about a small percentage of them.
Some of those cases are because the app is just
so incredible and useful that it's undeniable how valuable. It is.
In other cases, it might be that it's a peculiarity,
(44:21):
and it gets some momentary notice, and then ultimately that
doesn't stand the test of time, and in a few
cases it may just be notorious and infamous, as I
would argue the pay by Touch story ultimately became once
the history of Rogers became more public knowledge. Anyway, I
hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you are all well,
(44:45):
and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech
Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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