TagWorld

» see tagworld.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

tagworld was a myspace clone, that was not my country, not my crowd. by '05 i was a twenty one year old computer engineering student in ankara on ttnet broadband, the social product on every screen i passed through was msn messenger with hi5 a tab behind it. myspace had no foothold in turkey and neither did its clone tier, so tagworld was something i would only read about much later.

evan rifkin and fred krueger launched the site in fall '05 in los angeles with a music focused profile design that let you upload tracks and share widgets. draper fisher jurvetson put seven and a half million in during february '06 and the site crossed a million accounts in march, the same window myspace was around fifty million. comscore numbers started falling through the back half of '06, the team had been shipping features faster than the user base was sticking.

the viacom money came in early '07. sumner redstone had personally lost the myspace acquisition to rupert murdoch in '05 and had fired tom freston over the miss in september '06. tagworld was redstone's second swing at the social tier, a forty million dollar minority investment with a partnership to host community features for mtv.com and colbertnation. the company renamed itself social project and rolled out a decentralized social network framework called flux that was meant to let viacom brands run their own community tiers.

this part you literally had to be in the us for, and i was not. the consumer tagworld site faded through '07 as the team pivoted to flux. comscore traffic kept dropping. the brand was effectively retired before any obit existed for it. mtv networks acquired the remaining piece of social project on 22 september '08. the price was undisclosed and public reporting on the company's user base stopped from that day on.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the visual identity was clean, a lowercase tagworld wordmark in dark green over a white profile page. the layout was three columns. photo and music on the left, friends and feed running down the right. you got a profile page with a blog and a music upload slot, plus a widgets shelf below it that let you embed third party blocks. the wysiwyg editor let you drag those blocks around without writing html, that drag without html part was what rifkin and krueger told investors was the next gen differentiator over myspace.

this part i was not around for. the music tier was probably the most memorable feature. you could upload your own tracks to your profile and stream them from any tagworld page, unsigned bands used it the way they would later use bandcamp or soundcloud. the company had a separate music page that listed top uploads. it was the bait that drew mtv interest in the same window mtv was failing to win urge or any of its other music store attempts.

~ the redstone bet ~

this happened more in the american media press than where i was. sumner redstone was eighty three years old in '06 and was running viacom personally after splitting it from cbs in '05. he had told tom freston, the viacom ceo, to buy myspace in '05 for about six hundred million dollars. freston could not close the deal in time, rupert murdoch's news corp bought it for five hundred and eighty million. redstone fired freston on 5 september '06 over the miss. the public framing was that viacom needed a social network strategy and freston had blown the only easy path to one.

tagworld was the next plan. forty million dollars was not the cost of buying myspace, it was the cost of betting on a clone, and the cultural moment for myspace clones was already cracking by the time the check landed. rifkin and krueger were given a seat inside viacom's digital strategy and the company rebranded as social project. flux was built to power community across the viacom brand catalog. all of that was downstream of one personal grudge inside paramount towers.

~ what really happened ~

the consumer tagworld brand had effectively died in '07 even before the acquisition closed. the site stopped getting marketing and the user count stopped showing up in techcrunch posts. mtv networks formally acquired the remaining stake on 22 september '08. flux folded into the viacom community tools and the tagworld domain disappeared into the corporate org chart.

this part you had to be in the us for, and i was not. in october '10 mtv sold what was left of social project to a small turkish founded company called grou.ps, the deal was small enough that nobody published the price. the assets ended up powering small community sites under the grou.ps tools brand for another five years before that too went quiet. by then the entire story sat several layers deep under whatever the next viacom restructuring was. redstone himself died in august '20 at ninety seven and the obituaries did not mention tagworld at all.

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