- Piczo
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Piczo, Inc 
Type Blog company Founded 2003 Founder(s) Jim Conning [1] Headquarters San Francisco, California Key people Jeremy Verba (CEO) Website www.piczo.com Piczo, Inc is a privately held blog company for teens, based in San Francisco, California. Investors included Catamount, Sierra Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, and Mangrove Capital Partners.[2]
In March of 2009, Piczo was acquired by Stardoll.[3]
Contents
Piczo as a service
Their eponymous service, also called Piczo, is an online photo website builder and community, which is for generation of free advertising-supported websites.
Piczo, launched in 2004, allows users to add images, text, guestbooks, message boxes, videos, music and other content to their site using plain text and HTML. Partners include YouTube, VideoEgg, Photobucket, Flock, Yahoo & PollDaddy. When it had just launched, it wasn't a blog company - instead, it was just a site where you could create your own website. In fact, blogs weren't included as one of the original features.
In addition to the website development aspect of the site, Piczo used to have a User Generated Content repository, the Piczo Zone, where users can browse, post, and consume content that they or others have used on their site. Recently, Piczo has remodeled the entire site, and this along with many other features are no longer available. One of those deleted features was the Meebo chatrooms. Piczo members would create their own Meebo chatroom for everyone to chat in. Another deleted feature allowed Piczo members to be able to create their very own avatar which they were also able to use as their profile picture. By doing simple things like exploring other people's sites, checking your piczo inbox and entering your editor, you would receive points which you use as money to buy items and features for your character. To put it simply, the new Piczo has gotten rid of most unique features the site used to possess.
One of the features that stayed is "The Board" where Piczo informs users about HTML and Internet safety, though most pages are designed for the old Piczo.
In August 2008 Piczo announced "Piczo Plus," a feature that allows you to buy an "ad-free" site, which is no longer available to purchase.
Popularity
Piczo sees around 10 million unique visitors a month,[2] but according to Hitwise, is by no means the most popular social networking site available.[4][5][6][6][6][7]. While primarily offering services in English and German, Piczo is also available in French, Spanish, Romanian , Russian, Japanese, and Korean BETA versions.[8]
References
- ^ Software engine developer
- ^ a b Piczo Corporate Site
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/09/social-networking-sites-piczo-stardoll
- ^ Hitwise US - Top 20 Websites - February, 2008
- ^ Hitwise UK - Top 20 Websites - February, 2008
- ^ a b c Hitwise Australia - Top 20 Websites - February, 2008
- ^ Hitwise Singapore - Top 20 Websites - February, 2008
- ^ Piczo: Free Website Builder and Glitter, Music, Videos, Graphics, Codes, Blogs and more
External links
Categories:- Social networking services
- Web hosting
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