Tagged

Tagged is a social networking site based in San Francisco, California, United States, founded in 2004. The website suggests new people for members to meet based on shared interests. It also allows members to browse people, play games, and share tags and virtual gifts. Tagged says it has 100 million members. Quantcast reports Tagged has 6.2 million monthly unique U.S. visits and 20.4 million globally. Tagged's first acquisition was the popular social and instant messaging client Digsby, which has 3 million registered users. Michael Arrington wrote in April of 2011 that Tagged is most notable for the ability to grow profitably during the era of Facebook.

In 2009, Tagged was criticized for sending deceptive bulk mail and paid $1.4 million dollars in legal settlements regarding those practices. The company has since adopted privacy reforms and changed its invitation processes. The Office of New York State Attorney General Cuomo has also criticized Tagged for its alleged failure to respond promptly to complaints about child pornography.

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

Company history

Tagged Inc. was co-founded in mid 2004 by entrepreneurs Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith, who wanted to build a "Teen Yahoo or the next MTV". The duo had previously co-founded internet incubator Jumpstart Technologies, which was later fined $900,000 for alleged violations of the CAN-SPAM Act, then the largest ever penalty for spam. In March 2008 Microsoft announced a commercial partnership with social networking sites Tagged, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, and hi5 regarding email contacts API which has since been implemented. Other partnerships include Slide, RockYou, PhotoBucket, Meebo,Razz and Jangl. In February 2009, following complaints from the public Tagged was blocked in Qatar by the only ISP, Qtel, due to inappropriate content that Qtel could not selectively filter. Tagged.com had been one of the 10 most visited sites in Qatar.

In January 2010, in response to the earthquake in Haiti, Tagged announced that it was donating $50,000 to the Yéle Haiti Earthquake Fund, partly stemming from user donations. Also in January 2010, Tagged won a $200,000 judgment against a spammer Erik Voegler, who was sending spam to users on Tagged.

As of April 2011, Tagged has 65 employees and is looking to double its staff size over the next year.

Tagged is a member of the Social Media Advertising Consortium, which is a trade industry association that aims to increase advertising revenue and to facilitate collaboration among social networking sites, advertisers and marketing researchers. 

Website

After registering a free account, Tagged users can customize their profile page, in which users can upload photos and albums, receive and accept messages from other users, post a biography about themselves and their interests, send virtual "winks" to each other, and post status updates to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions. Users can see which other users have recently viewed their profile, send virtual tags to their friends, and sort videos by most viewed, top rated and most liked. Users may send virtual gifts to their friends. Gifts are bought with "gold" which users buy with actual money or receive by completing special offers or tasks. There are visual chat rooms in which users engage in real time online chat according to their age and mood. Designed to facilitate relationships and dating, Tagged allows users to send and receive notifications for "Luv", "Winks" and "Meet Me", a rating engine that allows users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted by others. Online social games featured on the site include Zynga games such as "Poker", Crowdstar's Happy Aquarium and Tagged's own "Pets", where users can earn cash to virtually buy people as pets. On October 30, 2009, Tagged announced a simpler signup process.

Social Games

In May of 2010 Tagged moved towards social discovery by opening up its own in-house gaming division. A change in communication strategy was also signaled by the acquisition of Digsby, which will add more social communication options to its platform. Leading the division is Andrew Pedersen, former vice president of the Pogo division of Electronic Arts. With Pedersen's leadership, Tagged plans to create more social games, several of which are already in development. 

Pets

Pets is one of the most popular games on the Tagged site and is designed to foster new relationships. Similar to a fantasy sports league, users can be ranked and have the ability to 'own', 'buy' and 'sell' other members.  Users are allowed to create the group of his or her choice. Members compete for higher value with trades, wish lists and gaining cash. Cash can be earned by players in several ways such as frequency of logging into the site or by converting Tagged Gold at the Pets Cash Bar into Pets Cash.

Tagged's Farm Game.

Social games on Tagged differ from other social networking services, because players are encouraged to make new friends through the games. 

Farm

Farm was introduced by Tagged in May 2011. Unlike most social farm-based games such as Facebook's farmville there is no animation or farmer. Advancement in the game is related to the amount of Tagged currency spent. 

Controversy over bulk email invitations

In June 2009, Time magazine called Tagged "The world's most annoying website. Tagged asked users for their email username and password, retrieved email addresses from their address books, and repeatedly sent email invitations to people who were not registered on Tagged, falsely stating that they have been "added as a friend" or that the inviter had sent them photos on Tagged. This process has been labelled an "e-mail scam" by consumer anti-fraud advocates and drawn criticism in the technology press and from users. The emails were discussed as possible spam by Black Web 2.0 and the resemblance to a virus was noted by urban legend site Snopes.com. The New York Times referred to the practice as "contact scraping".