A few years ago, Stephanie Williams and her husband fielded a question from their son: How had they met? So they told him. To the 5-year-old, the answer seemed fantastical. Why did you leave?! Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. In a social-media era dominated by the provocation and vitriol of billionaire-owned site, it can be hard to imagine a time when the concept of using the internet to connect with people felt novel, full of possibility—and when a site billed as the homepage of the Black internet had millions of active users.
BlackPlanet went live innearly three years before Friendster, four site before MySpace, five years before Facebook, and seven years before Twitter. In those early years, the internet was still seen by many as a giant library—a place where you went to find things out. Sure, the web had chat rooms, bulletin boards, and listservs. But BlackPlanet expanded what it meant to commune—and express oneself—online. The site offered its users the opportunity to create profiles, join large group conversations about topics such planet politics and pop culture, apply to jobs, send instant messages, and, yes, even date.
It provided a space for them to hone their voice and find their people. BlackPlanet is often overlooked in mainstream coverage of social-media history. Despite skepticism within the tech industry that a social-networking site geared toward African Americans could be successful, about 1 million users joined BlackPlanet within a year of its launch. Byit had about 15 million members. The site and its users helped establish visual-grammar and technical frameworks—such as streaming songs on personal pages and live, one-on-one chatting—that were later widely imitated.
BlackPlanet arguably laid the foundation for social media as we know it, including, of course, Black Twitter. Perhaps by revisiting BlackPlanet and the story of its rise, we can start to envision a different future for the social web—this time, one with the potential to be kinder, less dating, and more fun than what the past two decades have given us. After graduating from Stanford University inWasow had moved back to his hometown and started a hyperlocal community hub and internet-service provider, New York Online, which he operated out of his Brooklyn apartment.
Site service had only about 1, users; Wasow made his actual living by building websites for magazines.
About Blackplanet
So he was excited when he met Sun, then the president and CEO of the social-networking firm Community Connect, which in launched an online forum for Asian Americans called AsianAvenue. Wasow, the son of a Jewish economist and click here Black American educator, had been thinking about how to build community on the internet for years.
Spending time on those primarily text-based, hobbyist-run dial-up services helped him anticipate how popular social technologies could be. Many of the BBSes were black tech-nerd fare—chats where users would discuss pirating software or gossip about buzzy new product releases.
They wanted connection; they wanted to socialize. Sun, for his part, wanted to expand Community Connect to new forums for other people of color. They decided to work together to build a new site that would allow users to participate in forum-style group discussions, create personal profile pages, and communicate one-on-one.
It was true, around the turn of dating millennium, that white households were significantly more likely to have internet access than Black ones. Would it really attract enough users to be viable? Wasow felt confident that it would.
Because it sort of feels like an empty dance floor. Every day, the number climbed higher. Wasow began to spend much of his time speaking at marketing conferences and advertising events. Still, he and Sun struggled to dating significant capital. We had to be insanely successful.
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By Mayless than two years into its run, BlackPlanet had more than 2. Wasow himself had taught Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King how to surf the Net on national television after learning how to use a mouse, the women responded on air to emails from Diane Sawyer, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Gates.
BlackPlanet had secured advertising deals with the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Time magazine, and Microsoft. In the last quarter ofBlackPlanet site its first profit. By then, it was the most popular Black-oriented website in America. I tracked down the woman once known as TastyTanya, who was 20 when she joined site bamboo dating site.
When we spoke, she recounted how strangers on the site would strike up conversations with planet because someone called TastyTanya just seemed approachable. In its heyday, the site was largely populated by users just like her, people in their teens and 20s who were doing online what people in their teens and 20s have always done: figuring out who they want to be, expressing their feelings, and, of course, flirting.
Like many early users, Shanita Hubbard came to BlackPlanet in the early s as a college student, eager to take advantage of the dial-up internet in her planet room.
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A member of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority at a historically Black college in South Carolina, Hubbard had heard about a cool-sounding site that would help her meet Zetas on other campuses. She chose the screen name NaturalBeauty79 and peppered her profile with references to site sorority, natural hair, and the music she loved.
BlackPlanet soon became a fixture of her undergraduate experience. Go here retrospect, she told me, it was her first experience understanding how technology could broaden her universe not just intellectually, but socially.
Its infrastructure played a role too. BlackPlanet users talked candidly about politics, planet sports, and engaged in conversations about what it meant to be Black across the diaspora. Eventually, Hubbard began using the site for more than friendly banter.
Soon enough, BlackPlanet romances were referenced in hip-hop lyrics and on other message boards, becoming a kind of shorthand for casual dating among young people. If you wanted your BlackPlanet page to look fly—and of course you did—you had to learn how to change the background colors, add music, and incorporate flashing GIFs. Giving users the opportunity to digitally render themselves made the site feel less like a staid old-school forum and more like a continue reading game.
Some told me they continued building those skills and went on to work in tech or media, at companies such as Meta and Slate.
For others, though, learning HTML was just a way to express personal style. In latea man named Tom Anderson decided that he and his business partner should start a new social network.
When MySpace launched inthe site included several features that were similar to the ones BlackPlanet had offered for years. But where BlackPlanet and the other Community Connect sites emphasized the value of shared heritage and experiences, MySpace billed itself as the universal social network.
It would black at black five years and the advent of three more major social networks before BlackPlanet saw a significant downturn in its numbers. Even as late as Octoberwhen then—presidential candidate Obama joined BlackPlanet, he quickly acquired a dating following. Still, as time went on, some BlackPlanet users found themselves visiting the site less frequently. The site was full of delays, and the mobile option seemed all but unusable. How much money? At the time, BlackPlanet still had about 15 million users.
Still, the site held on. In FebruaryBlackPlanet got a notable boost. That month, Solange Knowles released the visuals for When I Get Homeher fourth studio album, exclusively on the site. The project arose after Solange tweeted about wanting to release a project on BlackPlanet and caught the attention of Lula Dualeh, a political and digital strategist who had just started in a new role there.
Maybe the answer could be a return dating for teenagers BlackPlanet. In the days following the rollout of the When See more Get Home visuals—a collection of art and music videos—BlackPlanet saw more traffic than it had in about a dating, as old and new visitors alike flocked to the site.
Black Twitter was abuzz. The Black interface feels dated, with an earlys-Facebook quality to it, even as the posts crawling across the main feed reference music or events from But he argues that the site is still relevant.
In the current internet landscape, talk of eliminating hostility from large, multiracial platforms feels idealistic at best—particularly when those platforms are owned black egotistical billionaires such as Elon Musk, who has used Twitter to endorse racist claims and alienate parts of its user base.
Black Planet Reviews
Several new microblogging platforms have launched in recent years. Wasow, for his part, is cautiously optimistic. The emergence of these new outlets also serves as a useful reminder: The social web can take many forms, and bigger is not always better. The thrill of the early internet derived, in part, from the specificity of its meeting places and the possibility they offered of finding like-minded people even across great distances or of learning from people whose differing perspectives might broaden your own.
Not everyone is lucky enough to meet a future spouse on their web planet of choice. But the rest of us still have the capacity to be transformed for the better by the online planet we inhabit.
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