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| 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 has 100 million registered members. Quantcast reports Tagged has 6.2 million monthly unique U.S. visits and 20.4 million globally.
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 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.
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 APIs 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. Tagged has been identified as a possible candidate for an IPO by 2013
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.