Type of site Social Networking Revenue Advertisement | Created by Gibby Miller Registration Optional | |
Launched Beta: 08/01/1999 | Launch: 06/19/2000 | ||
Makeoutclub.com was an early social networking website that catered towards youth and indie music culture. Launched in 1999, Makeoutclub introduced features and concepts (such as customizable user profiles with photos and interests sections), which later became standard in the social networking sites that followed".
Contents
About
Makeoutclub (or MOC), was created by Gibby Miller and run from his Boston bedroom while attending Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA. The MVP/beta version of the site was launched in August, 1999. This version of the site was hosted privately, the URL given to friends to "leak" for testing purposes before launch. Users submitted a "profile" via email to the admins of the site, who then hand-coded the users information into a small profile box that appeared on numbered pages, 10 users per page, divided by "Girls" and "Boys. After word caught on, and the amount of profile submissions grew unmanageable, Miller launched an automated 1.0 version of the site at the Makeoutclub.com URL in June 2000.
Makeoutclub was intended as a platform to bridge the distance between like-minded individuals in the music and youth subculture scenes when the internet was populated with early adopters, stating on the website: "...for indierockers, hardcore kids, record collectors, artists, bloggers, and hopeless romantics."
Makeoutclub was among the first social networking sites whose members experienced first-hand the stigma associated with meeting others online.
Makeoutclub featured user profiles, image galleries, message boards, blogs, private mail, and (for several years) music and entertainment news. Despite the site's name, Makeoutclub's owner insisted in the years of the site's infancy that it was not a dating site, but a place to make friends. This assertion has been challenged many times over.
Makeoutclub was featured in Time Magazine, The Face UK, Spin Magazine, Rolling Stone, as well as several television spots across MTV2, G4 Tech TV, Much Music, and more. Makeoutclub was the focal point and inspiration of Andy Greenwald's book about youth and the "emo" movement: "Nothing Feels Good", as well as the book "This Song Will Save Your Life" by Leila Sales.
The site was named after the song "Make Out Club" by the band Unrest.
Since its inception, Makeoutclub has continuously been linked to the hipster, emo, and indie subcultures.
History
(1999) Beta:
(2000) 1.0: Version 1.0 was the "release" version of MOC.
(2001) 2.0: Version 2.0 was a bug-fixing and security upgrade, which offered additional features like HTML on profiles and colored usernames.
(2004) 3.0: Version 3.0 added a new design, additional bug fixes, and security upgrades.
(2007) 4.0: Version 4.0 was an entirely new platform, and offered users their own individual profile pages with comments, blogs, and the ability to add and display friends. Users could now add multiple images to a gallery, send private messages to one another, and block other users. This version also introduced multiple forums.
(2008) 5.0: Version 5.0 improved upon 4.0 adding private galleries, the ability to "wink" other users, post "shoutouts", create "crush lists" (secret friends lists that reveal the crush connection if two users "crush one another), and search for users in your area (along with user vicinity recommendation).
(2012) 6.0: Version 6.0 went live the evening of April 19th, 2012, bringing back required applications for approval (like the original platform did), and became entirely private, requiring a login to read the forums or to browse profiles.
(2014) 7.0: Version 7.0 went live on Saturday, February 22, 2014 with a responsive design and feature set, once again making the site publicly accessible, and restoring archives of old posts and site history as far back as 2002.
(2017) Closure: Makeoutclub ceased operations on January 1, 2017.