Wallop
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wallop is an American software company that was spun off from Microsoft in 2003 to provide a social networking service, and from 2008 made Adobe Flash-based applications for other social networks. Wallop was a research project from the Social Computing Group that was a part of the Microsoft Research team. In the beginning, membership to Wallop was limited so that the testing groups were more controlled for trial purposes.[1]
Wallop was originally designed around 2003 as an Internet social networking service from Microsoft Research.[2][3] As a startup, the company behind Wallop was backed by $13 million from Microsoft and venture capitalists including Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners and Consor Capital. The company was later spun off of Microsoft.[4]
While the Wallop team was working on launching their website, however, the expansion of other social networks and their opening up of APIs led to Wallop's changing directions. Instead of trying to compete with these already established social networking providers, the company scrapped their Beta application and, as stated in their website, "Wallop retooled their product and focused on developing cutting-edge applications for leading social networking platforms like Facebook, and Bebo". As of 2008, the company left its social networking service model and went into creating applications for other social networking sites instead.[4]
Products
Around 2009, Wallop had two products they called Cool Cards and Party On!. These applications were hosted by Wallop, and built using Facebook and Bebo APIs, thus supporting those two social networking platforms by default, but could also be posted to other sites by embedding Adobe Flash applications into HTML.
Cool Cards is a simple Adobe Flash-based application to display card-like graphics that users can customize before posting in someone's social networking site profile. Party On! is also an Adobe Flash-based application which can also be posted in the user's profile, and allows users to create a customized invitation that will keep track of guest lists, making a place for people to plan parties inside such a profile.
