Mediaboss Marketing

In case you missed the glorious news: The iconic 00s social media site Bebo is coming back!

Yep, millennials its finally our time to shine. No longer do we have to try and blend in with Gen Z on TikTok because Bebo announced over the weekendthat it would return in February 2021 as a brand-new social network, according to their website.

Sadly, this does meanthat all of our old accounts, data, and cringey, overexposed selfies from many years ago are gone forever. But, on the plus side, the site has shared that theyve already banned Trump from the platform before its even launched. Praise be.

The new platform has actually been developed by the original founders of the 2005 site, so its bound to be great. However, there hasbeen no confirmation on whether the new social platform will incorporate the iconic elements of the original site.

Arguably a whole lot better than MySpace (dont tell 80s and early 90s babies that) and way more inventive than Facebook (dont tell boomers and people with kids that), Bebo had so many features that we are currently desperately missing on social media.

So here are all the things that made Bebo the best social networking website of all time:

The biggest rush you could get in high school was receiving one of someones three luvs for the day. Sure, it personally caused me to have several mental breakdowns along the way, but stalking how many luvs your friends had and watching who gave them to your crush was truly thrilling stuff.

On Facebook, the only thing close to an other half is when you update your relationship status with your partner or turn your friend into your sister. But not on Bebos watch normalise platonic other halves!

The only real problem the other half feature brings is in friendship groups with odd numbers, where someone is bound to be other half-less. Or, of course, when your friend dumps you as their other half so they can slot in their girlfriend or boyfriend or in 2021, it would probably now most likely be their husband or wife,or even their own kid.

The best part about Bebo was the ability to customise your page with the most outrageous skins imaginable.

Just like MySpace, Bebo taught a lot of us how to incorporate elements of graphic design (terribly, admittedly) and coding to create the perfect ~look~ for our profiles. And by perfect look, I mean text that probably read: B3b0s H0TT3st ChiiCK in hot pink with an arrow pointing to the profile photo.

Honestly, the way we all used to type on Bebo took some skill. Knowing exactly which letters to replace so that words didnt look too planned out or unreadable was an art in itself. It was also always a fun time using :L instead of lmao or hahaha.

Much simpler times, and it seems like its definitely time to BriinG iiT [emailprotected]

What a lot of social media platforms are missing is the ability to actually express personality. No one really uses the bio function on Facebook, plus Twitter and Instagram only give you a certain amount of characters to say who you are. Bebo cant relate.

Bebo gave you space to talk about yourself, in something thats more reminiscent of a dating site like Hinge. You could share what music you liked, the movies that best summed up your taste, and the exact sports you were interested in within their own little sections. Hell, the site even had a spot for you to share what you were scared of and what made you happiest. Can Facebook do that? I dont think so.

Sure, MySpace might have created the Top 8, but Bebo gave us the iconic Top 16.

And while I probably dont even have 16 friends to put in my top slots these days, Id like to have the option. Plus, how can anyone forget the tactic of just adding a bunch of fake arrow profiles that had text describing your best friends like < BEST FRIENDS FOR LIFE > in spot number two or SEXY BITCH > in the bottom corner?

Bebo also gave us the most petty way to fight with friends through the Top 16, too. I mean, is there really anything more petty thanquietly re-ranking your Top 16, and then updating your bio with a random lyric about fake friends? Long gone is the need for dramatic Instagram and Snapchat story posts with cryptic captions! Just switch your friend from spot three to spot nine!

Before we had Instagram influencers, Bebo Stunnahs were ruling the internet.

These Bebo Stunnah pages were essentially just profiles that would collate the ~stunning girls~ using the website, and honestly? The Stunnahs were the elite on Bebo. Everyone dreamed of being one, andbecause everyone desperately wanted to be featured as a Bebo Stunnah, we took as many pics of ourselves as possible.

The unmatched confidence I possessed as a teen when submitting my pics to these pages is something I wish I had now. We all had so much self-love. I mean, having entire albums dedicated to selfies, which were all basically the same photo, was the norm. Sure they were over-exposed and had far too much contrast, but we still took those pics and posted them anyway like the bad bitches we are.

Bebos Flashbox was the perfect way to show people how cool you were by unearthing music before anyone else. Or, if you were a moody teen like me, Flashbox was the way you expressed how you were feeling about life.

Of course, most of the time, we all seemed to just settle on DJ Sammys Heaven for some reason. But Im not mad at it, and if Flashbox returned, it would probably still be my page anthem.

Being able to draw a set of dick and balls on your friends whiteboard? Iconic. Bebo, you better be bringing it back RIGHT NOW.

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Bebo Is Coming Back This Month, And It's Time To Admit That There's Been No Better Social Media - Junkee

The stock price of Lizhi Inc (NASDAQ: LIZI) a leading online user-generated audio community and interactive audio entertainment platform in China is trading at over 70% today as it went from a previous close of $5.16 to over $8.80 (as of 1:48 PM ET). Investors are responding to the company issuing a letter to shareholders. The letter was issued by the companys Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Jinnan (Marco) Lai.

It is my pleasure to issue the first letter to shareholders on behalf of LIZHI INC. after the company went public. First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all our shareholders for your support and trust over the past year. 2020 was indeed an extraordinary year for all of us, said Lai. The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic caused many disruptive changes and uncertainties to our daily lives. Even so, 2020 was a landmark year for LIZHI as we successfully listed our shares on the Nasdaq Global Market in the U.S. Embarking on our new journey as a public company is a milestone and a new beginning for us. Despite the challenging macro environment, we have stood our ground and are proud to have achieved certain impressive results.

Lai said that the company has a goal of becoming one of the largest audio platforms globally. And based on the companys vision of globalization, it put forward a strategy to expand our global footprint through audio innovation in 2020. Shortly after launching in the U.S., the companys audio-based social product Tiya became ranked in the top 4 social networking apps in the U.S. And within a few months of Tiyas launch worldwide, it was ranked among the top 10 social networking apps in about 50 countries worldwide.

We believe that online social networking through audio will become a dominant method of social networking in the future, Lai added. People enjoy meeting and chatting in cafes, bars, and restaurants which is probably one of the most genuine and engaging ways to socialize. Encouragingly, we are now able to mimic such forms of social networking through real-time online audio networking platforms, where people get together virtually, chat online and share their daily lives. We envision a future where real-time audio-based social networking can be realized anytime anywhere either through the mirrors in restrooms, in self-driving smart cars, or through smart headsets that people carry around.

The company also launched an Innovation Training Camp internally to equip employees with innovative thinking in tandem with scientific methods. And the company also continued to invest in our management team with a lot of resources and systematic training to enhance management skills.

We firmly believe that the upcoming 5G and IoT era will widen prospects and potential for audio products, and we will spare no effort to provide users with high-quality services. In addition to the continuous optimization of our existing product offerings, we launched a new mobile app, LIZHI Podcast (also named LIZHI BOKE in Chinese), in January 2021, to provide our users with a more compelling podcast experience, explained Lai. We also are striving to broaden our product offerings for a variety of use cases, such as in-car audio and smart home. We are committed to providing users with a better audio experience and meeting their audio needs under different use scenarios.

This year, the companys core strategy is to create more connections between people and provide them companionship through our online audio platforms, aiming to increase brand recognition and attract a broader user base all over the world.

Disclaimer: This content is intended for informational purposes. Before making any investment, you should do your own analysis.

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LIZI Stock Price Increases Over 70%: Why It Happened - Pulse 2.0

On any given night, according to a blog post this week from founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, there are thousands of different rooms that people can join for live conversations. "Hosts" act as moderators of conversations and those in the room can raise their hands, virtually, to have their mic turned on to lend their voice. Participants include a who's-who list of venture capitalists, tech leaders and celebrities.

Davison and Seth, who are both well connected in the tech industry from previous roles at top companies, said their goal with Clubhouse "was to build a social experience that felt more human where instead of posting, you could gather with other people and talk."

"There are all these kinds of nuances of language that exist in text, but in real-time audio are even more fleeting and difficult to wrap one's hands around," said Sarah Roberts, an assistant professor at UCLA and content moderation expert. "By the time any moderation might be applied, the damage could essentially already have been done."

With the new funding, the company said it plans to scale its Trust & Safety team, listing two new job postings devoted to the topic.

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This audio-only social app has Twitter on alert - CNN

Pritish Nandy: Not at all. It will be counter-productive. Anything censored goes underground as we have all seen over the years: alcohol, drugs, gutka, pornography. The only thing that works is clearly outlined reasonable regulations. The only thing that can be reasonably censored is that which compromises national security. Nothing else. OTT is not free to air television. It is a paid service. People make a conscious decision while paying their subscriptions. If they dont like what they get, they should cancel their subscription and get off the platform. They cannot force the platform to change their content. Would you ask Hindustan Unilever to change the ingredients of their toothpaste if it offended you? Or would you simply change your toothpaste brand? Content is an FMCG product today. Respect it and treat it as one.

Pratik Gandhi: I don't think it's needed. We need censors in cars to avoid accidents. Not in the field of arts.

Apurva Asrani: I am against government controlled censorship. In a democracy one has every right to express oneself. Having said that, we live in a society where people of diverse cultural & economic backgrounds exist. It would be prudent to exercise some sort of self censorship in order to be sensitive to this diversity.

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Should there be censorship on digital platform? Major OTT players respond - National Herald

Contents

The Republican Party, often called the GOP (short for Grand Old Party) is one of two major political parties in the United States. Founded in 1854 as a coalition opposing the extension of slavery into Western territories, the Republican Party fought to protect the rights of African Americans after the Civil War. Todays GOP is generally socially conservative, and favors smaller government, less regulation, lower taxes and less federal intervention in the economy.

Though Americas Founding Fathers distrusted political parties, it wasnt long before divisions developed among them. Supporters of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong central government and a national financial system, became known as Federalists.

By contrast, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson favored a more limited government. His supporters called themselves Republicans, or Jeffersonian Republicans, but later became known as Democratic-Republicans.

The Federalist Party dissolved after the War of 1812, and by the 1830s the Democratic-Republicans had evolved into the Democratic Party (now the main rival to todays Republicans), which initially rallied around President Andrew Jackson.

Opponents of Jacksons policies formed their own party, the Whig Party, and by the 1840s Democrats and Whigs were the countrys two main political coalitions.

In the 1850s, the issue of slaveryand its extension into new territories and states joining the Unionripped apart these political coalitions. During this volatile period, new political parties briefly surfaced, including the Free Soil and the American (Know-Nothing) parties.

In 1854, opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would permit slavery in new U.S. territories by popular referendum, drove an antislavery coalition of Whigs, Free-Soilers, Americans and disgruntled Democrats to found the new Republican Party, which held its first meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin that May. Two months later, a larger group met in Jackson, Michigan, to choose the partys first candidates for statewide office.

The Republican goal was not to abolish slavery in the South right away, but rather to prevent its westward expansion, which they feared would lead to the domination of slaveholding interests in national politics.

In the 1860 election, a split between Southern and Northern Democrats over slavery propelled the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to victory, though he won only around 40 percent of the popular vote.

Even before Lincoln could be inaugurated, seven Southern states seceded from the Union, beginning the process that would lead to the Civil War.

Over the course of the Civil War, Lincoln and other Republicans began to see the abolition of slavery as a strategic move to help them win the war. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and by wars end, the Republican majority in Congress would spearhead the passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

Frustrated by the inaction of Lincolns Democratic successor, Andrew Johnson, as well as the treatment of freed blacks in former Confederate states during the Reconstruction era, Radical Republicans in Congress passed legislation protecting the rights of blacks, including civil rights and voting rights (for black men).

These Republican Reconstruction policies would solidify white Southerners loyalty to the Democratic Party for many decades to come.

During Reconstruction, Republicans would become increasingly associated with big business and financial interests in the more industrialized North. The federal government had expanded during the war (including passage of the first income tax) and Northern financiers and industrialists had greatly benefited from its increased spending.

As white resistance to Reconstruction solidified, these interests, rather than those of blacks in the South, became the main Republican focus, and by the mid-1870s Democratic Southern state legislatures had wiped out most of Reconstructions changes.

Because of the Republican Partys association with business interests, by the early 20th century it was increasingly seen as the party of the upper-class elite.

With the rise of the Progressive movement, which sought to improve life for working-class Americans and encourage Protestant values such as temperance (which would lead to Prohibition in 1919), some Republicans championed progressive social, economic and labor reforms, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who split from the more conservative wing of the party after leaving office.

Republicans benefited from the prosperity of the 1920s, but after the stock market crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression, many Americans blamed them for the crisis and deplored their resistance to use direct government intervention to help people. This dissatisfaction allowed Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to easily defeat the Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover, in 1932.

The relief programs included in FDRs New Deal earned overwhelming popular approval, launching an era of Democratic dominance that would last for most of the next 60 years. Between 1932 and 1980, Republicans won only four presidential elections and had a Congressional majority for only four years.

Though the centrist Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was president from 1953 to 1961, actively supported equal rights for women and African Americans, a conservative resurgence led to Barry Goldwaters nomination as president in 1964, continued with Richard Nixons ill-fated presidency and reached its culmination with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The South saw a major political sea change starting after World War II, as many white Southerners began migrating to the GOP due to their opposition to big government, expanded labor unions and Democratic support for civil rights, as well as conservative Christians opposition to abortion and other culture war issues.

Meanwhile, many black voters, who had remained loyal to the Republican Party since the Civil War, began voting Democratic after the Depression and the New Deal.

After running on a platform based on reducing the size of the federal government, Reagan increased military spending, spearheaded huge tax cuts and championed the free market with policies that became known as Reaganomics.

In foreign policy, the United States also emerged the victor in its long-running Cold War with the Soviet Union. But as the economy began to show signs of weakness, the growing national debt helped foster popular dissatisfaction with Reagans successor, George H.W. Bush.

The GOP recaptured the White House in 2000, with the highly contested victory of Bushs son, George W. Bush, over Democratic contender Al Gore. Though initially popular, particularly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration lost support thanks to growing opposition to the war in Iraq and the faltering economy during the Great Recession.

After Democrat Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected U.S. president in 2008, the rise of the populist Tea Party movement harnessed opposition to Obamas economic and social reform policies to help Republicans gain a large majority in Congress by 2014.

The 2016 election, in which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, left Republicans in control of the White House, Senate, House of Representatives and a majority of state governorships. Democrats gained control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections and in September 2019, a formal impeachment inquiry was launched against President Trump for allegedly attempting to involve Ukraine in the 2020 presidential election.

President Trump was impeached on December 18, 2019 on two articlesabuse of power and obstruction of Congress.On February 5, 2020, the Senate votedto acquit Trump on both charges. Trump was again impeached on January 13, 2021, for his role in the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump became the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. Trump lost his re-election bid in the 2020 election and left office on January 20, 2021.

Political Parties in Congress, The Oxford Guide to the United States Government.Republican Party, Ohio History Central.Andrew Prokop, How Republicans went from the party of Lincoln to the party of Trump, in 13 maps, Vox (November 10, 2016).

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Republican Party - HISTORY