Experience Project

Experience Project
Type of business Private
Type of site
 Social network service
Founded January 25, 2006 (2006-01-25)[1]
Headquarters San Francisco, California, U.S.
Key people Armen Berjikly (Founder & CEO)
Neil Sheth (CTO)
Erik Darby (SVP)
Slogan(s) Personal Stories about every Life Experience
Website ExperienceProject.com
Alexa rank Decrease 9,751 (April 2016)[2]
Registration Not required
Launched April 2007 (2007-04)
Current status Suspended

Experience Project is a free social networking website consisting of various online communities. It operated from 2007 until 2016, when it announced it would suspend new registrations indefinitely.

Members submitted "experiences"—their personal, first-person stories about various life experiences they had. Users could then form or join communities based on these experiences and/or interests, and interact with other members who shared them. As of May 2016, the site had over sixty-seven million of these "experiences".[3]

In March 2016, Experience Project announced that it would suspend operations indefinitely. The existing content of the site would remain publicly available, but members would no longer be able to post new content or access their accounts. The site was officially suspended on April 21, 2016.

Description

The nodes of the network were "life experiences", such as starting a new job, battling depression or surviving a divorce. Members who had listed experiences in common were automatically connected. Reversing the "f.r.i.e.n.d.s." concept of traditional social networks, in which connections are made between known individuals who then may or may not share experiences, on the Experience Project, connections were made based on shared experiences. The site emphasized anonymity to promote more authentic conversations that would otherwise be quelled by fear of recognition or embarrassment.[4]

In March 2016, it was announced that Experience Project would be closing for the long term on April 21, 2016. New registrations or the posting of new content was suspended, freezing the current library of experiences. Reasons cited for the closure included difficulties maintaining user privacy in the face of increasing governmental powers, challenges complying with new data privacy laws, and general online trends that were moving away from long-form content.[5]

Leadership

Armen Berjikly was founder and CEO of the community, with executive leadership including Neil Sheth as CTO, and Erik Darby as SVP.

Origins

Experience Project was started by Armen Berjikly in late 2004. In 2013, Berjikly gave a popular TEDx talk that told the origin story of the site.[6] After a close friend's diagnosis with multiple sclerosis Berjikly created This is MS, an online community for MS patients and caregivers focused on inspiring hope in patients through knowledge of current research. As This is MS grew, Berjikly identified that the key benefit to patients was not the editorialized content, but the relationships that formed between people who understood each other through the shared experience of having multiple sclerosis. Experience Project extended the ability to connect with people who understood each other to all experiences and all people.

General media coverage

Notes

  1. ↑ "ExperienceProject.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved 2016-07-13.
  2. ↑ "Experienceproject.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2016-04-08.
  3. ↑ "Experience Project". Retrieved 6 May 2016.
  4. ↑ "Deep Dark Secrets on the World Wide Web". UCLA Daily Bruin. Retrieved 2007-10-09.
  5. ↑ "Until We Meet Again...". Experience Project. Retrieved 2016-04-08.
  6. ↑ "When Change is not a Choice". TEDx. Retrieved 2016-05-12.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/10/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.