Bolt (website)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bolt is a social website.
Contents |
[edit] History
In 1996 bolt.com was started as a teen community, by Dan Pelson and Jane Mount as part of Concrete Media. The teen community was Bolt Media's main property until 2006, when a new media-sharing site took the name bolt.com.
On February 12, 2007 the New York Times reported that Bolt Media had agreed to a sale to GoFish, an online video competitor. This sale was to finance settlement of a lawsuit with Universal. [1]
[edit] bolt.com
bolt.com, as it is today, was originally known as Boltfolio, a Bolt Media property launched in late 2005. Touted as the leader of the "cult of creativity", Boltfolio intended to provide a one-stop shop for creative users to upload their own photos, videos, and music, as well as write blogs or record directly from a webcam. The original aim was to provide a simple set of tools that would attract users of like-minded creative sites such as DeviantArt, YouTube, and Flickr.
In December of 2005 Bolt Media finalized a deal to purchase InterMedia Inc., a small company focused on a video-sharing site, Yashi. Yashi and Boltfolio were integrated into one site, and in March of 2006 Bolt Media opted to focus the company on this new property. Thus Boltfolio became Bolt.com, bumping the existing Bolt.com site to the URL Bolt2.com. As 2006 wore on, creative Bolt members were featured less and less on the site, taking a back seat to videos produced by Bolt staff, popular music videos, and viral videos that also were appearing on competing video sites.
On October 17, 2006, one week after announcing a revenue-sharing deal with YouTube, Universal Music filed suit against Bolt Media and another video site, Grouper. Universal contended that both sites allowed and promoted their users to swap pirated Music Videos. Several weeks later, Bolt removed the music section from their site, without any explanation.
[edit] bolt2.com
The original bolt was renamed bolt2 on March 6, 2006. It was marketed towards kids, preteens, and younger teens to create content, meet people, and play games in a safe, no pressure, and age-appropriate environment. Bolt2.com was originally organized around games, pop culture and self-discovery.
However, as members age and stay with the site, more and more members are college students and/or between 18-24. These members tend to be more interested in current events, hot news issues, religion and politics, and keep the message boards active with lively heated debate. Many members have known each other for several years and have formed close bonds with their fellow "regs."
The site features include a daily horoscope, chat rooms, message boards, tagbooks, faceoffs, photo albums, user-submitted content such as concert reviews and a sex & dating blog and a Bolt store that sells merchandise. The site previously hosted a free e-mail service, but it was discontinued due to email companies such as Yahoo and Google providing between 1 and nearly 3 gigabytes of email storage for free, rendering Bolt's email service obsolete.
[edit] Trivia
- Originally, bolt2.com was to be called classicbolt.com
- Almost from the beginning Bolt member LoLiEpOpPe for 7 years was the highest ranking badge collector until she was dethroned in April 2006 by o0oBaByDoLLo0o.
- The Badge Race Club was one of the most influential clubs that had the highest participation ratios per member count and even spawned a rival club Badge Wars create by former members when they were banned.
- Bolt.com had an email service that launched twice and was removed twice. For a short time, it had video capabilties. The video feature is now a prominent feature in the new bolt.com and is not available on the bolt2.com site.
- Bolt created a website for 7-up called Gulpit.com in November 25, 2002 that featured bottle caps instead of badges. It was poorly maintained and only visited when a bottle cap was offered that also featured a badge. After 3 bottle caps the site has never updated again. It has since been taken down as of March 4, 2005.
- Angry Bolt users created a site called Boltsucks.com in response to the message board being taken down during the revamp in 2004. During this time, they created their own badges, including a very vulgar badge for telling off a bolt staff member. Boltsucks.com went through a series of crashes, and it was finally decided by the members and administrators of boltsucks.com that it would be best to shut the site down for good.
- A club was created to promote a FOX show Wonderfalls in February 2004. A badge was given to members who joined to help spread the word of the show to increase viewership and the show's ratings. The show was cancelled in early April and the club was quickly deleted. Those that had the badge are fortunate enough to claim this rare item.
- In recent months, the site has been overrun by hackers who have given themselves the powers of moderators and have taken to deleting the posts of those they do not favor. This, coupled with the neglect from the site's owners, has resulted in even the most loyal veterans deciding to move on from the site.
- Bolt2 used to have "radio stations" and members who submitted songs that they wanted to hear on Bolt Radio received the bolt dj badge.
- Even though Corey Clark was officially kicked off of American Idol in April of 2003, Bolt still kept his board up for his loyal fan. The board was eventually taken over by the Corey Haters lead by libs_mom, heath_h, silvermix, and pa_dutch. The Corey board was ultimately deleted in 2005 due to lack of usage.
[edit] The American Idol Effect
In 2003 Bolt was the official message board for FOX's American Idol during the second season. This created a swarm a new members signing up to only talk about American Idol. This did not sit well with the veterans. FOX later created and maintained their own message boards for the third season, but cross promotion still continued with AI sponsored quizzes, avatars, and badges. By the fourth season, the cross promotion was gone, but the message boards were still created and maintained. There were no message boards created for the fifth season of American Idol.
