Type of business | Private |
---|---|
Founded | February 2011 |
Headquarters | San Francisco Bay Area, California, U.S. |
Area served | United States |
Founder(s) | Hilary DeCesare, Kim Bruce, Paige McCullough |
Industry | Social media |
URL | http://www.everloop.com |
Everloop was an online social media site specifically made for children ages 8–13.
The site used 'loops' that were similar to Facebook groups that gave teens a place to interact.[1] They were small communities created around interests in categories such as video and photo sharing, writing, video games, etc. Each individual user also had an individual page that they could customize with text or images.
Everloop was made so that preteens had a place to experience social media before moving on to sites like Facebook that were not meant for younger children and could often be dangerous to them.[2]
Originally launched for girls under the name "Girl Ambition" in 2010,[3] the site was revamped for a broader audience and relaunched in February 2011 under the name Everloop.com.[4]
In June 2011 Everloop launched EverText,[5][6][7][8][9] a moderated SMS feature made for safe messaging between kids.
In 2012, Everloop launched Goobit,[10] a mobile app that connected with the main Everloop site.
In 2014, Everloop shut down along with EverText and Goobit.
Everloop was created adhering to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) standards and uses privacy protection and monitoring technology to guard young users against bullying, bad language and inappropriate sharing of information. Everloop's safety features included parent authentication to join, word and phrase filters, live staff for moderation and customer support and community user reporting for suspicious or inappropriate behavior.
EverText, Everloop's SMS feature, was also made with safety[11] in mind to avoid things such as online grooming using a technology-based filter software[12] that blocked out URLs, addresses, and profanity. EverText's filter could also understand patterns to avoid cyberbullying.
When any inappropriate behaviour was detected, Everloop stopped the user from posting and provided immediate feedback to moderators.[13]
The site permitted parents to monitor all friend requests and communication, but did not allow any parental posts to children's profile pages.
EverText was a SMS integration that was compliant with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).[14] The service utilized privacy protection technologies, and enables kids to securely use mobile devices to broadcast text updates to friends' profiles or directly to their cell phones.[15]
EverText allowed parents to moderate the number of texts kids can send, ranging from unlimited to 250 texts per month. When a child hit the limit, parents received a note and could add text credit to the account or leave it until the next month.[16]
The company closed a seed round of $3.1 million[21] in 2011 backed by vFormation, Silicon Valley based Band of Angels, Envoi Ventures, Richard Chino formerly of Overture, Wayne Goodrich formerly of Apple, Deena Burnett-Bailey of Angels of Hope and additional investors.