Superpoke! and SuperPoke! Pets were

virtual goods Virtual goods are non-physical objects and money purchased for use in online communities or online games. Digital goods, on the other hand, may be a broader category including digital books, music, and movies. Virtual goods are intangible by def ...

apps for

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

and

MySpace Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...

originally created by Nikil Gandhy, Will Liu, and Jonathan Hsu. They launched less than one month after the creation of the

Facebook Platform The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party software component, third-party developers to create their own application software, applications and services t ...

Max Levchin Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin (born July 11, 1975) is a Ukrainian-American software engineer and businessman. In 1998, he co-founded the company that eventually became PayPal. Levchin made contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts ...

's Slide acquired the application and its creators in 2007, with the application growing to become one of Facebook's most popular applications in terms of

monthly active users Active users is a software performance metric that is commonly used to measure the level of engagement for a particular software product or object, by quantifying the number of active interactions from users or visitors within a relevant range ...

. The application mimicked Facebook's own "

poke Poke may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Poke (Ender's Game), Poke (''Ender's Game''), a fictional character * Poke (game), a two-player card game * Poke, a fictional bar owner in the television series ''Treme (season 2), Treme'' * The ...

" feature, adding new actions like smiles, winks, slaps, and “smacking” Facebook friends. At one point SuperPoke! allowed users to virtually “stab” friends; Slide later removed this option following protests from anti-knife crime groups. SuperPoke! differentiated itself from other applications by introducing characters such as a sheep, chicken, and penguin. SuperPoke! was shut down on September 27, 2011 and SuperPoke! Pets closed on March 7, 2012.

Shutdown of SuperPoke! Pets and subsequent lawsuit for loss of purchased virtual goods

In August 2010, Slide was acquired by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, and almost a year later SuperPoke! Pets announced significant changes including removal of gold buying and quests. In September 2011, it was announced that SuperPoke! Pets would be shut down permanently beginning March 6, 2012. In 2012, the SuperPoke! Pets user community sued Google/Slide for shutting down SuperPoke! Pets after its players had invested an estimated $650 million of money in virtual goods that, with the shutdown of the app, would now expire worthless. The plaintiff's legal team wrote that Google's offer of a limited, "SuperPoke! Pets Lite" that eliminated access to virtual goods and interaction with pets was inadequate because it “entirely stripped the value from customers' original purchases,” rendering their virtual items as “effectively valueless” as users could no longer interact with each other on the secondary market or play with their virtual pets. Characterizing the virtual items they had purchased as “property,” they claimed that as a result of Slide/Google's actions, individual players lost access to an inventory of goods that had cost “hundreds or even thousands of dollars.” In 2013, the case was voluntarily dismissed by Abreu.

References

{{Reflist Meta Platforms applications Internet properties established in 2007