Pebble (formerly T2) was an American

social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...

platform founded by former

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

employees Sarah Oh and Gabor Cselle. It provided an authenticated network where users could make posts and interact in communities before shutting down on 1 November 2023. One day before the shutdown, Cselle launched a

Mastodon A mastodon, from Ancient Greek μαστός (''mastós''), meaning "breast", and ὀδούς (''odoús'') "tooth", is a member of the genus ''Mammut'' (German for 'mammoth'), which was endemic to North America and lived from the late Miocene to ...

instance of the same name. It closely resembles the look and feel of the old site.

Background

Prior to founding T2, Cselle oversaw the incubation of new consumer products in

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’s since-shuttered

Area 120 Area 120 is Google's in-house incubator in which employees work on 20% Project product ideas. It has helped develop Gmail, AdSense, Google News, Call Center AI, and Aloud, YouTube's translation and dubbing tool. The Area 120 division was ...

incubator. Cselle had also been a Group Product Manager at Twitter from 2014 to 2016, where he worked on the consumer product, and relaunched Twitter’s logged-out homepage and mobile trends. Sarah Oh had previously worked as an executive in Trust and Safety at Twitter and

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 ...

. On the day Oh was laid off from twitter, Cselle called her to offer his condolences, and to offer Oh a position at T2 to aid in creating a new social media platform. Cselle announced the development of T2 in November 2022. In early 2023, T2 hired former

Discord Discord is an instant messaging and Voice over IP, VoIP social platform which allows communication through Voice over IP, voice calls, Videotelephony, video calls, text messaging, and digital media, media. Communication can be private or take ...

Senior Director of Engineering Michael Greer as its chief technology officer. On 15 September 2023, the platform was rebranded as ''Pebble''. On 24 October 2023, the platform announced its shutdown on 1 November 2023, approximately one year since it started. On 30 October 2023, Cselle launched the mastodon-instanc
pebble.social

Platform

Pebble was one of several social media platforms conceived as an alternative to X (formerly Twitter) after its takeover by

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman. He is known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has been considered the wealthiest person in th ...

. The platform allowed 280 characters on user posts. Cselle expressed a desire to keep the platform as similar to the original Twitter platform as possible. It also emphasized security and safety features such as user authentication. Pebble's moderation was planned to make use of both human review and artificial intelligence features. On 25 April 2023, the platform's invite system launched, allowing its current community of around 1,000 users to invite their friends to the service instead of requiring users to join a waitlist. Each member of the platform was allowed up to 5 invites with the ability to request more invites if required. The platform was a web-based app only. Pebble offered checkmark verification, similar to X. Verification was done through Persona and a $5 charge is invoiced to offset the cost of verification. Unlike rival X Blue, the payment is one-time.

External links

Official website

References

{{reflist Defunct social networking services American social networking websites Real-time web Text messaging Microblogging services Internet properties disestablished in 2023 Internet properties established in 2022