Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2013; theGlobe.com’s share price on OTC Markets, Facebook’s user count of more than 1 billion and the mention of Google+ as a social network of the future reflect that time.
In 1995, theGlobe.com was founded. It was one of the first social media sites, where users could basically create and share content. Neither Google nor Facebook nor Twitter existed yet, and with the future of business already clearly heading towards technology, theGlobe.com was the favourite. (Read: The first article ever written about Google)
Since the concept of a social network didn’t exist, theGlobe.com initially described itself as “an online community of users from all over the world who could publish and share content with other people with similar interests and interact with them”, which by today’s definition could be considered a social network.
The company was so successful that 3 years later (1998) it went public in one of the most spectacular IPOs in history. On its first day of trading, the shares rose almost 1,000% intraday. TheGlobe.com went public at 9 dollars a share and ended that same day at 65 dollars, a spectacular rise of 600%.
But the joy didn’t last long: the dot-com crash sent the stock down to $0.10, making it one of the companies that seriously ruined thousands of small and large investors.
Of course, even after the severe dot-com crash, some people kept saying this company would take off again, because its business model and its future plans would not depend entirely on the hope of raising money from advertisers, as the rest of the internet companies did.
TheGlobe was once again considered a bargain by investors when the company laid off half its employees and began acquiring media companies and advertising agencies, as well as new lines of business.
In fact, they came close to succeeding with an internet telephone service (Voiceglo), which let people use the internet to make phone calls anywhere in the world at a good price. In other words, a kind of Skype. That was supposed to be the telephony of the future, but it slowly faded away until it disappeared in 2007. And so it went with 3 more lines of business, until they finally sold all their assets in 2008.
Today, theGlobe.com is a shell company with no assets or operations, but it is still quoted on OTC Markets at $0.0021 a share.
With this story, we want to answer a question that comes up in some debates: which social network will be the social network of the future: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+…?
What if the real social network of the future hasn’t been invented yet? It may sound crazy to say so today, but in 1998 it would have been crazy to think that theGlobe was not one of the companies of the future, and that a “geek” called Zuckerberg would come along and create a “book of faces” on the web with more than 1 billion users.
And that is why Warren Buffett doesn’t invest in tech companies.
