About Faceparty!
History
Faceparty was founded by Andrew David 'Dave' Bamforth and Phineas Kibbey in Autumn 2000. The pair met while working at music site Peoplesound.com, where they joined forces to create Faceparty.
Membership
By June 2006 the site had 6 million 'audited' subscribers with an additional 35,000 new members joining every week.
In April 2008 without notice, Faceparty removed 7 million members from its database leaving 200,000 members. However, it would later reinstate those deleted by mistake.[citation needed] one of the reasons given by Faceparty being that it was required to do this by the UK government to comply with new child protection laws. [1]
Since April 2008, Faceparty have removed the new member count and only allows new users to sign up if they can provide a password which is changed weekly.[2]
New Faceparty
In April 2008, it was announced that a new company, "Anarchy Towers Ltd", would be acquiring faceparty from CIS Internet Ltd and that not all profiles would be purchased. [3]. It was also announced that all advertising had been removed in a bid to become less corporate, and that staff levels would fall from 18 to 4. By shifting strategy and relying solely on premium SMS income, the company stated that it would be free to return to its roots.
The popular chatroom facility (Party Chat) was also removed from the site, to be replaced by a forum entitled Gossip. [4]. A new chatroom (Chat 2.0) has been introdued in a beta mode.
On July 8 2008, Faceparty temporarily rebranded itself as "Dogparty". The entire site adopted a canine theme - male members were referred to as dogs and female members as bitches. Profile pictures of all members were replaced with photographs of various breeds, and numerous references to dogs appeared throughout the site. The shoutout box was replaced with the barkout box, for example. Members' ages have also been replaced with their "dog year" equivalents. The rebranding of Faceparty was reversed on July 9 2008, all profiles images and canine themes were removed from the site and Faceparty once again resumed normal operations.
Pay-for services
Whilst most of the site is free to use, many of the features of Faceparty require Cool Tools which allows users to see who has been visiting their profile and rating them. Unlike more widely used social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, users are required to pay an annual fee for these services.
Faceparty also offers its own 'Adult Verification System' (AVS) which allows users over the age of 18 to view restricted 'adult' content on other users profiles. Faceparty charges a monthly subscription for its AVS service.
Music
In mid July 2006, Sony BMG struck a short-lived partnership with Faceparty, allowing its artists to be promoted to the social network's members on an exclusive basis, with competitions, free music downloads, and other promotions planned.[5]