With the parent company behind the Facebook social media platform formally rebranding as Meta – here’s three social media rebrands that didn’t go according to plan: Vine to Clash, MSN Messenger to Windows Live Messenger, Club Penguin to Club Penguin Island.
Vine to Clash
Seen as the predecessor to Tiktok, the American social networking site rose to prominence for its six-second-long looping video clips.
But the app did not allow content creators to monetize their videos and they began leaving the platform. In 2016, Vine’s parent company Twitter, announced it would disable all uploads.
Co-founder Dom Hofmann has since founded Byte (now known as Clash), where users can create 16-second looping videos. Although the app has 200,000 monthly users, this is only 1% of the users that Vine had at its peak.
MSN Messenger to Windows Live Messenger
Released in 1999 by Microsoft, MSN Messenger reached up to 330 million worldwide active users each month.
Following its acquisition of Skype Technologies in May 2011, Microsoft added interoperability between Skype and Microsoft accounts.
This led to MSN users transitioning to Skype, causing the former to rebrand to Windows Live Messenger before the platform was discontinued in October 2014.
Club Penguin to Club Penguin Island
Launched in 2005, the now infamous Club Penguin allowed users to interact with each other through cartoon penguin avatars. In 2013 the site had attracted over 200 million registered users.
With the proliferation of smart phones, Disney, Club Penguin’s owners sought to replace the original game with a new version for mobile.
Due to the number of adverts this version proved less popular, leading to issues with Club Penguin’s servers.
On January 30, 2017, it was announced that the game would be discontinued. It was replaced by a successor Club Penguin Island – which itself was discontinued the following year.
The original version of the game was then recreated on several private servers. The Walt Disney Company went on to sue these private sites for copyright infringement after concerns were raised that children were being groomed on the imposturous platform.