The brand Tuentithe telephone operator heir to the one that at the time came to be crowned one of the most popular networks in Spain, will disappear becoming part of O2. Telefónica, owner of both and in view of the user figures obtained by both operators, has made the decision to unify them under the name of the latter. Thus, O2 will become the only brand as low cost operator of the telecommunications company.
However, it cannot be guaranteed that this will be the definitive end of Tuenti, since Telefónica has specified that it will be left inactive, since its future has not yet been decided. “We stopped marketing it and unified all customers under one brand but, for now, no new uses for the brand have been decided«. Who knows what new metamorphosis he can surprise us with, place your bets.
Telefónica proposes a simple change for its customers
Telefónica has offered its users the possibility of maintaining rates similar to those they already had in Tuenti, and even to improve them, if they decide to transfer their accounts to O2. If you have contracted a Tuenti rate, you should know that this transfer will be totally free, all you have to do is change your SIM card and follow a series of on the web.
In case of having a prepaid rate, it will not be possible to get an equivalent in O2, since this operator does not offer that option. Given this scenario, the proposed solution is grant customers of the prepaid modality a Movistar card with the balance they had in their previous Tuenti account.
The delivery of SIM cards is expected to take a few weeks, until the end of May. Once received, customers will have up to June 18 as the deadline to request the change and activate the service.
Tuenti, from a social network to a mobile virtual operator
When El Confidencial leaked the news that the closure of Tuenti as a social network in 2016, in reality, it did not surprise anyone: it is evident that the one that became the number 1 social network among adolescents and young people was giving his last tails like a fish out of water. However, a few hours later, the newspaper El Mundo published another piece of news denying the closure by the company’s spokesmen, who explained that their business was doing better than ever.
Tuenti’s business as a virtual mobile operator, Of course, because we better not talk about the social network part. Either way, Tuenti as a Facebook-style social network is already historyBut not now, but for quite some time.
2006: the origin of Tuenti
Tuenti’s story starts in 2006, when its founder, the Californian Zaryn Dentzel decides to establish himself definitively in Spain and get ahead of the still relatively little-known Facebook, creating a social network similar in style to that of .
Like its competitor, Tuenti was originally aimed at university 20-somethings, at the time the most likely audience to adopt a social network. And the experiment worked. Spectacularly good. Tuenti grew in users, arriving in 2009 to position itself as the most popular social network in Spain, above Facebook. In 2010 Tuenti reached 10 million users, mostly teenagers, despite the fact that a limit of 14 years was imposed, below which it was not allowed to open a profile.
Practically all of you who are now between 30 and 35 years old have had a profile on Tuenti. Its penetration in this age segment (from 15 to 20 years old) reached over 80% of the population. If you studied at the institute, you had to be in Tuenti. Facebook was a boring thing, and besides, your parents were on Facebook. Tuenti was the initial social network, from which one jumped to Twitter and/or Facebook when he began his university studies and formed groups of new friends.
The first problems for Tuenti
But sooner or later it would end up arriving the closure of Tuenti It was something that could already be glimpsed in 2010. Tuenti had reached its ceiling and their numbers stopped growing. Twitter First (where all Tuenti users moved in en masse, only to be shot for the most part a couple of years later) and then facebookwith the invaluable help of yfueron slowly eating away at its user base.
And when in 2010, in the middle of the explosion of the , yours stops growing, is that something is not going right. Therefore, and probably knowing that in the end Tuenti would close, in 2010 Dentzel and his team decided that a bird in the hand is better than a hundred flying (or that they take the money and run) and they decide to sell their social network to Telefónica for 70 million euros.
Telefónica arrived and made it clear from the beginning what interested it in Tuenti: its user base. So they turned the once successful social network into a virtual mobile operator. In other words, Tuenti went from being a social network to a communications operator aimed at adolescents and that sells voice and data rates, integrating some of the features of the social network in a mobile app that also offers voice over IP, messages and chat between users free of charge.
As for the social network itself, the closure of Tuenti was the logical consequence of an unconditional surrender (not that there were many alternatives) to Facebook. In reality, the great differential fact of Tuenti over Facebook was the age range of its users, something that was not even foreseen by the company, which pointed to older ages and with greater consumption capacity. The sale or the closure of Tuenti were sung at the moment in which their did not give the expected results.
Was Tuenti conceived to be sold?
One might wonder to what extent the history of Tuenti is not that of many startups. Was Tuenti conceived to be sold? Did Zaryn Denthel know that when Facebook arrived in Spain it would destroy her social network?
Maybe yes or maybe no, since Probably at that time not even Mark Zuckerberg himself could conceive how far his creature was going to go. Although Tuenti claimed to have 20 million users, that is the chocolate of the parrot if we compare it with the 2,000 million of Facebook.
So, keeping the social network part active also didn’t make much sense when no one used it anymore (It would be necessary to see how many of those 20 million were really active users).
It was nice while it lasted. Now, like so many other social networks crushed by the unstoppable push of Facebook, Tuenti languishes in the limbo of the forgotten. It is what the Internet has, that like Saturn, devours its children without mercy.
Stay informed of the most relevant news on our news channel
Facebook Comments
Disqus