piczo

Piczo to join forces with fellow teen site Stardoll

Representatives from Piczo, a social network geared toward teens, have confirmed that the site will be rolling up into Stardoll, another social site that focuses on virtual doll accessorizing.

They'll be combining with a third site called Paperdoll Heaven to form what's called the "Stardoll Network." Then, presumably, they will have access to a stronger lineup of common advertisers.

Financial terms have not been disclosed. But to put things into perspective, Piczo says it has 30 million registered members and 10 million monthly unique visitors. Stardoll is slightly smaller. But with the biggest social sites now … Read more

Social slowdown hitting Piczo hard

CNET News.com reporter Caroline McCarthy co-wrote this article.

Life is getting more difficult for social-networking sites.

At the same time Facebook's traffic appears to have reached a plateau, News.com has learned that Piczo, a networking site that caters to teenage girls and was much written about in 2006, has seen layoffs, executive departures, high employee turnover, and a shrinking audience in the past five months.

Three former Piczo employees described a company grappling with the meteoric rise of competitors Facebook and Bebo and internal squabbles over the direction of the 3-year-old start-up. Piczo has also struggled to … Read more

Dracula just got a lot more emo: Piczo, Penguin host cover design contest

Recent Walt Disney acquisition Club Penguin isn't the only Antarctic waterfowl in the news on the youth social-networking front this week.

Venerable publishing house Penguin Group has just made a tech-savvy move through a partnership with teen-oriented community site Piczo, in which young Piczo users are encouraged to design covers for a selection of classic books and submit them to a competition pool.

The contest, called "Piczo My Penguin," runs for the next four weeks. It offers up six book titles, each one chosen by a trendy music act such as Razorlight, Beck or Goldspot: Alice in … Read more

Piczo goes multilingual

Piczo, which is a San Francisco-based social networking site for teens that touts extensive, parent-friendly safety features, has started to reach beyond the U.S. and U.K. The company announced an initiative to expand into other countries by introducing international versions of the site, and today, Piczo announced the first phase of this expansion: into Germany, France, and Spain. There are already sizeable chunks of Piczo's 25-million-member base from those three countries, according to an official release (including 1.2 million in Germany), but now they'll be able to opt into using the service in their home … Read more