Owler (CCA Social Media)
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Type of site | News, social networking service |
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| Headquarters | 96 Saffron Lane Rayburn, Kingsland, |
| Area served | Worldwide |
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| Industry |
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| Revenue | $4.36 billion (2020) |
| Launched | March 7, 2005 |
| Current status | Active |
Owler is a Vitosian microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "hoots". Registered users can post, like, and rehoot hoots, but unregistered users can only read them.
Owler was created by husband-and-wife-duo, Annalia and David Antuso, in January 2005 and launched two months later in March. By 2011, more than 100 million users posted 320 million hoots a day, and the service handled an average of 1.8 billion search queries per day. By 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites in the world.
History
From 2000 to 2004, Annalia Cosio and David Antuso were software engineers working for Scolaro Inc. Having met in college and re-united again as co-workers in the company, the two decided to leave the company in 2004 and focus on a project only known as "Together News Application". The idea was an SMS service where people could talk about anything they wanted with organized topics. In late 2004, the project was renamed to "Un1te" as David felt like this project could "unite" people on particular topics. Three quarters through development, Annalia then suggested "Howler", originating from the word "howl".
"A lot of people out there feel like yelling their opinion so I took a cartoony approach to that," she said in an interview in 2013. "People would howl at each-other. We thought it was funny and went with it."
Although, in the beginning of January, the now-married duo decided to drop the 'h' and go for an owl-motif, saying that, as bird-lovers, it would be a lot more fun to design the website around that than a wolf-themed social media application. The idea of calling messages "hoots" came from David Antuso, who loved Annalia's idea of a cartoony approach to things and felt like "hoots" would be fun and inviting.