Our last class assignment was for each of us to take a deeper dive into a social media platform, explaining what it was about and why it can be considered ‘social media.’ Mark Scott chose Skoob — ‘books’ spelled backwards.

As Mark told us, Skoob is a social media platform that caters to book lovers who speak and read Portuguese. As of right now, it is not translated into any other languages but it has a very healthy following of four million users. Skoob was launched 10 years ago, and has showed steady growth ever since.

I think conventional thought might say that Skoob needs to either expand into other languages, or slowly die. I don’t think that will happen though. By not only existing, but flourishing for ten years, the platform exhibits staying power. It caters to a niche, which I think plays in its favor. Skoob shows it is keeping up with other platforms by providing interactivity with Facebook and Twitter. I also think the language barrier isn’t much of a barrier at all. Portuguese is the 9th most spoken language in the world.

Thank you Mark, for introducing us to this platform. Skoob is pretty looc!