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TOP 5 SOCIAL NETWORKS |
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Facebook:
Facebook is a social networking service and website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. The service was launched in February 2004; by January 2011, Facebook had over 600 million users. Users can create a personal profile, add other users to their individual Facebook pages as friends, and exchange messages, such as automatic notifications when they or their friends update their respective profiles. Users can also join common-interest groups, which may be organized by workplace, school or college, or other shared characteristics.
While still a sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg created Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on 28 October 2003. According to the Harvard Crimson (the Harvard University daily paper) the site resembled a Harvard University version of the Hot or Not photo rating site. The Crimson wrote that Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person."
To obtain the photographs Zuckerberg hacked the protected areas of Harvard's computer network to access and copy the Houses' private dormitory ID images. At that time, the university did not provide a student directory with photos and basic information, and when that first site went online it generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views within the first four hours.
Soon the site was forwarded to a number of campus group list servers, but it was shut down by the Harvard administration within days. The administration charged Zuckerberg with breach of security, violation of copyrights, and violation of individual privacy, and threatened him with expulsion, but in the end the charges were dropped. Zuckerberg elaborated on his initial project that semester by creating a social study tool: prior to an art history final, he uploaded five hundred Augustan images to a single website with one image and a comment section per page. He opened up the site to his fellow students, and they started sharing their notes.
In January 2004 – the following semester – Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website; he said he was inspired by an editorial in the Crimson about the Facemash incident. On 4 February 2004 Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook. Its original address was thefacebook.com.
Only six days later three Harvard seniors, Divya Narendra and brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, accused Zuckerberg of deliberately misleading them by claiming to help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while exploiting their ideas for a competing product instead. The Crimson began investigating when the three took their complaint to the paper. They filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling out of court.
Within the first month of operation, over half of all Harvard undergraduates were registered on Thefacebook. Zuckerberg soon recruited college roommates and fellow computer science students Chris Hughes, Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), and Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), to help promote the website. They first limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but soon added support for students at other universities, extending membership gradually to include other institutions in the Boston area, Ivy League schools, Columbia, MIT, New York, Stanford, and Yale. Thefacebook continued to grow, ultimately including most universities in Canada and the USA.
The company was incorporated in the summer of 2004. Sean Parker, the entrepreneur who had been giving Zuckerberg informal advice, was made the company's president, and in June Facebook established its headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Later that month Peter Thiel, one of PayPal's founders, was the first to invest in Thefacebook. After the company bought the domain name "facebook.com" for US$200,000 in 2005, the "The" was dropped from its name.
The company introduced a high school version in September 2005. At the time, high school network membership operated by invitation only. Facebook went on to extend eligibility to the employees of certain companies, e.g. Apple, Inc and Microsoft. On 26 September 2006 Facebook was finally made accessible to anyone aged 13 and over who had a valid e-mail address.
Microsoft announced on 24 October 2007 that it had paid US$240 million for a 1.6 % share in Facebook, thus putting a total implied value of approximately US$15 billion Facebook. One condition behind Microsoft's purchase was the right to run international advertising on Facebook.
Facebook announced in October 2008 its intention to establish its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. Facebook stated in September 2009 that its cash flow had been positive for the first time since the company was founded. Since 2009 Facebook traffic has mounted steadily, making Facebook the world's leading social network.
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TOP 2 |
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Twitter:
Twitter, Inc owns and operates the Twitter website, a service for mobile social networking and micro-blogging. Users of the service can send "tweets," text messages of up to 140 characters to other users. By default every user's tweets are visible to the public, unless the user has set up a friends' list, to whom his or her tweets are then restricted. The service also provides a tweet subscription feature: users, then called followers, can also subscribe, or follow, other users' tweets. Tweets can be sent (and received) through the Twitter website, some external applications (as in smartphones), or by text message (SMS, Short Message Service) in some countries.
The company is based in San Francisco, California (where the website was first created), and has offices and servers in Boston, Massachusetts, and San Antonio, Texas.
Twitter was conceived in 2006, when Jack Dorsey was eating lunch in a children's playground with board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey discussed the feasibility of using instant or short messaging services to communicate with several persons simultaneously. After about two weeks of work on the project, Dorsey published the first Twitter message on 21 March 2006 at 9:50pm Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr."
The prototype was introduced at Odeo as an internal service for employees. A full version of Twitter was made public on 15 July 2006. In October 2006, Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and other members of Odeo set up Obvious Corp and bought Odeo and its assets (i.e. Odeo.com and Twitter.com too) from Odeo's investors and shareholders. In April 2007 Twitter was spun off into its own company.
Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained popularity worldwide.
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TOP 3 |
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Linkedin:
LinkedIn is a work-oriented networking site mainly used for professional networking. It was founded in December 2002 and officially launched in May 2003, and is based in Mountain View, California, with offices in Chicago, Omaha, New York, and London. LinkenIn was founded by Reid Hoffman and others from Paypal and Socialnet.com (Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, Jean-Luc Vaillant; co-founding team Stephen Beitzel, David Eves, Lee Hower, Ian McNish, Yan Pujante, and Chris Saccheri).
The site is presently available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, is a former Yahoo! Inc executive.
LinkedIn first showed a profit in March 2006. On 17 June 2008, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and other venture-capital firms acquired 5 % ownership of LinkedIn for US$53 million. This represented a post-money valuation of approximately US$1 billion. In June 2010 the company announced its European headquarters would be established in Dublin, Ireland. On 28 July 2010, Tiger Global Management LLC bought a 1 % share of the company, valuing its worth at approximately US$2 billion. On 4 August 2010, LinkedIn announced it had acquired Mspoke for an undisclosed figure. This was its first major acquisition since LinkedIn was founded, intended to improve content searches and help LinkedIn users with more than job-hunting alone.
As of 2 November 2010, LinkedIn had more than 80 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.
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TOP 4 |
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Instagram:
Instagram is a mobile photo application developed by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger lunched in October 2010. It uses a cell phone camera to take pictures, after which users can apply photo filters and share them. The service surpassed 50 million users shortly after opening the app to Android customers (it was previously only available on the iPhone). About 5 million users are signing up each week. Instagram was purchased by Facebook on April 19, 2012.
In June 2013, Instagram introduced 15-second video feature to the application.
Instagram has about 150 million users as of October 2013, and an average of 55 million photos is uploaded daily.
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TOP 5 |
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Tumblr:
Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website founded by David Karp and owned by Yahoo! Inc. The service allows users to post content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs, as well as make their blogs private.
As of 1st October 2013, Tumblr hosts over 139.4 million blogs. The company has its headquarters in New York City.
On 20 June 2013, Yahoo! acquired Tumblr on for approximately $1.1 billion.
David Karp started developing Tumblr began in 2006. Tumblr was launched in February 2007and within two weeks, the service had gained 75,000 users.
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