Social networking and popular websites

 

A social network service uses software to build online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others.  Most services are primarily web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.

from Wikipedia entry  

 

Social networking websites use third-party web application within their own suite of pages. Websites such as PhotoBucket, BunnyHeroLabs, RockYou and MyHeritageFiles while popular in their own right and are utilized by Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, etc.

 

Bebo.com

Bebo, a backronym for “Blog early, blog often”, is an online social media network similar in format to MySpace, Xanga, Facebook, and Yahoo! 360. In September 2007 Alexa ranked it as the 11th most popular site in the UK. User profiles include quizzes, polls for their friends to vote in and comment on, photo albums which allows the user to upload an unlimited number of pictures, blogs with a comments section for others' responses, a list of bands of which the profile-holder is a "fan", a list of groups that the user is a member of and a "Video Box"; which plays video, which may be either linked from popular Internet site YouTube, or uploaded directly to Bebo's servers via VideoEgg.  Members can also add "widgets" which are more graphically rich components provided by an external sites — typically something like a slide-show of the member's photos with some transition effect applied.  The minimum age to register an account is 13.  Bebo Safety.

from Wikipedia entry

Bebo is to be purchased by Time Warner AOL for $1 Billion NZ.  14/03/2008

 

MySpace.com

MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally.  Owner is Fox Interactive Media; which is owned by News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch).  MySpace is currently the world's sixth most popular website, and the third most popular website in the United States.  Today its traffic is similar to that of Facebook, a competing social network.  As of February 2008, there are over 300 million accounts.  MySpace profiles for musicians are different from normal profiles in that artists are allowed to upload up to six MP3 songs. The uploader must have rights to use the songs (e.g their own work, permission granted, etc). Unsigned musicians can use MySpace to post and sell music, which has proven popular among MySpace users.  Many political organizations have created Myspace accounts to keep in touch with and expand their membership base like Greenpeace and Food Not Bombs.   MySpace has proven to be a windfall for many smaller companies that provide widgets or accessories to the social networking giant. Companies such as Slide.com, RockYou!, and YouTube were all launched on MySpace as widgets providing additional functionality to the site. The minimum age to register an account on MySpace is 14.  MySpace Safety Tips.

from Wikipedia entry

 

Facebook.com

Facebook is a social networking website, launched in 2004.  Initially, membership was restricted to students of Harvard College. After September 11, 2006, anyone 13 or older became eligible for membership. The site has more than 64 million active users worldwide. It is the most popular website for uploading photos with 14 million uploaded daily.  The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the campus community that some U.S. colleges give out as a way to get to know other people on campus.  Facebook features include the Wall, which is a space on each user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see, Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (for example you could send your friends a "trout slap"), and status, which allows users to inform their friends of their current whereabouts and actions.  Facebook Platform provides a framework for developers to launch new applications that  integrated with the Facebook system. These include the Gifts application, which allows users to send virtual "gifts" to each other, the Marketplace, allowing users to post free classified ads, Events, which gives users a method of informing their friends about upcoming events, and Video, which is an application that allows users to share homemade videos among one another.  Facebook safety.

from Wikipedia entry

 

 

Did you know ...

New Zealand has it's own social networking web site?   Sonet

 

YouTube.com

A video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. Google acquired the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock in November 2006.  In 2008, a YouTube search for "*" returns about 72,600,000 videos.   Google aims to compete with local videosharing websites and in October 2007 launched YouTube New Zealand nz.youtube.com.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube

 

TinyPic.com

A photo and video sharing service that allows users to upload, link and share, images and videos on the Internet. An account is not required to use Tinypic. TinyPic allows upload and hosting of JPEG (jpg), png, gif and tiff files. Images bigger than a certain size will be automatically resized. TinyPic is owned and operated by Photobucket.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinypic

 

PhotoBucket.com

Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website.  Photobucket's image hosting is often used for eBay, MySpace, Bebo, Neopets, Facebook accounts, LiveJournals or other blogs, and message boards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket.com

 

Miniclip.com

Browser-based games, cartoons and Ecards.  It is the world's largest online games website, with 43 million unique users per month and is also the largest privately held website on the Internet. Its popularity originally arose from a game called Dancing Bush. Most games are created in Flash or Shockwave or Java.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniclip

 

ugo.com

The company streams various forms of media entertainment on its website as well as offering articles on topics of interest to its target audience. Topics include comics, television, music, and film. Its main competitors include CNet Networks, IGN Entertainment, and Yahoo!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGO_Networks

 

VideoEgg.com

A web-based publishing service that allows users to capture video content from virtually any device and format and publish it to the web.  Bebo via VideoEgg allows users to uploaded video directly to their profile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoEgg

 

GaiaOnline.com

An anime-themed forums-based website that reportedly has the largest forum on the Internet with over a million posts made daily, over a billion posts total, and over 2.5 million unique users each month.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_Online

 

RockYou.com

a publisher and developer of applications and other social network services. As of December, 2007 it is the most successful widget maker for the Facebook platform in terms of total installations.  The company was also developing widgets for MySpace and Bebo.  Applications made for Facebook include Super Wall,[1] "X Me", Likeness, Vampires, Slideshows, Birthdays, MyGifts, and Emote.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RockYou

 

Flixster.com

Flixster is a free online database of information about films and actors. It includes social features such as the ability for individual users to review and rate films and to compare their ratings with invited friends to assess compatibility in film tastes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flixster

 

Flickr.com

Flickr is a photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform. It was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its innovative online community tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means. It hosts over two billion images.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr

 

ilike.com

iLike is a website that allows users to download and share music. The website makes use of a sidebar that is used with Apple's iTunes.  iLike has a free Facebook application which allows users to play clips of music they like on their profile, show concerts they are going to and play a music trivia quiz. The application had great success after its release, making it one of the most popular applications on the Facebook Platform. As of November 2007, iLike has more than 15 million users.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILike

 

MyHeritage.com

MyHeritage is a family-oriented social network service that allows users to create an online family tree, share pictures, organize family events, and search for ancestors online.MyHeritage is also known for its face recognition algorithm used to scan a person’s uploaded photo and match them to various celebrities in the MyHeritage celebrity database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyHeritage

 

Twitter.com

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

 

Blingee.com

Layouts, graphics, games, cursors, smileys - you name they have it and more to bling up your social networking space.

 

Frengo.com

Widgets and games for your social networking space.

 

y8.com

Flash games.