3. Facebook is a social networking service and Web site
launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by
Facebook. As of July 2011 Facebook has more than 800
million active users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college
roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo
Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the
most used social networking service by worldwide monthly
active users, followed by MySpace
4. is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia
project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20
million articles (over 3.78 million in English) have been written
collaboratively by volunteers around the world
Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry
Sanger. Sanger coined the name Wikipedia, which is a
portmanteau of wiki (a technology for creating collaborative
websites
Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of
encyclopedia building and the large presence of unacademic
content has often been noted.
5. Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging
service that enables its users to send and read text-based
posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and
launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide
popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over
200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search
queries per day. It is sometimes described as "the SMS of the
Internet."
6. Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-
user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra
Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs
are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com.
Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on
other hosts, via FTP. All such blogs had (or still have) to be
moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than
blogspot.com allowed via Custom URLs.[
7. PBworks (formerly PBwiki) is a commercial real-time collaborative
editing (RTCE) system created by David Weekly, with Ramit Sethiand
Nathan Schmidt joining shortly thereafter as co-founders. Based in San
Mateo, California, the company's original name stems from their belief that
"making a wiki is as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich".The
company operates on a freemium basis, with basic features being offered
for free and more advanced features for a fee.
PBworks' investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures and the Seraph
Group, as well as angel investors Ron Conway and Chris Yeh.
In June 2008 the company hired Jim Groff, a former employee of Oracle
Corporation and Apple Inc. for its new CEO. David Weekly, the former
CEO, remains its Chief Product Officer and Chairman.
8. WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and
publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often
customized into acontent managemen system (CMS). It has
many features including a plug-in architecture and a template
system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's
"top 1 million" websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of
all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular
CMS in use on the Internet.
It was first released on May 27, 2003, by Matt Mullenweg as a
fork of b2/cafelog. As of February 2011, version 3.0 had been
downloaded over 32.5 million times.
9. Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab. It was
launched on June 23, 2003. A number of free client programs, or
Viewers, enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other
through avatars. Residents can explore the world (known as the grid), meet
other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and
create and trade virtual property and services with one another. Second Life is
intended for people aged 16 and over, and as of 2011 has about one million
active users.
Built into the software is a three-dimensional modeling tool based around simple
geometric shapes that allows residents to build virtual objects. There is also
a procedural scripting language, Linden Scripting Language, which can be used
to add interactivity to objects.Sculpted prims (sculpties), mesh, textures for
clothing or other objects, and animations and gestures can be created using
external software and imported. The Second Life Terms of Service provide that
users retain copyright for any content they create, and the server and client
provide simple digital rights management functions.
10. Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for
organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated
photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002
and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the
name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa
for "my house", and "pic" for pictures (personalized art).In July
2004, Google acquired Picasa and began offering it as a free
download.
11. YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former
PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can
upload, view and share videos.
The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe
Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated
video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as
well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original
videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by
individuals, although media corporations including
CBS, BBC, VEVO, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their
material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.
12. Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation
invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising
technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of
Internet-based services and products, and generates profit
primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The
company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often
dubbed the "Google Guys",while the two were attending
Stanford University as PhD candidates.
13. Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google
Plus, sometimes abbreviated as G+) is a social networking and
identity service, operated by Google Inc.
The service was launched on June 28, 2011, in an invite-only "field
testing" phase. The following day, existing users were allowed to
invite friends who were over 18 years of age to the service to create
their own accounts. This was suspended the next day due to an
"insane demand" for accounts.On August 6, each Google+ member
had 150 invitations to give out, but on September 20, 2011, Google+
was opened to everyone 18 years of age or older without the need
for an invitation.After Google+ went public, users registered to
Google+, but those under 18 years of age were unable to sign up for
Google+.[8]
