Happy New year!

Happy new year everyone! This is so great! We are in a new year wohoooo!

Anyways i wanted to talk about popular socialite sites going on worldwide with the internet world. Sites that were started with normal people who made it big by putting together some htmls and making it available for people especially to high school and college folks to get together, share videos, links and information anytime..anywhere

QUOTES FROM WIKIPEDIA.ORG!


Myspace: Who can omit the famous website myspace, created in 2003 and now employs over 300 employees. Here's a little something about myspace..

MySpace was founded in August 2003 by eUniverse (which later in mid-2004 changed its name to Intermix). eUniverse created and marketed the Myspace website, providing the division with a complete infrastructure of finance, human resources, technical expertise, bandwidth, and server capacity right out of the gate so the MySpace team wasn’t distracted with typical start-up issues. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's Founder, Chairman, CEO), who managed Chris DeWolfe (MySpace's current CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace's current president), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse.
The very first MySpace users were E-Universe employees. The company held contests to see who could sign-up the most users. The company then used its resources to push MySpace to the masses. eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to quickly breathe life into MySpace , and move it to the head of the pack of social networking websites. A key architect was tech expert Toan Nguyen who helped stabilize the MySpace platform when Brad Greenspan asked him to join the team. Shortly after launching MySpace, team member Chris DeWolfe in its first business plan suggested that they start charging a fee for the basic MySpace service. Brad Greenspan nixed the idea, believing that keeping MySpace free and open was necessary to make it a large and successful community.
Some employees of MySpace including DeWolfe and Berman were later able to purchase equity in the property before MySpace, and its parent company eUniverse (now renamed ‘Intermix’), were bought in July 2005 for US$580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the parent company of Fox Broadcasting and other media enterprises). Of this amount, approx. US$327m has been attributed to the value of MySpace according to the financial adviser fairness opinion.
In January 2006, Fox announced plans to launch a UK version of MySpace in a bid to "tap into the UK music scene" which they have since done. They also released it in China and will possibly launch it in other countries.
The corporate history of MySpace as well as the status of Tom Anderson as a MySpace founder has been a matter of some public

Facebook: Facebook i must say is my personal favoriate, i log on almost everyday check my mails, peep around my friend's updates and then i'm out. I can't say i'm the only one that does that, i'm pretty sure my friends on my list have a field day doing the exact same thing. That's what makes facebook fun. Lets take a look at facebook's history

Facebook is a social networking website, launched on February 4, 2004. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former Harvard student. Initially the membership of Facebook was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to MIT, Boston University, Boston College, and all Ivy League schools within two months. Many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually, people with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools on February 27, 2006 and some large companies. Since September 11, 2006, anyone 13 or older may join. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.
The site is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner ads and sponsored groups (in April 2006, revenue was rumored to be over $1.5 million per week). Users create profiles that often contain photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. The viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network or confirmed friends. According to TechCrunch, "about 85% of students in [previously] supported colleges have a profile [on the site]. [Of those who are signed up,] 60% log in daily.

Yahoo!: Yahooooooo! Yahoo is one of the older ones. Who doesn't know Yahoo in this day and age. If i tell you an email addy with yahoo.com and you tell me 'huh?' I would know you just came from a place with no internet asscess at all. Yahoo is not just a place for sending emails and searching, links etc, it is a huge social network. There is so much about Yahoo! but here's a short history.

In January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website named "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web." Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages.
In April 1994, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" was renamed "Yahoo!". Filo and Yang said they selected the name because they liked the word's general definition, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." The name can also be a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Its URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.
By the end of 1994, Yahoo had already received one million hits. Yang and Filo realized their website had massive business potential, and on 1 March 1995, Yahoo was incorporated. On April 5, 1995, Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo! with two rounds of venture capital. On 12 April 1996, Yahoo had its initial public offering, raising $33.8 million dollars, by selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.
"Yahoo" had already been trademarked for barbecue sauce (and knives (by EBSCO Industries)). Therefore, in order to get the trademark, Yang and Filo added the exclamation mark to the name. However, the exclamation mark is often omitted when referring to Yahoo.

Youtube: Youtube is really a nice website to visit and quite useful. I didn't use it as much till recently, and i notice the vast amount of video upload that site provides. It's unbelieveable.

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Prior to PayPal, Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The domain name "YouTube.com" was activated on February 15, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months. The creators offered the public a preview of the site in May 2005, six months before YouTube made its official debut.
Like many technology startups, YouTube was started as an angel-funded enterprise from a makeshift office in a garage. In November 2005, venture firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million; additionally, Roelof Botha, partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal, joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the company, which had experienced huge popular growth within its first few months.
During the summer of 2006, YouTube was one of the fastest growing websites on the Web, and was ranked the 5th most popular website on Alexa, far out pacing even MySpace's rate of growth. According to a July 16, 2006 survey, 100 million video clips are viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded every 24 hours. The website averages nearly 20 million visitors per month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, where around 44% are female, 56% male, and the 12- to 17-year-old age group is dominant. YouTube's pre-eminence in the online video market is substantial. According to the website Hitwise.com, YouTube commands up to 64% of the UK online video market. On October 9, 2006, it was announced that the company would be purchased by Google for US$1.65 billion in stock. The purchase agreement between Google and YouTube came after YouTube presented three agreements with media companies in an attempt to escape the threat of copyright-infringement lawsuits. YouTube will continue operating independently, with its co-founders and 67 employees working within the company. The deal to acquire YouTube closed on November 13, and was, at the time, Google's second largest acquisition.

Google: You know what i love google, i mean who doesn't google up something. infact i google up most of the information on this page. It may have been initially created as a search site but now has grown and exploded to a huge socialite site. Here's a quickie on google.com

Google is an American public corporation, specializing in Internet search and online advertising. The company is based in Mountain View, California, and has 15,916 full-time employees (as of September 30, 2007). It is the largest American company (by market capitalization) that is not part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 7, 1998. Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion. Through a series of new product developments, acquisitions and partnerships, the company has expanded its initial search and advertising business into other areas, including web-based email, online mapping, office productivity, and video sharing, among others.
In 2006, "google" came in second on Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year.