Wednesday, December 10, 2008

History of Myspace



The history of Myspace isn’t a long one, since the Web site has only been around for a few years. Myspace.com is a social networking site, intended to bring various users together for personal and professional interaction. It began in 2003 and has since grown to become one of the most popular Web sites in the world. It currently boasts over 80 million users and is only gaining in its momentum.

The Early History of Myspace
The face of Myspace is undoubtedly Tom Anderson, co-founder and now dot com millionaire. Every new user is automatically connected with their first “friend”, who is Tom himself. He is known for his trademark profile picture, a low-key snapshot of him wearing a white t-shirt and sitting at his computer. (It is hard to believe that he is now an industry giant.)

It was in July of 2003 that Tom, Chris DeWolfe and a small team of programmers launched what would become a cultural phenomenon, Myspace.com. DeWolfe was a business graduate, while Tom had several liberal arts degrees, including English and Film. Its unique interface helped the site to boom immediately, eventually leading to a multi-million dollar corporate buyout.

At the time of Myspace’s birth, the reigning champ on the social networking scene was Friendster.com. However, the Friendster phenomenon (which has peaked at around 27 million users) would be nothing compared to Myspace’s impact. Once Myspace appeared, Friendster users left in droves. Why? This is often attributed to Myspace’s customizable profile pages. While Friendster allowed users to enter personal info and upload photographs, Myspace actually supported fully customizable pages and media. Soon, millions of teenagers and young adults were learning rudimentary HTML.


Recent History of Myspace
In April of 2006, it was reported that approximately 10 million new users joined Myspace.com. Given those numbers, it is hard to believe the site is going out of fashion any time soon. It has become a promotional tool for many professionals, especially musicians and filmmakers. There have also been Myspace celebrities born in the past year or two, including Tila Tequila and Jeffree Star (two people who gained popularity merely through their Myspace profiles).

In 2005, Rupert Murdoch purchased Myspace’s parent company, Intermix Media, for a reported $580 million. It is estimated that the site’s current yearly revenue is $20 million and growing (the site is covered with various paid advertisements). Myspace is now branching out into the music industry with the launch of Myspace Records. Various concert series are also being hosted by the site, such as Myfestival, a UK tour featuring many popular bands from the site.


Myspace Controversy
Although the site is enjoying a tremendous success and is serving most of its users very well, there has also been a lot of controversy born from it. Underage users, in particular, have caused quite a stir. Users under 16 are protected with private profiles that cannot be viewed by outsiders. Unfortunately, many children are lying about their age to have a public profile. As a result, they are left vulnerable to potential pedophiles and otherwise unethical site users.

Although Myspace users are not supposed to post anything graphic or offensive on the site, many ignore these terms of service. From documentation of drug use to child pornography, it has been found on the site. Also, many arrests have been made in recent years because of careless admissions of guilt on the site. In one unfortunate case, a young Myspace user actually used a “friends bulletin” to post his suicide note online. Things like this have given the site a bad reputation with many, although a majority of profiles are completely lawful and benign.


By : A. Cottrell

Source : www.music.lovetoknow.com




History of Friendster



Friendster is an online social networking service. It was founded in California by Jonathan Abrams in the year of 2002. Friendster is privately own. Friendster is one of the oldest and first of the popular social networking sites boom. The concept of friendster is based on a circle of friends and various friends techniques for individuals to socialnetwork within virtual communities. Friendster is widely used in Asia. It has over 50 million users worldwide. MySpace took over Friendster's number one position in popular social networking sites when it was introduced in 2004. Now the social networking site known as friendster has competition from every angle. There are new social networking sites growing everyday. An average of 90% of young people are participating in social networking sites daily. Google offered to buy the social network called Friendster in the year of 2003 but Friendster declined.

Today, that decision not to sell to Google is considered as one of the biggest financial mistakes to many individuals. The amount of 53 million was funded to Friendster by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital in the year of 2003. Friendster was awarded the prestigious patent in the year of 2006 for their method of calculating and displaying relationships in a social network. It was dubbed with the name of Web of Friends due to the circles displayed of individual friends profile pictures. Each circle has a line drawn similar to a web connecting them to another contact on your friend list. It was very creative and crafty of them. Friendster is available in many different languages. Friendster has a language link that can change the text displayed on the site to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Spanish for other users.

What can friendster do? Friendster can connect you with other like-minded people to share information and network. Friendster has a rich source of connections you can gain by it being one of the oldest social networking sites around. Friendster is perfect for someone looking to build up their social network and business contacts. You can find old friends, classmates, co-workers, and new aquaintances through there vast array of features. You can build up an incredible social network through Friendster. The site has been putting extra money into updating and it has loads of networking potential. Unlike other sites Friendster is not buried with spam and lurking pedophiles. It is a great online social networking site to relax and connect on a deeper level with others.

The purpose of social networking is solid in the Friendster online service. You can post blogs, message, disucss, email, and interact with other individuals with the same interests and hobbies as you. You can also conduct searches for new friends and add friends of your friends current circle. Friendster allows you to always be connected and informed. It is important to remember that Friendster is an excellent social networking site to make meaningful connections. Friendster can do what most social networking sites can but on a more experienced level.


By : Ange Perdu

Source : www.webupon.com


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Tuesday, December 9, 2008

History of Google



Google is now the most dominant search tool on the web, setting the standards that others try to follow and better, as yet unsuccessfully. It was founded in 1998 - relatively late compared to many of the popular search engines - by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were graduate students from Stanford University.

Page and Brin had been working together on a search engine they called "BackRub" since early 1996, but with the encouragement of Yahoo! co-founder David Filo, they decided to start a company in 1998 and went looking for investors to back them. Google, Inc. was established on September 7, 1998. The founders hired Craig Silverstein - who was later to become Director of Technology - as their first employee, and started the business in a friend's garage.

Google was still in an alpha stage, with an index of just 25 million pages, but it was handling 10,000 search queries every day. The search engine and the company grew quickly through word of mouth, initially with regular web users coming across the tool and finding the results to their liking.

Usage spread rapidly through press coverage, awards and recommendations, whilst Google's effectiveness and relevance, its speed and reliability, plus clean visual effects and 'quirky' nature all contributed to a rapid increase in the number of new advocates.

Google took a major step forward in 2000 when it replaced Inktomi as the provider of supplementary search results on Yahoo. Following this it won further successes and provided search data to Yahoo as its primary results, as well as to AOL, Netscape, Freeserve and BBCi in the UK. This gave Google exceptional coverage of web searches and established its reputation as one of the most reliable and accurate search tools, making it the clear market leader.

Despite losing the Yahoo relationship in 2004, Google continued to increase its coverage of the web search market and developed numerous regional versions of its search tool, both in English and other languages, so that its global dominance grew. In the UK, Google now accounts for over 70% of web searches that are made.

Google has also been actively developing a range of search options, including an image search, news search, shopping search (Froogle) and local search options. In addition, following Google's IPO in early 2005 it has set itself on a course for Internet domination and to challenge the position of Microsoft as the leading provider of computer services. There has been a series of announcements of new products, including the email service Gmail, the impressive Google Earth product, Google Talk to compete in the growing VoIP market, Google Base and Google Book Search, which is part of its ambitious project to make the content of thousands of books searchable online

Google has become synonymous with search and has entered the dictionary as a verb - 'to google' something. The expansion and integration of all Google's different services is making it a dominant player in the online market, but to many websites, Google is also the ultimate ranking target that will make a significant difference between the volumes of traffic received from prospective customer ssearching the web.

Source : www.websearchworkshop.co.uk


History of Yahoo!



Yahoo! began as a student hobby and evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

The Web site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.

Jerry and David soon found they were not alone in wanting a single place to find useful Web sites. Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Word spread from friends to what quickly became a significant, loyal audience throughout the closely-knit Internet community. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors.

Due to the torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo! was receiving, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the business and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They eventually came across Sequoia Capital, the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. They agreed to fund Yahoo! in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.

Realizing their new company had the potential to grow quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in Fall 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.

Today, Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 345 million individuals each month worldwide. As the first online navigational guide to the Web, www.yahoo.com is the leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo! is the No. 1 Internet brand globally and reaches the largest audience worldwide. The company also provides online business and enterprise services designed to enhance the productivity and Web presence of Yahoo!'s clients. These services include Corporate Yahoo!, a popular customized enterprise portal solution; audio and video streaming; store hosting and management; and Web site tools and services. The company's global Web network includes 25 World properties. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yahoo! has offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and the United States.


Source : www.docs.yahoo.com

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History of YouTube



First, we'll start by looking at YouTube as the startup-turned-company. We'll see how it got to where it is today, how it plans to make money, the acquisition rumors that have circumvented it for the past few months, its hasty bandwidth bills, and the legal issues the company has so far had to put up with.

Background
YouTube's Founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen. Image Credit: AP Based in San Mateo, YouTube is a small privately-funded company with 60 employees. Chad Hurley, one of its co-founders, serves as the CEO with its other two co-founders Steven Chen, CTO, and Jawed Karim, Advisor. So far, the company has raised over $11 million of funding from Sequoia Capital, the firm who also provided initial venture capital for Google, Yahoo!, and Apple in their early days. Their tagline is "Broadcast Yourself" and this largely represents their goal.

History
YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees, who, witnessing the boom of online grassroots video, realized the need for a decent service that made the process of uploading, watching and sharing videos hassle-free. They registered the domain YouTube.com on February 15th, 2005 and developed the site over the following months from a garage in Menlo Park. In May 2005 they launched in a public beta, and in November, YouTube made its debut with an $3.5 million of funding from Sequoia Capital.

To get a decent start and attract the initial crowd they were looking for — teenagers, college students, hobbyists, film-makers — they came out with a contest that promised to give out one iPod Nano to a random member each day, which ran for two months. This contest worked on a point-based system, for example one point was rewarded for signing up, one for inviting others, another one for posting a video, etc. The more the points you gained, the higher the chance of winning you had. This was a significant action that got YouTube noticed by the masses and gave it a headstart as per the signups. After all, if you knew you had a chance to winning a $250 iPod Nano just by signing up and posting that Uncle Bob's funny biking incident clip you've had on your hard-drive for the past few years, wouldn't you?

Now, after being the host (and former-host) of countless SNL segments, Superbowl ads, TV goof-ups, Anime mashups, Nobody's Watching episodes, Sporting segments, Shakira music videos, and most recently the Lonelygirl15 installments — which have managed to receive more than 90 million views in total — the result? World's fastest growing website at present, YouTube!

Business
YouTube's Business Aspect While the service is completely free for the users, the company's business model — which was put in place in March 2005 — is based on traditional banner advertising, sponsorships, partnerships and promotions, and even contextual advertising. So far, they've had numerous partnerships with traditional media companies, notably NBC and the Warner Music Group.

There has been a lot of debate over YouTube's business, with claims that it is purely based on copyrighted infringements. Billionaire Mark Cuban was recently quoted in a News.com article saying "anyone who buys YouTube is a moron." While it has only been faced with one lawsuit by Californian journalist Robert Tur over copyright infringement, it has had to take several videos down to settle matters, most notably the SNL skit Lazy Sunday over NBC's requisition.

Bandwidth Costs
On April 2005, a Forbes article cast a spotlight on YouTube's bandwidth bills and how much of a limitation this is to its business. The article claimed that the site uses 200 terabytes a day which easily approaches to a $1 million monthly bandwidth bill. What's surprising is that this was even before its peak in June/July in which the site doubled in traffic.

Ever since it began, the company has had a stronger goal to build a community than to make a lot of money. But with the growing phenomenon, now with more than 65,000 uploads daily and 100 million videos being watched, they've had to kick-start their business plan in-order to sustain the growth.

Valuation & Acquisition Rumors
Over the past, YouTube has been rumored to be in talks with many companies for a potential acquisition. In these, include Viacom, Yahoo!, Disney, and Sony. Most of them have turned out to be false, or have never panned out.

Recently, however, there were claims in the New York Post article (which has since been taken down) that they won't be considering any offers below $1.5 billion for a sellout. With the number of copyright infringements the company has dealt with, and the seven-digit bandwidth bills, it is unlikely that this pricetag will sustain at such a high value.

By : Sid Yadav

Source : www.rev2.org