History

Friendster was considered the top online social network service. However, around April 2004, in terms of page views MySpace overtaken it. Friendster also has other rivals such as Windows Live Spaces, Bebo, Yahoo! 360, and Facebook. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital funded Friendster in October 2003.

Overview and advantage

Friendster got a patent or a method and apparatus for calculating, displaying and acting upon relationships in a social network. The system collects descriptive data about various users and allows those users to indicate other users with whom they have a personal relationship. The data are integrated and processed to show the series of social relationships connecting any two users within a social network. Any two individuals connected by the pathways can be displayed. Moreover, the social network itself can be displayed to any number of degrees of separation. To reach desired individuals, an individual is able to determine the optimal relationship path. Users are provided with communications tool. Users can posts videos on their profiles.

Overview

MySpace profile consists of moods, Blurbs, blogs, multimedia, comments, profile customisation (HTML) and music.

History:

MySpace, owned by Universe (which in 2004 changed its name to Intermix Media), was created and marketed in 1998. It was launched in February 1999. 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.

eUniverse employees were the very first MySpace users. Contents were held by the company to see who could sign-up the most users. Toan Nguyen, tech expert, helped stabilize the MySpace platform.

Brad Greenspan believed that keeping MySpace free and open was necessary to make it a large and successful community. MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the parent company of Fox Broadcasting and other media enterprises). There are many international MySpace websites such as MySpace Australia, MySpace Canada, MySpace UK, MySpace Japan and so on.

Advantages

MySpace users can post their bulletin on “bulletin board”. Bulletins can be useful for notifying an entire, but usually a portion of the friends list without resorting to messaging users individually. There are some users that use Bulletins as a service for delivering chain messages about politics, religion, or anything else.

MySpace Group allows a group of users to share a common page and message board. Anybody can create a group and the moderator of the group can choose for anyone to join, or to approve or deny requests to join.

MySpace introduced MySpaceIM, an instant messenger for MySpace users. It can be used to notify new MySpace messages, friend requests, and comments.

- MySpace TV, currently in beta mode, is similar to You Tube video sharing website.
- MySpace Mobile allows users to access MySpace content on their mobile phone.
- MySpace News was launced in April 2007 which displays news from RSS feeds that users submit. Users can rank each news story by voting for it. The more votes a story gets, the higher the story moves up the page.

Many political organisations such as Greenpeace and Food Not Bombs created Myspace accounts to keep in touch with and expand their membership base. Many hopeful 2008 presidential candidates have created MySpace profiles, presumably in an effort to snare younger voters.

Overview

People with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then used for high schools 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 school, place of employment, geographic region, or social group. It is the most popular website for uploading photos.

History

In February 2004, Facebook was funded by Mark Zuckerberg while attending Harvard University. Mark was given support by Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. More than half of the undergraduates at Harvard were registered on the service by the end of the month. During that time, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes joined Mark for site promotion. Facebook was expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale and eventually to the rest of Ivy League and a few other schools. Mark and Moskovitz moved out to Palo Alto, California with McCollum and summer an internship at Electronic Arts. Soon McCollum left EA to help with the development of Facebook and a companion website, Wirehog, full-time. Facebook's user base had exceeded one million by December.

Advantage

Anybody can create their own 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.

The News Feed is a new home page that allows information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. It also shows conversations taking place between the walls of a user's friends. The Mini-Feed, an integral part of the News Feed interface, allows to show updates about that user and can delete events from the Mini-Feed after they appear so that they are no longer visible to profile visitors.

Users can use The Wall to allow friends to post messages for the user to see. Many users use their friends' walls for leavt, temporal notes. Attachments can be posted as by July 2007.

Facebook is popular for photo posting. Friends can give gifts (small icons of novelty items) to each other by selecting one from Facebook's virtual gift shop and adding a message. Facebook Marketplace allows users to post free classified ads for e.g. for Sale, Housing, Jobs, and other. Members can let friends to know about upcoming events in their community and to organize social gatherings through Facebook events. Users can add their videos with the service by uploading video, adding video through Facebook Mobile, and using a webcam recording feature. Besides that, videos can be used to "tag" their friends much like the way users can tag their friends in photos.

Overview

Two specific modules (comment section and a list of the user's friends) must be included by profiles as these are locked into place and can't be moved around or removed, unlike the other modules. An account created is private by default unless the user chooses “Public profile”.

History

Husband and wife team, Michael and Xochi Birch founded the site in January 2005. A major relaunch was set in July 2005. Most countries can use Bebo including Ireland, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. A Polish version of the site was launched. French and German versions are also in plan.

Advantages

Profiles can include quizzes, polls for the friends to vote in and comment on, photo album, blogs, a list of bands, a list of groups that the user is a member of “Video Box' which plays videos (can be linked to popular sites such as You Tube, uploaded directly to Bebo's servers via VideoEgg or copied from a Bebo Media Content Provider's page who may add any external swf onto their profile). Members can also add “widgets”. Freeform Art (ffart), a simple drawing system, is provided for the user who wants to draw simple pictures which may then be uploaded to a friend's profile. 'My Skins' module allows Bebo artists to display their favorite public Bebo Skins on their profile. Users can use Bebo Mobile to upload latest picture uploaded by the user via mms. Bebo nation allows users to purchase space on a map to display their profile picture with a link to their profile. Users can add up 8 different applications at one time to their profile. From the homepage, members can see recent changes friends have made.

Bebo Music:

Bands or solo artists can create a profile showcasing their music. The profile can include members' list, area of tour, blogs and a list of songs which have been uploaded for playing through Bebo's media player, or to be added to other user's playlists. These songs can be categorized into albums, along with cover-art. All band members can edit the content of the band profile. Bebo Music can also be used to form clubs or societies, or as unofficial fan pages for established bands.

Bebo Authors:

Authors can upload their chapters of their books and also get them reviewed with a certain module.

Bebo groups:

People can view groups which were previously joined to a school and were also viewable only to school members. Users have an option to join things they find interesting. These groups can often be educational as well as related to pop culture.

Overview

Flickr is among the earliest Web 2.0 applications. Users can share personal photographs and bloggers use the site as a photo repository. Photos can be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means. Photos from Yahoo! Photos can be transferred to Flickr before it shuts down on September 20, 2007.

History

Ludicorp, a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based company developed Flickr and was launched in 2004. The tools from the service were originally made for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Early versions of Flickr were more on a multiuser chat room named FlickrLive with ability for real-time photo exchange. Yahoo! Inc. acquired Ludicorp and Flickr in March 2005. Services were updated from beta to “gamma” besides the design and structural overhaul on May 16, 2006. The upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100MB a month (from 20MB) on December 29, 2006. Flickr used a new tagline on their logo to "Flickr LOVES YOU” in June 2007.

Advantage

Organization:

Photo submitters can organize images using tags which allow searchers to find images concerning a specific topic such as place name or subject matter. Tag clouds were implemented that allows images to be tagged with the most popular keywords. Flickr also allows users to organize their photos into "sets", or groups of photos that fall under the same heading. Programmers are able to create applications trough comprehensive web-service API that can perform almost any function a user on the Flickr site can do.

Organizer:

This is a web application for organizing photos within a Flickr account that can be accessed through the Flickr interface. Users have freedom to modify tags, descriptions, and set groupings.

Access control:

The site provides both private and public image storage. Private images are only visible to the uploader, but they can also be marked as viewable by friends and/or family or specific group. Contact list is provided allowing users to control image access for a specific set of users in a way similar to that of LiveJournal.

In November 2006, a “guest pass” was made which allows private photos to be shared with non Flickr members. For example, a user could email this pass to parents who may not have an account to allow them to see the photos otherwise restricted from public view.

In March 2007, new content filtering controls were added, allowing members to specify by default what types of images they generally upload and how "safe" their images are as well as specify that information for specific images individually. Besides that, users can specify the same criteria when searching for images.

Interaction and compatibility:

Its functionality includes RSS and Atom feeds and an API that allows independent programmers to expand its services. The site relies on standard HTML and HTTP features, which allows wide compatibility among platforms and browsers. Users can post their photos via email attachments. Many users prefer Flickr as their primary photo storage site, popular among weblog community, Macintosh and Linux users. Members are able to 'do more with your photos' via partnerships with third parties, offering streamlined printing of various forms of merchandise. E.g. business cards, photo books and large prints. Users of Windows Live Photo Gallery BETA now have the ability to upload their photos directly to Flickr.

Licensing:

Users have the ability to post images under certain common usage licenses most notably Creative Commons.

Overview

Windows Live Messenger is an instant messaging client and first released on December 13, 2005 by Microsoft. It is the successor to MSN Messenger. It is part of Microsoft's Windows Live set of online services. The client connects to Microsoft's .NET Messenger Service.

Development history:

Version 8

On December 13, 2005, the first beta was released. It remained online and usable for around a month until an auto-update feature forced one to install Beta 2. Beta 2 was released on February 26, 2006 with several fixes and improvements. Beta 3 was released on May 2, 2006, was nearly identical to the final. On June 19, 2006, the final and official release of Windows Live Messenger was made. Final version of 8.1 was available on January 29, 2007.

Version 8.5

Beta 1- June 21, 2007
Beta 2- September 5, 2007
Final version- November 6, 2007

New features:

Sharing Folder-

Lets user deliver a file to another person on his or her contact list. When files are added to the "sharing folder" for that particular person, the file will automatically be transferred to the corresponding computer when they are online.

PC-to-phone calls-

Features in the US, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Finland, Belgium, Spain, and Italy. Offline messaging- One can send messages to contacts who are offline; they will receive the messages once they come online.

Overview

AOL is an American global Internet services and media company operated by Time Warner. It is famous for its online software suite, also called "AOL", that allowed millions of customers around the world to access the world's largest "walled garden" online community and eventually reach out to the internet as a whole.

History:

AOL had attempted to reposition itself as a content provider similar to companies such as Yahoo! as opposed to an Internet service provider. In 2005, Live8 concert live was broadcast by AOL, and thousands of users downloaded clips of the concert over the following months. In 2004, with the launch of AOL 9.0 Optimized, AOL also made available the option of personalized greetings. Eventually, AOL announced plans to offer subscribers classic television programs for free with commercials inserted via its new IN2TV service. At the same time, Warner Bros. Television's vast library of programs, was made available, with Welcome Back Kotter as its marquee offering. On August 2 2006, AOL announced that they would give away e-mail accounts and software previously available only to its paying customers provided the customer accesses AOL or AOL.com through a non-AOL-owned access method.

This move helps to decrease costs associated with the "Walled Garden" business model by reducing usage of AOL-owned access points and shifting members with high-speed internet access from client-based usage to the more lucrative advertising provider, AOL.com. The change from paid to free was also used to slow the rate of members canceling their accounts and defecting to Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo!, or other free e-mail providers.

Free Services:

AOL Video- Features professional content and allows users to upload videos as well.

AOL Local- Brings together like the popular AOL CityGuide, AOL Yellow Pages and AOL Local Search to help users find local information like restaurants, local events, and directory listings.

Xdrive- Service offered by AOL which allows users to back up their files over the Internet. Provides a free 5 GB account (free online storage) to anyone who has, or is willing to sign up for a free AOL screenname. 50 GB of storage is also offered for a $9.95 per month fee.

AOL had signed a deal with several major movie studios like 20th Century Fox, Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, NBC Universal's Universal Pictures, and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group to open an online video store allowing users to "download to own" full length movies and television shows.