Social Networking Sites

Facebookis a social networking website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc., with more than 500 million active users in July 2010, which is about one person for every fourteen in the world. Users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by workplace, school, or college. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be aged 13 or older to become a member of the website.

MySpace is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, News Corp. Digital Media, owned by News Corporation. MySpace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006. According to comScore, MySpace was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, in April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors. MySpace employs 1,000 employees, after laying off 30 percent of its workforce in June 2009; the company does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. The 100 millionth account was created on August 9, 2006, in the Netherlands.

Friendster is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California. The service allows users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website is also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and hobbies. Users may share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via their profile and their network. Friendster has over 115 million registered users and over 61 million unique visitors a month globally. The website receives approximately 19 billion page views per month, and is in the top 500 global websites based on web traffic. Over 90% of Friendster's traffic comes from Asia. In Asia, Friendster has more monthly unique visitors than any other social network. The top 10 countries accessing Friendster, according to Alexa, as of May 7, 2009 are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, the United States, Singapore, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and India.

Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service which enables its users to send and read other users' messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users may subscribe to other author tweets�this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers. As of late 2009, users can follow lists of authors instead of following individual authors. All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, compatible external applications, or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries. While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may (where the website was first based)incur phone service provider fees. The website is based in San Bruno, California near San Francisco. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts.