Facebook

Facebook is a popular social network that has grown to rank with MySpace has. But what is it about Facebook that has special appeal and makes it even more popular than MySpace? What makes Facebook Facebook? And what made it a mega hit? It all got started back in 2003, as Facemash. Mark Zuckerberg created it, along with help of his friends and roommates Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz. Zuckerberg was in his sophomore year at Harvard when opened it up, as a way to get his mind off his crush. Facemash placed photos of undergraduate two side by side, and asking the viewers which one is hotter . The site was originally only for Harvard, but quickly grew to other colleges, then high schools and finally for anyone over age 13. After it was initially started, it was forwarded to Harvard s school admins and it was quickly shut down. Zuckerberg was charged and faced expulsion for breaching privacy. Later on, Harvard dropped their charges against Zuckerberg. After the charges were dropped, the following semester he recreated Facemash, and opened The Facebook in February 2004. In 2005, he dropped the from the name and URL. Also in September 2005, he launched the High School version of Facebook. When he first started the high school version, each high school had to be invited before being allowed to join the network. Shortly after launching the high school version he started allow companies to have their own networks on Facebook as well. Now a group of operators, a year after they launched their high school version, they opened it up to the public for everybody over the age of 13. Syria and Iran have blocked Facebook from being accessed in their countries. Some companies have forbidden it from their offices. It has also been said that Zuckerberg had stolen the code and intellectual property from former classmates of his. They have been sued more than once and have been the subject of criticism. In Aug 2007, the code that normally creates the pages for Facebook showed instead of the content, leaving many to wonder if their data on Facebook is even safe. In February 2009, Facebook changed their privacy policy, causing an up roar along the way. They made it so that their users once upload data onto their servers, that they own all the rights. Even after the user deletes their account. Many users got upset by this, and entered a debate that was all over the internet. EPIC filed a claim against Facebook with the FTC, while Zuckerberg tried to defend Facebook s policy change. To do damage control they switched back to their old policies, though they are in the middle of rewriting them again. They will allow users to vote on the new terms, before they are adopted officially. It has been rumored that a film about Facebook being made, though the Facebook spokesperson has

said that they have not agreed to cooperate with anyone about making a film. A 1.6% stake in Facebook had been sold to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million in October 24th 2007. Facebook s history is a mixture of trouble and success from very early on. They have seen more than their share of legal issues and likely will as long as they exist. Currently it is the number one social network with MySpace and Twitter both behind it. They have over 175 million active users worldwide currently and is growing every day. Though they may have had their share of issues, they still maintain a well kept site that hasn t gotten lost through the Web 2.0 shuffle.

Twitter
Type Private Founded San Francisco, California, United States Founder Jack Dorsey Noah Glass Evan Williams Biz Stone Headquarters 795 Folsom Street, Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94107, United States Area served Worldwide Key people Jack Dorsey (Executive Chairman) Dick Costolo (CEO) Evan Williams (Director) Biz Stone (Creative director) Revenue US $140 million (projected 2010) Employees 600+ (2011) Website twitter.com Alexa rank 9 (November 2011) Type of site Mobile social-network service, microblogging Registration Required (to post, follow or be followed) Users 380 million (November 2011)

Available in Multilingual, including Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese, Hindi, Tagalog and Malay. Launched July 15, 200

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 over 300 million users as of 2011. generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as "the SMS of the Internet." Twitter Inc., the company that operates the service and associated website, is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in San Antonio, Boston, and New York City. Creation Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability." Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr". "...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was." Jack Dorsey The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets including Odeo.com and Twitter.com from the investors and shareholders.Williams fired Glass who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011.witter spun off into its own company in April 2007.[18] Reaction The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," remarked Newsweek's Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it. Reaction at the festival was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter "absolutely rul[e]" SXSW. Social software researcher Danah Boyd said Twitter "own[ed]" the festival.Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"

Previous Twitter logo, used until September 14, 2010. The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has also hosted over 25 "tweetups", events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA. In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain as President of Revenue from News Corp.'s Fox Audience Network. On September 14, 2010, Twitter launched a redesigned site including a new logo, however it can still be seen when Twitter has an over capacity error.

Blogs
Blogs have become an integral part of online culture. Practically everyone reads blogs now, whether they re official news blogs associated with traditional news media, topic-based blogs related to one s work or hobbies, or blogs purely for entertainment, just about anyone you ask has at least one favorite blog. But it wasn t always so. Blogs have a relatively short history, even when compared with the history of the Internet itself. And it s only in the past five to ten years that they ve really taken off and become an important part of the online landscape.

The Early Years It s generally recognized that the first blog was Links.net, created by Justin Hall, while he was a Swarthmore College student in 1994. Of course, at that time they weren t called blogs, and he just referred to it as his personal homepage. It wasn t until 1997 that the term weblog was coined. The word s creation has been attributed to Jorn Barger, of the influential early blog Robot Wisdom. The term was created to reflect the process of logging the web as he browsed. 1998 marks the first known instance of a blog on a traditional news site, when Jonathan Dube blogged Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer.

Weblog was shortened to blog in 1999 by programmer Peter Merholz. It s not until five years later that Merriam-Webster declares the word their word of the year. The original blogs were updated manually, often linked from a central home page or archive. This wasn t very efficient, but unless you were a programmer who could create your own custom blogging platform, there weren t any other options to begin with.

During these early years, a few different blogging platforms cropped up. LiveJournal is probably the most recognizable of the early sites. And then, in 1999, the platform that would later become Blogger was started by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan at Pyra Labs. Blogger is largely responsible for bringing blogging to the mainstream.

The Growth Period The early 2000s were a period of growth for blogs. In 1999, according to a list compiled by Jesse James Garrett, there were 23 blogs on the internet. By the middle of 2006, there were 50 million blogs according to Technorati s State of the Blogosphere report. To say that blogs experienced exponential growth is a bit of an understatement. Political blogs were some of the most popular early blogs. Some political candidates started using blogs during this time period, including Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. One important event in the rise of blogging was when bloggers focused on the comments U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said regarding U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond in 2002. Lott, while praising Thurmond, stated that the U.S. would have been better off if Thurmond had been elected President in 1948. During that race, Thurmond was a strong supporter of racial segregation (though his position changed later in his political career). The mainstream media didn t pick up on the comments and their potential implications until after bloggers broke the story. In-depth topic blogs were also becoming more popular during this time. They often delved much deeper into current news and pop culture than mainstream media sources, in addition to commenting directly on what traditional media was reporting. By 2001, there was enough interest in blogging that some how-to articles and guides started cropping up. Now, meta blogs (blogs about blogging) make up a sizable portion of the most popular and successful blogs out there. A number of popular blogs got their start in the early 2000s, including Boing Boing, Dooce, Gizmodo, Gawker (the first major gossip blog to launch), Wonkette, and the Huffington Post. Weblogs, Inc. was started by Jason Calacanis in 2003, and was then sold to AOL for $25 million. It was that sale that helped to cement blogs as a force to be reckoned with rather than just a passing fad.

A couple of major blogging platforms got their start in the early 2000s. Version 1.0 of Movable Type was released in September of 2001. WordPress was started in 2003, though parts of its development date back to 2001. TypePad was also released in 2003, based on Movable Type. Some peripheral services to the blogosphere also started in the early 2000s. Technorati, the first major blog search engine, was launched in 2002. Audioblogger, the first major podcasting service, was founded in 2003. The first video blogs started in 2004, more than a year before YouTube was founded. Also launched in 2003 was the AdSense advertising platform, which was the first ad network to match ads to the content on a blog. AdSense also made it possible for bloggers without huge platforms to start making money from when they first started blogging (though payments to low-traffic blogs weren t very large). Once bloggers started making money from their blogs, the number of meta blogs skyrocketed. Bloggers like Darren Rowse (of Problogger.net and Digital-Photography-School.net) and John Chow made sizable amounts of money telling other bloggers how they could turn blogging into a full-time career. One early event that highlighted the rising importance of blogs was the firing of Heather Armstrong, the blogger behind Dooce, for comments posted on her blog regarding her employer. This event happened in 2002, and sparked a debate over privacy issues, that still hasn t been sufficiently put to rest by 2011. Dooced became a slang term to describe being fired from one s job for something you ve written on your blog, and has made appearances in Urban Dictionary, and even on Jeopardy!

Blogs Reach the Mainstream By the mid-2000s, blogs were reaching the mainstream. In January of 2005, a study was released saying that 32 million Americans read blogs. At the time, it s more than ten percent of the entire population. The same year, Garrett M. Graff was granted White House press credentials, the first blogger ever to do so. A number of mainstream media sites started their own blogs during the mid to late 2000s, or teamed up with existing blogs to provide additional coverage and commentary. By 2004, political consultants, candidates, and mainstream news organizations all began using blogs more prominently. They provided the perfect vehicle for broadcasting editorial opinion and reaching out to readers and viewers. Mainstream media sources are also teaming up with existing blogs and bloggers, rather than just setting out on their own. Take, for example, the regular posts on CNN.com from Mashable editors and writers. Another good example is the purchase of TechCrunch and associated blogs by AOL, which, while not a traditional media source, is one of the oldest internet companies still in existence. During this time, the number of blogs grew even more, with more than 152 million blogs active by the end of 2010. Virtually every mainstream news source now has at least one blog, as do many corporations and individuals.

The Rise of Microblogs and Tumblogs A lot of people only think of Twitter when they think of microblogging, but there are other microblog (also called tumblog) platforms that allow for a more traditional type of blogging experience, while also allowing for the social networking features of Twitter (like following other bloggers). Tumblr was the first major site to offer this kind of service, starting in 2007. They allow for a variety of different post types, unlike traditional blogging services, which have a one-size-fits-all post format (that allows users to format their posts however they want, including adding multimedia objects). It also makes it easier for users to reblog the content of others, or to like individual posts (sort of like Facebook s like feature). Posterous is another, similar service. Launched in 2008, Posterous allows bloggers to set up a simple blog via email, and then submit content either via their online editor or by email. Posterous is sometimes considered more of a lifestreaming app than a blogging platform, thought it s technically both.

The Future of Blogging Eight to ten years ago, blogs were becoming the primary point of communication for individuals online. But with the advent of social media and social networking in the past five years, blogs have become only one portion of an individual s online persona. Vlogs and podcasts have also taken on a bigger role in the blogosphere, with a lot of bloggers opting to use primarily multimedia content. Services that cater to these kinds of posts (like Tumblr and Posterous) are likely to keep growing in popularity. With new services like Quora coming onto the market, there s the possibility that the blogosphere will shrink, and more people will turn to sites like these to get information. But services like Quora also provide valuable tools for bloggers, as they give insight into what people really want to know about a topic. Blogs are unlikely to go anywhere in the foreseeable future. But there s a lot of room for growth and innovation in method in which their content is found, delivered, and accessed.

What is blogging What is Blogging? All about blogging. If you are twenty-something or younger, you probably don t need to be reading this. You ve probably been

happily blogging away for what seems like years, all your friends blog, you read their blogs, and they yours. But for those of us over forty, or with families to care for and busy jobs to do, or perhaps our attention has just been someplace else for the last two years, we may not have even heard the term, or if we had, it sounded like "flogging" and not wanting to go there, we just ignored it. But blogging is growing and for very good reasons, much like email took off ten years ago. And like ten years ago when I found myself repeatedly trying to explain email to people and why they really did need an email address, now I m explaining blogging and why it matters. What is blogging? - the act of producing a blog. What s a blog? That s a little bit harder to answer, but bear with me. The term blog is short for web log, a "log" of diary-like entries published on a web site. This is how it started, people publishing their daily thoughts for all to read on their website. Often the blog entries occur as short, quick snippets a link to something cool found on the web, an opinion, an idea, a rant. And sometimes they are longer, thoughtful essays. Sometimes new entries are produced every few minutes, and sometimes just once and a while. It all depends on the author and what she or he wants to express. But blogging has evolved to mean much more than diary entries. Blogging is easy, almost instant, publishing of content to a website, where every entry is preserved in a database and is therefore categorizeable and searchable. Content can be photographs, recipes, restaurant reviews, or anything digitally storable on a computer that you can categorize. One of my blogs is a recipe site, with my family s recipes sorted by ingredient (beef, chicken, lamb) or menu item (brunch, main course, dessert). Another is a group weblog for book reviews. Several of my friends are authors on this site with the ability to post reviews of books they ve read. Another blog is set up sort of like a journal, except that it is rarely personal. I use it mostly to park things (ideas, opinions, links, humor) that I find interesting or useful, and think others might find so as well. The true power of the blog comes from its interactivity with visitors and other blogs. As an author, you can allow your web visitors to comment on your entries, the comments then being published along side or in a separate window of the entry. On your blog, you can keep track of when other blogs reference one of your entries. You can have their references to your site be automatically published on your site. Your website is no longer an island visited by anonymous people only known to you by the page view statistics your web host gives you about your site. Your visitors, at least those who either comment on your blog, or make a comment about your blog on their blog have a name, an email address, a website an identity. As you find other blogs that you like to read, you link to them on your blog site. And as others find your blog interesting, they link to you as well. All of this helps build a community of those who share a common interest in each other s content. What makes blogging different from writing to any other kind of web site? For one thing, the tools. Even with great web development tools from Adobe and Macromedia, building a web page is a pain. It just takes time, a lot of work, too much time if you are just going to say a sentence or two. And once you ve made a page, updating it takes time too. The blogging tools that are freely available to the public have changed the nature of web publishing. It s easy. You log in to your weblog control page, you type in your entry, you click on Save and presto! Your entry is now published to your website. The default templates

that come with these services are professional looking enough, and customizable if you know how to do that sort of thing in HTML. Why does blogging matter? 1. It gives you a place to easily store interesting bits of information and ideas that you come across. Bits and bytes. Computer storage is cheap. Brain storage is unreliable. If I could I would dump everything I've ever learned into my computer. The computer is more efficient at searching than the brain is, and better at storage. We forget things. The computer doesn t. With a blog, even better, the stored knowledge is on the net, accessible from any browser anywhere in the world. 2. Writing your thoughts down, on paper or computer, is a good mental discipline. It sharpens your intellect, it refines your thinking. It helps clarify your thoughts so that you communicate them better. It helps etch more clearly in that unreliable brain things that you might want to remember more clearly. And it puts you in the position of "creator" rather than passive consumer of content. 3. By opening up your blogs to comments, you invite the collective intelligence (hopefully) of your readers to add to your thoughts and to contribute to your knowledge. You've created a collaborative thought space. 4. Young people are blogging, en masse. One blogging site, Live Journal, cites 650,000 active accounts, 95% of which are from users under the age of 30. Blog sites are replacing home pages because of the ease of publishing, the depth of functionality, and the connections with other bloggers. 5. If you produce a website, your website will score higher in Google rankings (search engine results) if your site is a blog. Google rewards sites for rapidly changing content and links outbound and inbound from other sites, which is the nature of blogs. 6. Now anyone can publish. The best content will get the most exposure as more blogs link to it and more people comment to it. The publishing and distributing of content will become decentralized, shifting power away from the major media companies. How do you get started? If you want to start a blog, you ll need blogging software to load on your server, or a blogging hosting service to host your blog for you. The easiest way is to use a host service like Blogger.com or Typepad. Blogger.com is free and ad supported, but you will need to know some HTML to get started and to make your site look good. Typepad is a new service that costs a minimum of $5 per month, but you don t have to know any HTML and the service is the most feature rich of all of them with gorgeous styles from which to choose the look of your blog. LiveJournal is another host service free to users if they ve been invited by a friend and a nominal fee if not. Radio Userland is a desktop program that is installed on your computer and the entries are uploaded to a host. If you want the most flexibility and customizable features, you ll need to go with blogging software that you load onto a remote server hosting your web site. Movable Type (from the same company that makes TypePad) is the most powerful solution out there, with a free license available for personal, noncommercial use and licenses available for personal and commercial use that includes support. Movable Type requires a good knowledge of HTML and style sheets but the documentation is extensive and MT has an active user base and support forum.

Research In

English
By:Camille Eyriel M. Briones To: Ma am Laurente