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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

SOCIAL NETWORKING SERVICES

social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as email and instant messanging services.
The example of the social network service are the FACEBOOK,SKYROCK AND THE BEBO..

Facebook, formerly Thefacebook, is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus US colleges and preparatory school give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.
community that some

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 175 million active users worldwide.

Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria and Iran. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service.Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. It is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.

The advent of Facebook came about as a spin-off of a Harvard University version of Hot or Not Mark Zuckerberg, while attending Harvard as a sophomore, concocted Facemash on October 28, 2003. Zuckerberg was blogging about a girl and trying to think of something to do to get her off his mind: called Facemash.

Facebook users may choose to join one or more networks, organized by city, workplace, school, and region. These networks help users connect with members of the same network. Users can also connect with friends, giving them access to their friends' profiles.

The website is free to users, but generates revenue from advertising. This includes banner ads. By default, the viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network and "reasonable community limitations". Users can create profiles including photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends.

Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner adversiting, and as such Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory. According to comScore, an internet marketing company, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft, but considerably less than Yahoo!.

The media often compares Facebook to MySpace, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization. MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheet(CSS), while Facebook only allows plain text.

Facebook has a number of features with which users may interact. They include the Wall, a space on every user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see, Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (a notification that tells a user that they have been poked), Photos, where users can upload albums and photos,and Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions. A user's Wall is visible to anyone who is able to see that user's profile, which depends on their privacy settings. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only.

Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. In October 2005, the University of New Mexico blocked access to Facebook from its campus computers and networks.It cited a violation of the university's Acceptable Use Policy for abusing computer resources as the reason, stating the website forces use of the university's credentials for activity not related to the university. The school later unblocked Facebook after the website rectified the situation by displaying a notice on the login page stating the credentials used on the website are separate from the ones used for their school accounts. The Ontario government also blocked access to Facebook for its employees in May 2007, stating the website was "not directly related to the workplace".

Facebook won a lawsuit against Canadian Adam Guerbuez, of Montreal, worth $873 million. Guerbuez had spammed the website with various advertisements including penis enhancement marijuana. Guerbuez founded Atlantis Blue Capital.


This is a list of features that can be found on the website. Basic features include friend networking with others and posting on a "wall".
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Skyrock.com is a social networking siteoffering its members a free, personal web space where they can create a blog, add a profile, and exchange messages with other registered members. The site also offers a specific space for members who create blogs showcasing their original musical compositions.

Skyrock ranks as the world’s 7th largest social network with over 21 million visitors in June 2008

Skyrock.com began as a blogging site, Skyblog.com, founded by Skyrock CEO Pierre Bellanger in December 2002.

In May 2007, after abandoning the Skyblog.com brand , Skyrock.com was launched as a full-scale social network.

Despite being ranked by comScore as the world’s 7th biggest social network with 21 million visitors worldwide, Skyrock.com is less known than other social networks on an international scale. This is largely due to its origins as a French-language network, but also the fact that its target is young adults aged under 25.

Alexa consistently ranks Skyrock among the top 10 sites in France, in Belgium and in Switzerland.

Massively embraced by the young generation, Skyrock.com is not always understood by older generations who associate the platform with potential dangers. Given the platform’s high penetration rate in France, Skyrock has its share of highs and lows in the public eye, and deals with its share of uses and abuses. For example, in several French middle schools, students used the platform to malign school personnel, resulting in their expulsion and in the issuing of alerts by schools to warn parents and students about such behavior

Furthermore, certain American newspapers have attempted to associate the breakout of the Paris Riots in 2005 to usage of Skyblogs However, institutions of the French state have never filed formal complaints indicting the usage of Skyrock Blogs.

Bebo is a popular social networking site, founded in January 2005. It can be used in many countries including Ireland, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. A Polishversion was launched recently, which uses a different user database. There are plans for French,German and other versions. Founded by husband and wife Micheal Xochi Birch , Bebo had a major relaunch in July 2005. and

It was bought by AOL on March 13, 2008 for $850 m (£417 m).

"Bebo" is an acronym for "Blog early, blog often"

Bebo is similar to other social networking site. Each profile must include two specific modules, a comment section where other users can leave a message, and a list of the user's friends. Users can select from many more modules to add. By default, when an account is created the profile is private, which limits access to friends specifically added. The user may select the "Public Profile" option so as the profile will still be visible to any other members of a school they may have joined. Profiles may be personalized by a design template that is the background of the user's profile, known as a skin.

The BEBO PROFILE CONTAINS:

Thursday, March 5, 2009

The 3 instant messaging..Meebo,,Xfire,,and Gadu-Gadu..


Meebo
is an Ajax-based in-browser instant messaging program which supports multiple IM services, including Yahoo! Messenger, .NET Messenger Service, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat and Jabber; it is based on the free and open source library libpurple created by the software developers of Pidgin.


Meebo also developed a version of Meebo for use on the iPhone and a native application that runs on Android mobile phones.

Meebo was founded in September 2005 by Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg and Elaine Wherry, and is based in Mountain View, California.

Meebo received funding from Sequoia Capital on December 15, 2005. Meebo includes features such as invisible sign on (to prevent others from knowing when a user connects) and simultaneous connections to multiple IM services.

On August 2, 2006, Meebo launched the "meebo me" widget, which allows users to embed a version of Meebo on their personal website. Additionally, on October 11, 2006, they announced a partnership with Amie Street to include the "meebo me" widget on each Amie Street user page.

Achievements

* In June 2006, Meebo was listed 65 of PC World’s 100 Best Products of the Year.
* In August 2006, Meebo was listed as one of Time's Top 50 Coolest Websites for 2006.

Xfire...

Xfire is a freeware instant messaging services targeted at gamers , that also serves as a game server browser and has various other feature It is currently available for Microsoft Window. Xfire was originally developed by Ultimate Arena based in Menlo Park,CAlifornia.

In 2003, at a company formerly called Ultimate Arena gaming, Xfire was originally by Garrett Blythe and Chris Kirmse. Many employees have contributed to its development since then, including the former developed CEO Mike Cassidy (former CEO of Direct hit), and DennisCOO David Lawee "Thresh" Fong (former U.S. Champion of Quake).

On April,25, 2006, Xfire was acquired by Viacomin a $102-million deal.

In September 2006, Sony was misinterpreted to have announced that Xfire would be used for the Playstation Instead, what they actually meant was that only one PS3 game, Untold Legend Dark Kingdom was to use some of the features, with more game support planned for the future.

OnMay 27,2007, Xfire announced they have over 7 million registered users.

On June 13, 2007, Mike Cassidy, CEO and co-founder, departed the company to work for venture capital firm, Benchmark Capital. Adam Boyden, VP Business Development & Marketing was assigned to take his place and manage the company for a temporary period

They Feature:


Gadu-Gadu
.....


Gadu-Gadu is a Polish instant messaging client using its own protocol. Gadu-Gadu is the most popular IM service in Poland, with over 7.8 million registered accounts and approximately 6.5 million users online daily.

Gadu-Gadu is financed by the display of advertisements. The developer is based in Warsaw Poland.

Gadu-Gadu uses its own proprietary protocol. As with IQC, users are identified by unique serial numbers. Protocol's features include status messanges, file sharing , and VOIP. Users may format and embed images in messages. Since client version 6.0, an experimental secure connection mode can be used.

The official client provides over 150 emoticons, allows grouping contacts, sending SMSand integrates with other services ran by the same company: a virtual Internet dial-up, a socisl networking site MojaGeneracja.pl and an internet radio Open.fm. Because of this, many users consider newer versions bloatware, so the older versions are still common.

Gadu-Gadu allows its users to add personal information to a "public directory", available publicly to search.

Many unofficial plugins have been created to expand its capabilities.


Saturday, February 28, 2009

The Search Engines

Ask.com

Ask.com is a search engine started in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley,California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Three venture capital firms,Highland Capital Partner, Institutional Venture Partners, and The RODA Group were early investors.Ask.com is currently owned by InterActive Corp.

Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where "Jeeves" is the name of the "gentleman's personal gentleman", or valet (illustrated by Marcos Sorensen), fetching answers to any question asked. The character was based on Jeeves, Bertie Wooster fictional valet from the works of P.G. Woodhouse.

The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language. It supports a variety of user queries in plain English, as well as traditional keyword searching.


HotBot, owned by Terra/Lycos, is one of older Web search engines. Originally it just used the Inktomi database and then added Derict hit and the Open directory. Then in Dec. 2002, it relaunched as a multiple search engine with Inktomi, Fast, Google, and Teoma. In July 2003, they stayed with the same four databases, but renamed them HotBot, Lycos, Google, and Ask Jeeves. Lycos was dropped in March 2004. This review covers HotBot using the Inktomi database, which they now call "HotBot." See the GooGle and Teoma (Ask Jeeves) reviews for more details on how their database and interface work, bearing in mind that not all features are available at HotBot. The basic search screen shows no options, but choose Advanced Search for the full range of search features. To see how HotBot used to work, see the old search engine showdown review. Use the table of content on the left to navigate this review.

HotBot offers the choice of three search engine databases:

  • HotBot (which is actually a Yahoo!/Inktomi database, and the version reviewed here)
  • Google
  • Ask Jeeves (the Teoma database)
HotBot is one of the early Internet search engine and was launched in May 1996 as a service of Wired magazine. It was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to update its search database more often than its competitors. It also offered free webpage hosting, but only for a short time, and it was taken down without any notice to its users. Though competitive when it was acquired by Lycosin 1998, HotBot has in recent years reduced its scope. Today the website is merely a front end for third-party search enginesYaHoo, and MSN, as well as Lycos' own lyGo.com. It was one of the first search engines to offer the ability to search within search results. The site still exists, however it is run by Yahoo! mainly.


Lycos

In October Lycos began as a search engine research project by Dr Micheal Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University in 1994. Bob Davis joined the company as its CEO and first employee in 1995. Lycos then enjoyed several years of growth and in 1999 became the most visited online destination in the world with a global presence in more than 40 countries. Lycos was sold to Terra Networks of Spain in May 2000 for $5.4 billion forming a new company Terra Lycos and maintaining a position as one of the world's largest Internet companies. Shortly after the merger Davis left the company to become a venture capitalist with HighLand capital partners in Boston. 2004 Lycos was sold by Terra's parent company Telefonica to Daum Communication Corporation the second largest Internet portal in Korea becoming once again Lycos Inc.

(Lycos, Inc., Waltham, MA, www.lycos.com. One of the major Web search and content sites on the Web. In 2000, Lycos and Terra Networks, S.A., the leading provider of content and Internet access to the Spanish and Portuguese markets, merged to become Terra Lycos.

In early 2004, the company restructured and redirected itself from portal status to become a vast social network and online community. This so-called Lycos, Inc. division, based in the U.S., was sold in October of 2004 to Daum Communications Corporation, the leading Internet site in Korea. Acquired in the transaction were the flagship Lycos.com and its specialty sites that include tripod.com, angelfire.com and hotbot.com.