Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. Twitter currently has approximately 18 million active users worldwide and is growing quickly!
Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, and school or college. Facebook is the most widely used social network in the world and currently has more than 200 million active users!
MySpace is a free online community composed of personal profiles aimed mostly at a younger audiences. Myspace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006. However it was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, in April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors. MySpace currently has around 60 million active users.
Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site’s cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page. If your website is lucky enough to appear on the the Digg.com homepage you can expect to receive thousands of unique visits within minutes! Digg is a great way to release information such as product launches and news releases to massive audience.
Windows Live Spaces (previously MSN Spaces) is Microsoft’s blogging and Social Networking platform. The site was originally released in early 2004 under the MSN Spaces name to compete with other social networking sites. Windows Live Spaces received an estimated 27 million unique visitors per month as of August 2007.
StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles. tumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. Users can rate or choose not to rate any Web page with a thumbs up or thumbs down, and clicking the Stumble button resembles “channel-surfing” the Web. StumbleUpon also allows their users to indicate their interests from a list of nearly 500 topics to produce relevant content for the user.
Vimeo is a video-centric social networking site which launched in November 2004. The site supports embedding, sharing, video storage, and allows user-commenting on each video page. Users must register to upload content. Registered users may also create a profile and upload small user pictures as their avatars, comment and “like” videos. Vimeo does not allow commercial videos, gaming videos, or anything not created by the user to be hosted on the site. Vimeo has gained a reputation as catering to a high end, artistic crowd because of its high bitrate, resolution, and relative HD support.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of October 2009, LinkedIn had more than 50 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. LinkedIn is a great way to connect with old business partners and clients or meet new ones! Employers can even list job opportunities to recruit new, well qualified professionals!
Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. Delicious allows their users to get to their web bookmarks from any computer at anytime, bookmark webpages and share them with their friends, checkout popular websites other delicious users are bookmarking.
YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. YouTube uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.
