Facebook: Facebook is an online social networking service.
Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark
Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard
University students. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to
Harvard students, but later expanded it. It
gradually added support for students at various other universities before it
opened to high-school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over.
Facebook now allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old to become a
registered user of the website.
Twitter:
Twitter is
an online social networking and microblogging service
that enables users to send and read "tweets", which are text messages
limited to 140 characters. Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can
only read them. Twitter was
created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and by July 2006, the site was launched. The service rapidly gained
worldwide popularity, with 500 million
registered users in 2012, who posted 340 million tweets
per day. The service also handled 1.6 billion search queries per
day. Twitter is now one of the ten most-visited websites, and has been
described as "the SMS of
theInternet.
Instagram: Instagram is an
online photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service
that enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters to
them, and share them on a variety of social networking services. Instagram was
created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and
launched in October 2010. The service rapidly gained popularity, with over 100
million active users as of April 2012. The service was acquired by Facebook in
April 2012 for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock. In 2013,
Instagram grew by 23%, while Facebook, as the mother company, only grew by 3%.
Whats App: WhatsApp Messenger is
a proprietary, cross-platform instant messaging subscription
service for smartphones. In addition to text messaging, users can send each other images,
video, and audio media messages as well as their location using integrated
mapping features. WhatsApp Inc. was founded in 2009 by Americans Brian Actonand Jan Koum (also
the CEO),
Snapchat: Snapchat is a photo messaging application
developed by Evan Spiegel and
Robert Murphy, then Stanford
University students. Using the
application, users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and
send them to a controlled list of recipients. These sent photographs and videos
are known as "Snaps". Users set a time limit for how long recipients
can view their Snaps (as of March 2014, the range is from 1 to 10 seconds), after which they will be hidden from the recipient's device
and deleted from Snapchat's servers.
