About Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products,[6] and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.[7][8] The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the “Google Guys”,[9][10][11] while the two were attending Stanford University as PhD candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for twenty years, until the year 2024.[12] The company’s mission statement from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”,[13] and the company’s unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Amit Patel[14] and supported by Paul Buchheit – is “Don’t be evil”.[15][16] In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.
It has been estimated that Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world,[17] and processes over one billion search requests[18] and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.[19][20][21][22] Google’s rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company’s core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email service, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz and Google+. Google’s products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Notably, Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Motorola Droid and the Samsung Galaxy smartphone series’, as well as the new Google Chrome OS,[23] best known as the main operating system on the Cr-48 and also, since 15 June 2011, on commercial Chromebooks such as the Samsung Series 5[24] and Acer AC700.[25] Alexa lists the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet’s most visited website, and numerous international Google sites (google.co.in(14) and most visited site in India, google.co.uk etc.) are in the top hundred, as are several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube (Alexa:3), Blogger (Alexa:6), and Orkut.[26] Google also ranks number two in the BrandZ brand equity database.[27] The dominant market position of Google’s services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.[31]
While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites.[32] They called this new technology PageRank, where a website’s relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.[33][34]
A small search engine called “RankDex” from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[35] The technology in RankDex would be patented[36] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.[37][38]
Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine “BackRub”, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[39][40][41]
Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word “googol”,[42][43] the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wants to provide large quantities of information for people.[44] Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.stanford.edu.[45]
The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997,[46] and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend’s (Susan Wojcicki[31]) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.[31][47][48]
In May 2011, unique visitors of Google surpassed 1 billion mark for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from a year ago with 931 million unique visitors
About Wikipedia
Wikipedia (i/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdi.ə/ or i/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ wik-i-pee-dee-ə) is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. The name “Wikipedia” is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.
Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles (except in certain cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism). Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity, if they choose.
The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are the Five pillars. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines to improve the encyclopedia; however, it is not a formal requirement to be familiar with them before contributing.
Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting 400 million unique visitors monthly as of March 2011 according to ComScore.[1] There are more than 82,000 active contributors working on more than 19,000,000 articles in more than 270 languages. As of today, there are 3,748,378 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia (see also Wikipedia:Statistics.)
People of all ages, cultures and backgrounds can add or edit article prose, references, images and other media here. What is contributed is more important than the expertise or qualifications of the contributor. What will remain depends upon whether it fits within Wikipedia’s policies, including being verifiable against a published reliable source, so excluding editors’ opinions and beliefs and unreviewed research, and is free of copyright restrictions and contentious material about living people. Contributions cannot damage Wikipedia because the software allows easy reversal of mistakes and many experienced editors are watching to help and ensure that edits are cumulative improvements. Begin by simply clicking the edit link at the top of any editable page!
Wikipedia is a live collaboration differing from paper-based reference sources in important ways. Unlike printed encyclopedias, Wikipedia is continually created and updated, with articles on historic events appearing within minutes, rather than months or years. Older articles tend to grow more comprehensive and balanced; newer articles may contain misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Awareness of this aids obtaining valid information and avoiding recently added misinformation (see Researching with Wikipedia).
What Wikipedia is not circumscribes Wikipedia’s scope. Further information on key topics appears below. Further advice is at Frequently asked questions, advice for parents, or see Where to ask questions. For help getting started with editing or other issues, see
Wikipedia history
For more details on this topic, see History of Wikipedia.
The wikipedia.org website, Wikipedia’s homepage for all languages
Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors, but the writing of articles was slow. During 2000, Jimmy Wales, founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to work on the project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Multiple sources suggested that a wiki might allow members of the public to contribute material, and Nupedia’s first wiki went online on January 10, 2001.
There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia’s editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a website in the wiki format, so the new project was given the name “Wikipedia” and launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15 (now called “Wikipedia Day” by some users). The bandwidth and server (in San Diego) were donated by Wales. Other current and past Bomis employees who have worked on the project include Tim Shell, one of the cofounders of Bomis and its current CEO, and programmer Jason Richey. The domain was eventually changed to the present wikipedia.org when the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation was launched as its new parent organization, prompting the use of a “.org” domain to denote its non-commercial nature.
In May 2001, a wave of non-English Wikipedias was launched—in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. These were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian.[2] In September,[3] Polish was added, and further commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia was made. At the end of the year, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbo-Croatian versions were announced.
About Twitter:
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”, and images.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011,[6] generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.[3][8][9] It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet.”[10]
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.[11] The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass,[12] 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.”[13] 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”.[14]
“…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[15]
The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.[7] 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.[16] Williams fired Glass who was silent about his part in Twitter’s startup until 2011.[17] Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007
About Youtube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, share and view videos.[3]
The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5[4] 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 including CBS, BBC, VEVO, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.[5]
Unregistered users may watch videos, and registered users may upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos that are considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users 18 years old and older. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for US$1.65 billion, and now operates as a subsidiary of Google
Main article: History of YouTube
From left to right: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim
YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal.[6] Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[7]
According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, while Hurley commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party “was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible”.[8]
YouTube began as a venture-funded technology startup, primarily from a $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006.[9] YouTube’s early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California.[10] The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.[11]
The first YouTube video was entitled Me at the zoo, and shows founder Karim at the San Diego Zoo.[12] The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.[13]
YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005. The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.[14] According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43 percent and more than 14 billion videos viewed in May 2010.[15] YouTube says that over 48 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the US.[16][17] It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.[18] Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Google and Facebook.[19]
The choice of the name www.youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, www.utube.com. The owner of the site, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being overloaded on a regular basis by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to www.utubeonline.com.[20][21] In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.[22] Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube’s running costs, and YouTube’s revenues in 2007 were noted as “not material” in a regulatory filing.[23] In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in advertising sales.[24]
In November 2008, YouTube reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS, allowing the companies to post full-length films and television episodes on the site, accompanied by advertisements in a section for US viewers called “Shows”. The move was intended to create competition with websites such as Hulu, which features material from NBC, Fox, and Disney.[25][26] In November 2009, YouTube launched a version of “Shows” available to UK viewers, offering around 4,000 full-length shows from more than 60 partners.[27] In January 2010, YouTube introduced an online film rentals service,[28] which is currently available only to users in the US.[29][30] The service offers over 6,000 films.[31]
YouTube’s current headquarters in San Bruno, California
In March 2010, YouTube began free streaming of certain content, including 60 cricket matches of the Indian Premier League. According to YouTube, this was the first worldwide free online broadcast of a major sporting event.[32]
On March 31, 2010, the YouTube website launched a new design, with the aim of simplifying the interface and increasing the time users spend on the site. Google product manager Shiva Rajaraman commented: “We really felt like we needed to step back and remove the clutter.”[33] In May 2010, it was reported that YouTube was serving more than two billion videos a day, which it described as “nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined”.[34] In May 2011, YouTube reported in its company blog that the site was receiving more than three billion views per day.[16]
In October 2010, Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role, and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company.[35]
In April 2011, James Zern, a YouTube software engineer, revealed that 30 percent of videos accounted for 99 percent of views on the site
About Facebook:
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 750 million active users.[6][7] Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Facebook users must register before using the site. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists, e.g. “People From Work”, or “Really Good Friends”. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the website.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[8] The website’s membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based on ConsumersReports.org on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the site’s terms.[9]
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[10] Entertainment Weekly included the site on its end-of-the-decade “best-of” list, saying, “How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers’ birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?”[11] Quantcast estimates Facebook has 138.9 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in May 2011.[12] According to Social Media Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account.[13] Nevertheless, Facebook’s market growth started to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011
History
Main articles: History of Facebook and Timeline of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was comparable to Hot or Not, and “used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the ‘hotter’ person”.[15][16]
Mark Zuckerberg co-created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.
Chris Hughes
Dustin Moskovitz
Sean Parker
Cameron Winklevoss
To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard’s computer network and copied the houses’ private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a student “facebook” (a directory with photos and basic information). Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.[15][17]
The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion. Ultimately, however, the charges were dropped.[18] Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final, by uploading 500 Augustan images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section.[17] He opened the site up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.
The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash incident.[19] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook”, originally located at thefacebook.com.[20]
Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.[21] The three complained to the Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. The three later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling.[22]
Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service.[23] Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.[24] It soon opened to the other Ivy League schools, Boston University, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[25][26]
Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company’s president.[27] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[24] It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[28] The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[29]
Total active users[N 1]
Date Users
(in millions) Days later Monthly growth[N 2]
August 26, 2008 100[30] 1,665 178.38%
April 8, 2009 200[31] 225 13.33%
September 15, 2009 300[32] 160 9.38%
February 5, 2010 400[33] 143 6.99%
July 21, 2010 500[34] 166 4.52%
January 5, 2011 600[35][N 3] 168 3.57%
July 6, 2011 750[36] 182 2.54%
Facebook launched a high-school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[37] At that time, high-school networks required an invitation to join.[38] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[39] Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.[40][41]
On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion.[42] Microsoft’s purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook.[43] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.[44] In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned cash-flow positive for the first time.[45] In November 2010, based on SecondMarket Inc., an exchange for shares of privately held companies, Facebook’s value was $41 billion (slightly surpassing eBay’s) and it became the third largest US web company after Google and Amazon.[46] Facebook has been identified as a possible candidate for an IPO by 2013.[47]
Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.[48]
In March 2011 it was reported that Facebook removes approximately 20,000 profiles from the site every day for various infractions, including spam, inappropriate content and underage use, as part of its efforts to boost cyber security.[49]
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move to its new headquarters, the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, California.[50][51]
Release of statistics by DoubleClick showed that Facebook reached one trillion pageviews in the month of June 2011, making it the most visited website in the world.[52] It should however be noted that Google and some of its selected websites are not counted in the DoubleClick rankings
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products,[6] and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.[7][8] The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the “Google Guys”,[9][10][11] while the two were attending Stanford University as PhD candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for twenty years, until the year 2024.[12] The company’s mission statement from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”,[13] and the company’s unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Amit Patel[14] and supported by Paul Buchheit – is “Don’t be evil”.[15][16] In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.
It has been estimated that Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world,[17] and processes over one billion search requests[18] and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.[19][20][21][22] Google’s rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company’s core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email service, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz and Google+. Google’s products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Notably, Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Motorola Droid and the Samsung Galaxy smartphone series’, as well as the new Google Chrome OS,[23] best known as the main operating system on the Cr-48 and also, since 15 June 2011, on commercial Chromebooks such as the Samsung Series 5[24] and Acer AC700.[25] Alexa lists the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet’s most visited website, and numerous international Google sites (google.co.in(14) and most visited site in India, google.co.uk etc.) are in the top hundred, as are several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube (Alexa:3), Blogger (Alexa:6), and Orkut.[26] Google also ranks number two in the BrandZ brand equity database.[27] The dominant market position of Google’s services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.[31]
While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites.[32] They called this new technology PageRank, where a website’s relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.[33][34]
A small search engine called “RankDex” from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[35] The technology in RankDex would be patented[36] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.[37][38]
Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine “BackRub”, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[39][40][41]
Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word “googol”,[42][43] the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wants to provide large quantities of information for people.[44] Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.stanford.edu.[45]
The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997,[46] and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend’s (Susan Wojcicki[31]) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.[31][47][48]
In May 2011, unique visitors of Google surpassed 1 billion mark for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from a year ago with 931 million unique visitors
About Wikipedia
Wikipedia (i/ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdi.ə/ or i/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdi.ə/ wik-i-pee-dee-ə) is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. The name “Wikipedia” is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.
Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles (except in certain cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism). Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity, if they choose.
The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates are the Five pillars. The Wikipedia community has developed many policies and guidelines to improve the encyclopedia; however, it is not a formal requirement to be familiar with them before contributing.
Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting 400 million unique visitors monthly as of March 2011 according to ComScore.[1] There are more than 82,000 active contributors working on more than 19,000,000 articles in more than 270 languages. As of today, there are 3,748,378 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia (see also Wikipedia:Statistics.)
People of all ages, cultures and backgrounds can add or edit article prose, references, images and other media here. What is contributed is more important than the expertise or qualifications of the contributor. What will remain depends upon whether it fits within Wikipedia’s policies, including being verifiable against a published reliable source, so excluding editors’ opinions and beliefs and unreviewed research, and is free of copyright restrictions and contentious material about living people. Contributions cannot damage Wikipedia because the software allows easy reversal of mistakes and many experienced editors are watching to help and ensure that edits are cumulative improvements. Begin by simply clicking the edit link at the top of any editable page!
Wikipedia is a live collaboration differing from paper-based reference sources in important ways. Unlike printed encyclopedias, Wikipedia is continually created and updated, with articles on historic events appearing within minutes, rather than months or years. Older articles tend to grow more comprehensive and balanced; newer articles may contain misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Awareness of this aids obtaining valid information and avoiding recently added misinformation (see Researching with Wikipedia).
What Wikipedia is not circumscribes Wikipedia’s scope. Further information on key topics appears below. Further advice is at Frequently asked questions, advice for parents, or see Where to ask questions. For help getting started with editing or other issues, see
Wikipedia history:
For more details on this topic, see History of Wikipedia.
The wikipedia.org website, Wikipedia’s homepage for all languages
Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had an elaborate system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors, but the writing of articles was slow. During 2000, Jimmy Wales, founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to work on the project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Multiple sources suggested that a wiki might allow members of the public to contribute material, and Nupedia’s first wiki went online on January 10, 2001.
There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia’s editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a website in the wiki format, so the new project was given the name “Wikipedia” and launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15 (now called “Wikipedia Day” by some users). The bandwidth and server (in San Diego) were donated by Wales. Other current and past Bomis employees who have worked on the project include Tim Shell, one of the cofounders of Bomis and its current CEO, and programmer Jason Richey. The domain was eventually changed to the present wikipedia.org when the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation was launched as its new parent organization, prompting the use of a “.org” domain to denote its non-commercial nature.
In May 2001, a wave of non-English Wikipedias was launched—in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. These were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian.[2] In September,[3] Polish was added, and further commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia was made. At the end of the year, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbo-Croatian versions were announced.
About Twitter:
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”, and images.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011,[6] generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.[3][8][9] It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet.”[10]
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.[11] The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass,[12] 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.”[13] 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”.[14]
“…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[15]
The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.[7] 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.[16] Williams fired Glass who was silent about his part in Twitter’s startup until 2011.[17] Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007
About Youtube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, share and view videos.[3]
The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5[4] 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 including CBS, BBC, VEVO, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.[5]
Unregistered users may watch videos, and registered users may upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos that are considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users 18 years old and older. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for US$1.65 billion, and now operates as a subsidiary of Google
Main article: History of YouTube
From left to right: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim
YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal.[6] Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[7]
According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, while Hurley commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party “was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible”.[8]
YouTube began as a venture-funded technology startup, primarily from a $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006.[9] YouTube’s early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California.[10] The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.[11]
The first YouTube video was entitled Me at the zoo, and shows founder Karim at the San Diego Zoo.[12] The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.[13]
YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005. The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.[14] According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43 percent and more than 14 billion videos viewed in May 2010.[15] YouTube says that over 48 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the US.[16][17] It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.[18] Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Google and Facebook.[19]
The choice of the name www.youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, www.utube.com. The owner of the site, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being overloaded on a regular basis by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to www.utubeonline.com.[20][21] In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.[22] Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube’s running costs, and YouTube’s revenues in 2007 were noted as “not material” in a regulatory filing.[23] In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in advertising sales.[24]
In November 2008, YouTube reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS, allowing the companies to post full-length films and television episodes on the site, accompanied by advertisements in a section for US viewers called “Shows”. The move was intended to create competition with websites such as Hulu, which features material from NBC, Fox, and Disney.[25][26] In November 2009, YouTube launched a version of “Shows” available to UK viewers, offering around 4,000 full-length shows from more than 60 partners.[27] In January 2010, YouTube introduced an online film rentals service,[28] which is currently available only to users in the US.[29][30] The service offers over 6,000 films.[31]
YouTube’s current headquarters in San Bruno, California
In March 2010, YouTube began free streaming of certain content, including 60 cricket matches of the Indian Premier League. According to YouTube, this was the first worldwide free online broadcast of a major sporting event.[32]
On March 31, 2010, the YouTube website launched a new design, with the aim of simplifying the interface and increasing the time users spend on the site. Google product manager Shiva Rajaraman commented: “We really felt like we needed to step back and remove the clutter.”[33] In May 2010, it was reported that YouTube was serving more than two billion videos a day, which it described as “nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined”.[34] In May 2011, YouTube reported in its company blog that the site was receiving more than three billion views per day.[16]
In October 2010, Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role, and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company.[35]
In April 2011, James Zern, a YouTube software engineer, revealed that 30 percent of videos accounted for 99 percent of views on the site
About Facebook:
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 750 million active users.[6][7] Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Facebook users must register before using the site. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists, e.g. “People From Work”, or “Really Good Friends”. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the website.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[8] The website’s membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based on ConsumersReports.org on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the site’s terms.[9]
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[10] Entertainment Weekly included the site on its end-of-the-decade “best-of” list, saying, “How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers’ birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?”[11] Quantcast estimates Facebook has 138.9 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in May 2011.[12] According to Social Media Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account.[13] Nevertheless, Facebook’s market growth started to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011
History
Main articles: History of Facebook and Timeline of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was comparable to Hot or Not, and “used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the ‘hotter’ person”.[15][16]
Mark Zuckerberg co-created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.
Chris Hughes
Dustin Moskovitz
Sean Parker
Cameron Winklevoss
To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard’s computer network and copied the houses’ private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a student “facebook” (a directory with photos and basic information). Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.[15][17]
The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion. Ultimately, however, the charges were dropped.[18] Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final, by uploading 500 Augustan images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section.[17] He opened the site up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.
The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash incident.[19] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook”, originally located at thefacebook.com.[20]
Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.[21] The three complained to the Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. The three later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling.[22]
Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service.[23] Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.[24] It soon opened to the other Ivy League schools, Boston University, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[25][26]
Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company’s president.[27] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[24] It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[28] The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[29]
Total active users[N 1]
Date Users
(in millions) Days later Monthly growth[N 2]
August 26, 2008 100[30] 1,665 178.38%
April 8, 2009 200[31] 225 13.33%
September 15, 2009 300[32] 160 9.38%
February 5, 2010 400[33] 143 6.99%
July 21, 2010 500[34] 166 4.52%
January 5, 2011 600[35][N 3] 168 3.57%
July 6, 2011 750[36] 182 2.54%
Facebook launched a high-school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[37] At that time, high-school networks required an invitation to join.[38] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[39] Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.[40][41]
On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion.[42] Microsoft’s purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook.[43] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.[44] In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned cash-flow positive for the first time.[45] In November 2010, based on SecondMarket Inc., an exchange for shares of privately held companies, Facebook’s value was $41 billion (slightly surpassing eBay’s) and it became the third largest US web company after Google and Amazon.[46] Facebook has been identified as a possible candidate for an IPO by 2013.[47]
Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.[48]
In March 2011 it was reported that Facebook removes approximately 20,000 profiles from the site every day for various infractions, including spam, inappropriate content and underage use, as part of its efforts to boost cyber security.[49]
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move to its new headquarters, the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, California.[50][51]
Release of statistics by DoubleClick showed that Facebook reached one trillion pageviews in the month of June 2011, making it the most visited website in the world.[52] It should however be noted that Google and some of its selected websites are not counted in the DoubleClick rankings
Post a Comment