Facebook, Flickr, MySpace & Twitter: What Are These?

Facebook:

Facebook is a social networking website 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. The choice for the website's name comes from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while attedning Harvard University. The Facebook website currently has more than 250 million active members worldwide.

Flickr

Flickrwas developed by a Vancouver-based company that launched Flickr in February 2004. Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular website for users to share personal photographs, Flickr is also popular tool for bloggers. As of June 2009^[update], it claims to host more than 3.6 billion images up from 3 billion in November 2008.

MySpace:

MySpace is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California. MySpace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006. In April 2008, MySpace was overtaken internationally by it's main competitor, Facebook.

MySpace is an interactive on line friend finder where you can post pictures and picture albums of yourself and share with all of the new friends you meet. You can also post blogs about whatever you want such as what your interests are, who your heroes are. What hobbies you like to do. You can post quizzes or general knowledge questions and facts. You can create your own homepage that is a reflection of you and write about yourself. On your homepage there is a bulletin board on which you can post things that you want to sell. You can comment back and forth to other MySpace members on their homepages and email back and forth and not having to leave the MySpace area and go to your email account.

Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging 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). While the service costs nothing to use, sending an SMS may incur phone service provider fees. Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey.

Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide. In February 2009, a Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social networksites. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for the month of February of 2009.

Sources: wikipedia.com