Gays.com

Last updated
Gays.com
Type of site
LGBT social networking service
Available in English, German
Revenue Advertising
URL Gays.com
RegistrationRequired
Launched17 May 2008 (2008-05-17)
Current statusActive

Gays.com is an LGBT social networking service and website launched on 17 May 2008, operated and privately owned by Gays.com Limited. [1] Users must register before using the service, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages.

Contents

The June 2008 issue of City Weekend magazine referred to Gays.com as "the gay Facebook". [2]

History

In 2006, the purchase of the domain name for $500,000 by German entrepreneurs Julius and David Dreyer was a record sale for the year and one of the highlights of the domain name industry. [3] The website launched as a closed beta in Shanghai on 17 May 2008, and was timed to coincide with the fourth International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. [4] Gays.com became open beta on 10 September 2008. [5]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Friendster</span> Social gaming site

Friendster was a social network based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003. Later, the company became a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages, and comments with other members via profiles and networks. It is considered one of the original social networks.

tribe.net

tribe.net was a website that hosted an online community, or tribe of friends, similar to other social networking sites. The site name was always spelled in all lower case. As of February 2017 the site content was inaccessible and the site lacked a host. As of 25 February 2023, the tribe.net domain hosts a Mastodon server.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Delicious (website)</span> Discontinued American social bookmarking web service

Delicious was a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011, and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year. In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc. In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Myspace</span> Social networking website

Myspace is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it was the first social network to reach a global audience and had a significant influence on technology, pop culture and music. It also played a critical role in the early growth of companies like YouTube and created a developer platform that launched the successes of Zynga, RockYou and Photobucket, among others. From 2005 to 2009, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world.

Wallop is an American software company that was spun off from Microsoft in 2003 to provide a social networking service, and from 2008 made Adobe Flash-based applications for other social networks. Wallop was a research project from the Social Computing Group that was a part of the Microsoft Research team. In the beginning, membership to Wallop was limited so that the testing groups were more controlled for trial purposes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Gmail</span>

The public history of Gmail dates back to 2004. Gmail, a free, advertising-supported webmail service with support for Email clients, is a product from Google. Over its history, the Gmail interface has become integrated with many other products and services from the company, with basic integration as part of Google Account and specific integration points with services such as Google+, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, Google Meet, YouTube, and Google Buzz. It has also been made available as part of G Suite. The Official Gmail Blog tracks the public history of Gmail from July 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tagged (website)</span> Social discovery website

Tagged is a social discovery website based in San Francisco, California, founded in 2004. It allows members to browse the profiles of any other members, and share tags and virtual gifts. Tagged claims it has 300 million members as of 2014. As of September 2011, Quantcast estimates Tagged monthly unique users at 5.9 million in the United States, and 18.6 million globally. Michael Arrington wrote in April 2011 that Tagged is most notable for the ability to grow profitably during the era of Facebook.

The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Odnoklassniki</span> Social networking service

Odnoklassniki, abbreviated as OK or OK.ru, is a social network service used mainly in Russia and former Soviet Republics. The site was launched on March 4, 2006 by Albert Popkov and is currently owned by VK.

Google Friend Connect was a free social networking site, active from 2008 to 2012. Similar to Facebook Platform and MySpaceID, it allowed users to build a profile to share and update information through messaging, photographs and video content via third-party sites which acted as a host for profile sharing and social exchanges.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bebo</span> American social networking website

Bebo was an American social networking website that originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013 and relaunched in February 2021. The site relaunched several times after its bankruptcy with a number of short-lived offerings, including instant messaging and video streaming, until its acquisition by Amazon in July 2019 when it was shut down. It was announced in January 2021 that it would be returning as a new social media site the month after. By May 2022, it had once again been shut down, without having ever left beta testing.

Ping.fm was an advertising-supported social networking and micro-blogging web service that enabled users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plurk</span> Social networking and micro-blogging service

Plurk is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates through short messages or links, which can be up to 360 text characters in length.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MSN Messenger</span> Instant messaging client

MSN Messenger, later rebranded as Windows Live Messenger, was a cross-platform instant-messaging client developed by Microsoft. It connected to the now-discontinued Microsoft Messenger service and, in later versions, was compatible with Yahoo! Messenger and Facebook Messenger. The service was discontinued in 2013 and was replaced by Skype.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Facebook</span> History of the social networking service

Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. 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 gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.

<i>vSide</i> 2006 video game

vSide was an Internet-based 3D virtual world that was launched on May 15, 2006. The game is in its public beta phase. However, the game appears to have been discontinued as of 2021. Initially developed by American studio Doppelganger, Inc., a studio founded in 2004, the game was acquired in June 2009 by ExitReality, which is the owner and developer. Inside the game's universe, users are called vSiders and can interact with each other through social networking, celebrity entertainment, virtual boutique shopping and self-expression. Membership is free.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">So.cl</span>

So.cl was a social networking service and social search engine operated by Microsoft FUSE Labs. They announced on March 7, 2017 that it would be closing down So.cl on March 15, 2017.

Spaces is a Russian social network service that targets mobile phone users.

Spring.me was a social networking service. Until a rebranding in 2013, it was known as Formspring, a question-and-answer-based social network launched in 2009 by Ade Olonoh, the founder of online form builder Formstack.

References

  1. "Gays.com: Launch of a New-generation Social Networking Website for the GLBT Community". Yahoo. 17 May 2008.
  2. "THE LGBeaT: The Gay Facebook". City Weekend. 5 June 2008.
  3. "Gays.com Sold for $500,000 as Online Auction Drives Domain Sales Boom". Sedo. 7 November 2006.
  4. "The long-awaited Gays.com launch party pics". Gays.com blog. 26 May 2008.
  5. "Gays.com moves into open beta". The Inquisitr. 14 September 2008.