Friendster was a social networking service based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003. The company was sold in 2015 and 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.
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang. Although the name "Rotten Tomatoes" connects to the practice of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes when disapproving of a poor stage performance, the original inspiration comes from a scene featuring tomatoes in the Canadian film Léolo (1992).
Myspace is an American social networking service. From 2005 to 2008, it was the largest social networking site in the world, reaching more than 100 million users per month.
TV.com is a website owned by Red Ventures. The site covers television and focuses on English language shows made or broadcast in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It emphasized user-generated content. Australia and UK versions of the website are also available, at au.tv.com and uk.tv.com, respectively.
IMDb is an online database of information related to films, television programs, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, and fan and critical reviews. An additional fan feature, message boards, was abandoned in February 2017. Originally a fan-operated website, the database is now owned and operated by IMDb.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.
Flixster was an American social-networking movie website for discovering new movies, learning about movies, and meeting others with similar tastes in movies. The site allowed users to view movie trailers as well as learn about new and upcoming movies at the box office. It was based in San Francisco, California and was founded by Joe Greenstein and Saran Chari on January 20, 2006. Flixster was the parent of website Rotten Tomatoes from January 2010. On February 17, 2016, Flixster, including Rotten Tomatoes, was acquired by Fandango.
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films and the film medium. The concept is often used interchangeably with that of film reviews. A film review implies a recommendation aimed at consumers, however not all film criticism takes the form of reviews.
Geosocial networking is a type of social networking in which geographic services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social dynamics. User-submitted location data or geolocation techniques can allow social networks to connect and coordinate users with local people or events that match their interests. Geolocation on web-based social network services can be IP-based or use hotspot trilateration. For mobile social networks, texted location information or mobile phone tracking can enable location-based services to enrich social networking.
Shazam is an American application owned by Apple Inc. The application can identify music, movies, advertising, and television shows, based on a short sample played and using the microphone on the device. The software is available for Android, macOS, iOS, Wear OS and watchOS.
Kin was a short-lived mobile phone line from Microsoft designed for users of social networking. Microsoft described the phones' target demographic as men and women between ages 15 and 30. It was manufactured by Sharp Corporation and sold through Verizon Wireless.
Jinni is a search engine and recommendation engine for movies, TV shows and short films. The service is powered by the Entertainment Genome, an approach to indexing titles based on attributes like mood, tone, plot, and structure. Its availability is via API, in business-to-business licensing, where it impacts businesses like Comcast's Xfinity product.
The Social Network is a 2010 American biographical drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. Adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, it portrays the founding of social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits. It stars Jesse Eisenberg as founder Mark Zuckerberg, along with Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, Armie Hammer as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Max Minghella as Divya Narendra. Neither Zuckerberg nor any other Facebook staff were involved with the project, although Saverin was a consultant for Mezrich's book.
Flickchart is a Florida-based movie-ranking and social networking website.
MovieLens is a web-based recommender system and virtual community that recommends movies for its users to watch, based on their film preferences using collaborative filtering of members' movie ratings and movie reviews. It contains about 11 million ratings for about 8500 movies. MovieLens was created in 1997 by GroupLens Research, a research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, in order to gather research data on personalized recommendations.
VG247 is a video game blog published in the United Kingdom, founded in February 2008 by industry veteran Patrick Garratt. In 2009, CNET blog Crave ranked it as the third best gaming blog in the world.
Google Play, formerly Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android operating system, allowing users to browse and download applications developed with the Android software development kit (SDK) and published through Google. Google Play also serves as a digital media store, offering music, books, movies, and television programs. It previously offered Google hardware devices for purchase until the introduction of a separate online hardware retailer, Google Store, on March 11, 2015, and it also offered news publications and magazines before the revamp of Google News on May 15, 2018, and it offered music and podcasts as part of Google Play Music until December 2020 when the service was replaced with YouTube Music and Google Podcasts.
Fayve was a digital entertainment distribution service founded and developed by Vulcan Technologies, LLC. It was launched on November 8, 2012, and ran as an app on iOS for iPad owners, on Google Play for Android Tablets and on Amazon for Kindle tablets. The app was a movie and TV show discovery tool that aggregated content from Netflix, Hulu, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Amazon Instant, Redbox, YouTube, VUDU, Crackle, iTunes, XFINITY, IndieFlix and Fandango into one library. It allowed users with accounts from those service providers to stream content from a single interface.
Letterboxd is an online social networking service co-founded by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow in 2011. It was launched as a social app focused on sharing opinions about, and love of, film, and is maintained by a small team in Auckland, New Zealand. The site is meant for sharing its members' tastes in films. Members can use it as a diary to record their opinions about films, keep track of films they have seen in the past, write reviews or make lists of films and showcase their favorite films, as well as meet and interact with other cinephiles. Films can be rated, reviewed, included in a list and tagged with relevant keywords.
Netflix is an American-based company that offers a service for streaming movies and TV series over the Internet. Several technical development efforts were required to provide this service.
TasteDive is an entertainment recommendation engine for films, TV shows, music, video games, and books. It also has elements of a social media site.
