Friendster was a social network game 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.
Total Film is a British film magazine published 13 times a year by Future Publishing. The magazine was launched in 1997 and offers a cinema, DVD and Blu-ray news, reviews, and features. Total Film is available both in print and interactive iPad editions.
Flickr is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. It has changed ownership several times and has been owned by SmugMug since April 20, 2018.
Photobucket is an American image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community. Photobucket hosts more than 10 billion images from 100 million registered members. Photobucket's headquarters are in Denver, Colorado. The website was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007. In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp, sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Ontela then renamed itself Photobucket Inc. and continues to operate as Photobucket.
The Pirate Bay is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute magnet links and torrent files, which facilitate peer-to-peer, file sharing among users of the BitTorrent protocol.
Calvin Cheng Ern Lee is a Singaporean businessman and former Nominated Member of Parliament. Cheng is known for his views on socio-political issues in Singapore. He began his business career in the modeling industry and expanded into event hosting, publishing, and educational technology.
OLT Express Poland was a Polish charter airline, formally known as Yes Airways. On 31 July 2012 it suspended all charter services, less than a week after the scheduled sister airline OLT Express Regional cancelled all its services. Stranded customers were returned home on LOT services. All leased aircraft were repossessed by lessors, and even some wet lease pilots were released back to their employer airlines. Its sister airline, OLT Express Regional, filed for bankruptcy on 27 July 2012 after its licence was suspended by the Polish Aviation Authority.
Mixi is an online Japanese social networking service. It was founded in 1999 and is owned by Mixi, Inc.. As of September 2012, Mixi had about 14 million monthly active users, with about 8.6 million of those on smartphones. Mixi, Inc. was founded by Kenji Kasahara in 1999 as a limited liability company and became a Japanese corporation in 2000. The company changed its name to Mixi, Inc. from E-Mercury, Inc. in February 2006 to align its name with the social networking service, and was updated to MIXI, Inc. in 2022. Its headquarters are in Shibuya, Tokyo.
Shutterstock is an American provider of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools; it is headquartered in New York. Founded in 2003 by programmer and photographer Jon Oringer, Shutterstock maintains a library of around 200 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, with around 10 million video clips and music tracks available for licensing. Originally a subscription site only, Shutterstock expanded beyond subscriptions into a la carte pricing in 2008. It has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012.
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American technology giant Meta Platforms. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to only Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities and, since 2006, anyone over 13 years old. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed 2.96 billion monthly active users, and ranked third worldwide among the most visited websites. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
StudiVZ, SchülerVZ and MeinVZ was a social networking platform for students and based in Berlin, Germany. The name is an abbreviation of the German expression Studentenverzeichnis, which means students' directory.
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.
NK.pl, formerly Nasza-klasa.pl, was a Polish school-based social networking service used by alumni and students. NK.pl was owned and administered by Ringier Axel Springer Polska.
Fotki is a digital photo sharing, video sharing and media social network website and web service suite; it is one of the world's largest social networking sites. Fotki licenses photo-sharing software for many global companies, such as Telecom Italia, Alice.it, Sears, Mark Travel, Vegas.com, Funjet.com etc.
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.
Nexopia is a Canadian social networking website created in 2003, by 18-year old Timo Ewalds. It was designed for ages 14 and up, but was later lowered to 13. Users are able to create and design profiles, a friends list, blogs, galleries, and compose articles and forums. Interaction is accomplished through an internal personal messaging system, public user comments on profiles, blogs or through threads and posts on the forums. In November 2012, Nexopia was acquired by digital ad network Ideon Media.
Kiwibox.com was a social networking service. It was founded in 1999 and went defunct in September 2019.
Pearltrees refers to itself as "a place for your interests". Functionally the product is a visual and collaborative curation tool that allows users to organize, explore and share any URL they find online as well as to upload personal photos, files and notes. The product features a unique visual interface that allows users to drag and organize collected URLs, and other digital objects. that themselves can be further organized into collections and sub-collections, (URLs). Users of the product can also engage in social/collaborative curation using a feature called Pearltrees Teams.
In Russia, internet censorship is enforced on the basis of several laws and through several mechanisms. Since 2012, Russia maintains a centralized internet blacklist maintained by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor).
