Emo is a music genre characterized by emotional, often confessional lyrics. It emerged as a style of hardcore punk and post-hardcore from the mid-1980s Washington, D.C. hardcore scene, where it was known as emotional hardcore or emocore. The bands Rites of Spring and Embrace, among others, pioneered the genre. In the early-to-mid 1990s, emo was adopted and reinvented by alternative rock, indie rock, punk rock, and pop-punk bands, including Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker, Cap'n Jazz, and Jimmy Eat World. By the mid-1990s, Braid, the Promise Ring, and the Get Up Kids emerged from Midwest emo, and several independent record labels began to specialize in the genre. Meanwhile, screamo, a more aggressive style of emo using screamed vocals, also emerged, pioneered by the San Diego bands Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Screamo achieved mainstream success in the 2000s with bands like Hawthorne Heights, Silverstein, Story of the Year, Thursday, the Used, and Underoath.
A subculture is a group of people within a cultural society that differentiates itself from the conservative and standard values to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures develop their own norms and values regarding cultural, political, and sexual matters. Subcultures are part of society while keeping their specific characteristics intact. Examples of subcultures include BDSM, hippies, hipsters, goths, steampunks, bikers, punks, skinheads, gopnik, hip-hoppers, metalheads, cosplayers, otaku, otherkin, furries, hackers and more. The concept of subcultures was developed in sociology and cultural studies. Subcultures differ from countercultures.
Xanga was a website that hosted weblogs, photoblogs, and social networking profiles. It was operated by Xanga.com, Inc. and based in New York City.
Last.fm Limited is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, either from Internet radio stations, or the user's computer or portable music devices. This information is transferred ("scrobbled") to Last.fm's database either via the music player or via a plug-in installed into the user's music player. The data is then displayed on the user's profile page and compiled to create reference pages for individual artists.
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.
BuzzNet is a photo, journal, and video-sharing social media network that is currently owned by Hive Media. The network was owned by SpinMedia from its inception until September 2016, when it was sold to Hive Media.
Open Diary is an online diary community, an early example of social networking software. It was founded on October 20, 1998. Open Diary went offline on February 7, 2014, but was re-launched on January 26, 2018. The site was owned and operated by Bruce Ableson and Susan Ableson, known on the Open Diary website by the title of their diaries, The DiaryMaster and The DiaryMistress. Ableson has described Open Diary as "the first web site that brought online diary writers together into a community."
Piczo was a social networking and blogging website for teens. It was founded in 2003 by Jim Conning in San Francisco, California. Early investors included Catamount, Sierra Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, and Mangrove Capital Partners.
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.
Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo is a book by Andy Greenwald, then a senior contributing writer at Spin magazine, published in November 2003 by St. Martin's Press. Greenwald documents the history of the emo genre from its mid 1980s origins in Washington, D.C. to a more recent crop of bands, such as Thursday and Dashboard Confessional. The book received generally favorable reviews from music publications, with it appearing on best-of lists by Alternative Press and NME.
Alternative fashion or alt fashion is fashion that stands apart from mainstream, commercial fashion. It includes both styles which do not conform to the mainstream fashion of their time and the styles of specific subcultures. Some alternative fashion styles are attention-grabbing and more artistic than practical, while some develop from anti-fashion sentiments that focus on simplicity and utilitarianism.
Yuku was an upgraded version of ezboard, Inc.'s internet forums. Yuku described itself as "Message Boards 2.0". This tagline was most likely derived from the Web 2.0 features of Yuku message boards, such as tags and RSS.
Odnoklassniki, abbreviated as OK or OK.ru, is a social networking service primarily in Russia and former Soviet Republics. The site was launched on March 4, 2006 by Albert Popkov and is currently owned by VK.
Dipdive was a social networking website created by will.i.am. It is best known as the original source site of the 'Yes We Can' music video. The site allowed users to upload images, videos and audio files, post blog entries and create playlists. Dipdive was home to a variety of creative content and information on social causes.
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 was a Canadian social networking website created in 2003, by 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.
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.
Kroogi [Russian: Круги, translation: circles] is a social networking service where musicians, painters, writers, videographers, photographers, and other users and organizations that wish to share their projects with the world, showcase their work. Their supporters can follow their activity, download content, and make monetary contributions.
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.
