Six Apart Ltd., sometimes abbreviated 6A, is a software company known for creating the Movable Type blogware, TypePad blog hosting service, and Vox. The company also is the former owner of LiveJournal. Six Apart is headquartered in Tokyo. The name is a reference to the six-day age difference between its married co-founders, Ben and Mena Trott.
Justin Kan is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of live video platforms Justin.tv and Twitch, as well as the mobile social video application Socialcam. He is also the cofounder and former CEO of law-tech company Atrium. In 2024, Kan announced that he had founded Stash, a payment and e-commerce platform for video game developers.
Jaiku was a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter, founded a month before the latter. Jaiku was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that year. It was purchased by Google on October 9, 2007.
Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, Tumblr, Koo, and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.
Xobni was a San Francisco-based company that made software applications and services including products for Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices. It was founded in March 2006 by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina from Adam's dorm room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the Y Combinator summer founder's program. In late 2006, it relocated to San Francisco to be closer to Silicon Valley. It was acquired by Yahoo! in July 2013 for more than $60 million and shut down one year later.
Seesmic was a suite of freeware web, mobile, and desktop applications which allowed users to simultaneously manage user accounts for multiple social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.
Blippy was a social media sharing site operated from Palo Alto, California by a company of the same name, for users to post and follow each other's updates about their purchases of goods and services. It was described as the "Twitter of personal finance", and was often compared with Twitter because it was based on that company's open sharing model. One purpose of the site was to facilitate discussion and comparison shopping among people who are connected with each other online. As of July, 2010, the company primarily focused on social sharing of product and service reviews. The Blippy service was shut down as of May 2011.
Quora is a social question-and-answer website and online knowledge market headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that have been submitted by other users. As of 2020, the website was visited by 300 million users a month.
500px is a global online photo-sharing platform that is a subsidiary of Visual China Group. It is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was co-founded by Oleg Gutsol and Evgeny Tchebotarev on October 31, 2009.
Lanyrd was a conference directory website. It was created by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe and launched in 2010. The site was created while the couple were on honeymoon.
140 Proof is an advertising company that uses social data from many sources in targeting relevant ads based on consumers' interests as indicated by their social activity across networks.
Tilt.com, Inc. was a crowdfunding company founded in 2012 that allowed for groups and communities to collect, fundraise, or pool money online. James Beshara and Khaled Hussein launched the platform under the name Crowdtilt out of Y Combinator.
Topsy Labs was a social search and analytics company based in San Francisco, California. The company was a certified Twitter partner and maintained a comprehensive index of tweets, numbering in the hundreds of billions, dating back to Twitter's inception in 2006.
Bubbly was a social voice service working across feature phones and smartphones. For feature phones, users can record their voice by dialling a short code and speaking, as well as listen to popular posts. Subscribers get a text with the short code number for dialling into Bubbly's servers to have the voice message play back. To cater to smartphone users, Bubbly was made available on iOS and Android platforms in April 2012.
The history of Twitter, also known as X, can be traced back to a brainstorming session at Odeo.
Jared Friedman is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is a partner at Y Combinator in San Francisco, where he invests in and helps startups. Previously, Jared was the co-founder and CTO at Scribd, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users.
Kamcord was a social media platform where users post and interact through video content from their mobile devices. Kamcord has pioneered a new content format called "shots," short videos or stills of a user's phone screen annotated with facecam, voice commentary, text, highlighting/drawing, animations, and other tools.
Garry Tan is an American venture capitalist and executive who is the CEO of Y Combinator and a founder of Initialized Capital. He previously co-founded Posterous and Posthaven. He was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, and previously a partner at Y Combinator. Tan is also known for his engagement in San Francisco politics, both as a commenter on social media and as a political donor.
