Friendster was a U.S. social networking site based in Mountain View, CA, founded in 2003 by Jonathan Abrams. The company was sold in 2015 and became a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was originally a social networking service website. 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.
AbeBooks is an e-commerce global online marketplace with seven national domains that offers books, fine art, and collectables from sellers in 50+ countries. It has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2008.
Reid Garrett Hoffman CBE is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Hoffman was the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. On the Forbes 2019 list of the world's billionaires, Hoffman was ranked #1349 with a net worth of US$1.8 billion.
Shelfari was a social cataloging website. Shelfari users built virtual bookshelves of the titles they owned or had read, and could rate, review, tag, and discuss their books. Users could also create groups that other members could join, create discussions, and talk about books, or other topics. Recommendations could be sent to friends on the site for what books to read.
From 2006 to 2015, TheFind.com was a discovery shopping search engine targeting lifestyle products such as apparel, accessories, home and garden, fitness, kids and family, and health and beauty.
Goodreads is a social cataloging website that allows individuals to freely search its database of books, annotations, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. The website's offices are located in San Francisco. The company is owned by the online retailer Amazon.
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.
Scribd is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform.
Rakuten OverDrive, Inc. is an American digital distributor of eBooks, audiobooks, music, and video titles. The company provides secure management, digital rights management and download fulfillment services for publishers, libraries, schools, and retailers. OverDrive's catalog includes more than 2 million digital titles from more than 5,000 publishers. The company's global network includes more than 43,000 public libraries, K-12 schools, colleges and universities, and corporations in 75 countries worldwide. OverDrive was founded in 1986 and is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
WeMix was an online music creation community and user-generated record label founded in 2007 by hip-hop musician and actor Christopher "Ludacris" Bridges and reality TV show producer Matt Apfel. It was a privately held joint venture between Ludacris’ Disturbing tha Peace label and MegaMobile TV. The site was a social network that featured a content browsing/filtering structure similar to YouTube. WeMix allowed artists to interact, share their music, give feedback, and collaborate with other artists. The site was free to all users and had an internet-advertising business model.
Random House of Canada was the Canadian distributor for Random House, Inc. from 1944 until 2013. On July 1, 2013, it amalgamated with Penguin Canada to become Penguin Random House Canada.
Wattpad is an Internet community for readers and writers to publish new user-generated stories in different genres, including classics, general fiction, historical fiction, non-fiction, poetry, fan-fiction, spiritual, humor, and teen fiction. It aims to create social communities around stories for both amateur and established writers.
Rakuten Kobo Inc., or simply Kobo, is a Canadian company which sells e-books, audiobooks, e-readers and tablet computers. It is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario and is a subsidiary of the Japanese e-commerce conglomerate Rakuten. The name Kobo is an anagram of book.
Facebook is a social networking service launched as FaceMash in July 2003, but later changing to TheFacebook on February 4, 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommate and fellow Harvard University student 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 and older.
Zynga Poker is a social game developed by Zynga as an application for the social-networking website Facebook as well as Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Windows, MySpace, Tagged, and Google+. It was created and launched in July 2007 by a team consisting of some of the founders of the company including Justin Waldron, Michael Luxton, and Eric Schiermeyer. According to a March 2011 ESPN article, with 38 million players, Zynga Poker is the largest poker site in the world. According to a 2014 article by Dean Takahashi, about 350 million have played Zynga Poker, and the game has millions of daily players.
Myntra is an Indian fashion e-commerce company headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. The company was founded in 2007 to sell personalized gift items.
BranchOut was a Facebook application designed for finding jobs, networking professionally, and recruiting employees. It was founded by Rick Marini in July 2010, and was, as of March 2012, the largest professional networking service on Facebook. The company sold its assets to HR Software Company 1-Page in November 2014 and the staff was picked up by Hearst.
Everloop was an online social media site for youngsters under 13.
Zola Books is a New York based social eBook retailer that combines a social network, bookseller and recommendation engine. Founded by literary agents and launched in September 2012. the company was described by the Washington Post as "a venture whose strategy is to combine all three of the e-book world’s major market functions — retailing, curation and social-networking — in an ambitious bid to become a one-stop destination for book lovers on the Web".
