Social software, also known as social apps or social platform, include communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote cooperation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before. The opportunities offered by social software are instant connection and the opportunity to learn.An additional defining feature of social software is that apart from interaction and collaboration, it aggregates the collective behaviour of its users, allowing not only crowds to learn from an individual but individuals to learn from the crowds as well. Hence, the interactions enabled by social software can be one-on-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible.
Blogger is an American online content management system founded in 1999 which enables its users to write blog with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it before being acquired by Google in 2003. Google hosts the blogs, which can be accessed through a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be accessed from a user-owned custom domain by using DNS facilities to direct a domain to Google's servers. A user can have up to 100 blogs or websites per account.
This is a Glossary of Internet Terminology; words pertaining to Internet Technology, a subset of Computer Science.
ezboard, Inc., based in San Francisco, California, United States, was a provider of free and paid hosted Internet forums.
Delicious is 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.
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.
MSN Groups was a website part of the MSN network which hosted online communities, and which contained Web pages, hosted images, and contained a message board. MSN Groups was shut down on February 21, 2009, as part of a migration of online applications and services to the Windows Live brand. Windows Live Groups, a part of the Windows Live branding, was never marketed as, or intended to be a replacement for, MSN Groups.
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.
Geotagging, or GeoTagging, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names, and perhaps a time stamp.
BuzzNet is a photo, journal, and video-sharing social media network, currently owned by Hive Media. The network was owned by SpinMedia from its inception until September 2016. Like other social networking services, Buzznet is a platform for members to share content based on their personal interests. Unlike other social networking services that focus primarily on messaging and profile pages, Buzznet members participate in communities that are created around ideas, events and interests, most predominantly music, celebrities, and the media.
Meetro was a multi-network social messenger with location-based services (LBS). It was compatible with AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, GTalk, XMPP, and ICQ. Meetro's features made it useful for meeting people with similar interests in a given area, as well as bundling multiple messaging protocols into one program. Meetro was located in San Francisco, California.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.
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.
The Renren Network, formerly known as the Xiaonei Network, is a Chinese social networking service similar to Facebook. It was popular among college students. Renren Inc. has its headquarters in Chaoyang District, Beijing, with additional offices in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Renren had an $740m initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2011.
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.
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.
The Gmail interface makes Gmail unique amongst webmail systems for several reasons. Most evident to users are its search-oriented features and means of managing e-mail in a "conversation view" that is similar to an Internet forum.
XRumer is a piece of software made for spamming online forums and comment sections. It is marketed as a program for search engine optimization and was created by BotmasterLabs. It is able to register and post to forums with the aim of boosting search engine rankings. The program is able to bypass security techniques commonly used by many forums and blogs to deter automated spam, such as account registration, client detection, many forms of CAPTCHAs, and e-mail activation before posting. The program utilises SOCKS and HTTP proxies in an attempt to make it more difficult for administrators to block posts by source IP, and features a proxy checking tool to verify the integrity and anonymity of the proxies used.
Discourse is a free and open-source Internet forum software. Features include support for threading, categorization and tagging of discussions, configurable access control, live updates, expanding link previews, infinite scrolling, and real-time notifications. It allows for a high level of customizability via its plugin architecture and its theming system. It was released on August 26, 2014, by its founders, Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward and Sam Saffron.
