Before I begin, let me just give a quick history lesson about Internet and social networking stuffs. For the matter to be less boring I have included the timeline view.
Atleast the Dynosaurs didnt had a Social Networking and some even predict thats since the Dianosaurs didnt had Noah in their friend list in facebook and twitter,they simply didnt know about the great flood and his ark.
Back to the main topic.Here i present a review for 10 sites mostly used by Indians/can be used by Indians.Here is one interesting comparison
1.Facebook
Facebook has toppled the chart and left behind orkut during the last quarter of 2009.The reason?Well people definitely liked the idea of a site where free games can be played just for casual time pass.But soon the casual timepass had changed and brought the idea of MMONG(Massive Multiplayer Online Neighbour Gaming),where the is all about neighbours.But games and apps alone didnt helped facebook.Facebook came with a unique solution to Orkut Scraps.Wall postings.Easy to view.The rea l catch was the looks..and the superior design which helped to accumulate all under one page.
Fun Facts
• 60+% of people online use Facebook to stalk their ex!
• 7. Facebook deletes accounts with strange sounding names like “Leboe”, “Allien”, etc. Guess it’s do with their policy of not allowing fake accounts and them thinking these are not valid names?
• Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is the world’s youngest billionaire! Mark’s surely made money off all of us.
• Syria has banned Facebook (it’s a country [for those that don't know]), apparently to prevent an uprising of sorts by people getting together.
• The Social Network is a 2010 biographical drama film about the founding of the social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits. The film was directed by David Fincher and features an ensemble cast including Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rashida Jones, Joseph Mazzello, and Rooney Mara.
• Facebook never actually described the meaning of Poke
2.Google
When one says Google, the first thing that comes to mind is the search engine.Truelly if google cant find it then there is less chance that the term doesnt even exists in the world of Internet.When initially google came,their database was not that big but in due course of time it truelly became the world's most used search engine.I've even seen people using the search engine to go to various websites instead of typing the name in address bar.The one search engine for all.I call it my life saver tool..google has an answer to every question..well almost every thing.
Fun Facts
• Google's name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.
• Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.
• Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages, including Chinese, Greek, Icelandic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Estonian. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google has a Klingon interface just in case. Try it out http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-klingon
• Googlers are multifaceted. One operations manager, who keeps the Google network in good health is a former neurosurgeon. One software engineer is a former rocket scientist. And the company's chef formerly prepared meals for members of The Grateful Dead and funkmeister George Clinton.
3.Gmail
Behold the first email service to offer in GB.No more deleting of old mails and even you can easily search them as well.Well as of now 7555.342850 MB of space and counting.Ive searched the internet hoping to find how gmail can offer so much storage that too increasing size but couldnt find it.Thats perhaps the only reason that gmail is more popular that other mail services.Truelly you can store all the emails since you opened the account till your death and all of them will be there neatly arranged.But a word of caution..Ever wondered what happens when you put all your money in one bank and then the bank goes bankrupt..So just a tip..start using outlook,its available with office package and can store all your emails..also keep a backup in google mail server but just in case..grab the mails to the harddisk.Check out the link to see how.http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77689.
4.Yahoo
Fun Facts
• Stanford Student’s Jerry Yang and David Filo first started Yahoo! in February of 1994 to keep track of their own interests on line. They named their project “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.”
• In April the name of Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was changed to Yahoo, which is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
• Yang and Filo added the exclamation point to the end of Yahoo! because “Yahoo” was already owned by a company that produced BBQ sauce
• The owners of Yahoo considered buying Google before went public. However, at the time Yahoo decided that a few billion dollars was too much to pay to buy out their competitor.
5.Orkut
Orkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google Inc.Once again needs no introduction one interesting fact about orkut is that though it is named after the creator Orkut Buyukkokten working as a software engineer in google.Recent changes have altered the looks of Orkut.
Fun Facts
The Story A boy lost his girlfriend in a train accident, but the her name nowhere appeared in the dead list. This boy grew up and became IT technical architect in his late 20s, and got achievements.He hired developers from the whole globe and plan to make a software where he could search for his girlfriend through the web, and things went as he ever planned. He found her, after losing millions of dollars and 3 long years! It was time to shut down the search operation, when the CEO of Google had a word with him and took over this application. This Software made a whopping 1 billion dollars profit in its first year, which we today know as ORKUT .The boy?s name is ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN . Yes it?s named after him only. Today he is paid a hefty sum by Google for the things we do like scrapping. He is expected to be the richest person by 2009.ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN today has 13 assistants to monitor his scrapbook & 8 to monitor his friends-list. He gets around 20,000 friend-requests a day & about 85,000 scraps !!!
Some other Cool Facts about this guy:
• He gets $12 from Google when every person registers to this website.
• He also gets $10 when you add somebody as a friend.
• He gets $8 when your friend?s friend adds you as a friend & gets $6 if anybody adds you as friend in the resulting chain.
• He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $4 when somebody scraps you.
• He also gets $200 for each photograph you upload on Orkut.
• He gets $2.5 when you add your friend in the crush-list or in the hot-list.
• He gets $2 when you become somebody?s fan.
• He gets $1.5 when somebody else becomes your fan.
• He even gets $1 every time you logout of Orkut.
• He gets $0.5 every time you just change your profile-photograph.
• He also gets $0.5 every time you read your friend?s scrap-book & $0.5 every time you view your friend?s friend-list.
It is left to the readers discretion to decide wether this is true or not.....
6.Blogger
The website which offers free blogging space and is patched with google has been tagged with 22% views originating from India.What is a blog?Well for a start..whatever I write and mail you guys is a blog which is also available at http://wastelandersdiary.blogspot.com/. For more details you can log on to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog for a blog wikipedia.If you dont write you can follow blogs.This is more like following the day to day activities of your living idols(like movie stars,popular science figure)
Facts
I dont know if there is any fun facts behind it but here is a list of plus points that I enjoy at blogger over other free blogging sites.
- Easy to use interface which gets you started in a minute.
- Email blog facility.Since the account is linked with Google, I can send emails to people as against to posting via rss feed.Dude this is india.Everyone wants a home delivery so a word of warning.If you publish something be sure to send emails initially.
7.Wikipedia
"Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 18 million articles (over 3.5 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking around seventh among all websites on Alexa and having 365 million readers."--From Wikipedia.
Well thats the point.Now a days people dont read encyclopedia to get information.They use wikipedia.Its the new online encyclopedia.Now with the launch of mobile version of the site mobile.wikipedia.org. the next generation will soon have all the information at their finger tips...hope they dont start to replace books eventually..
8.Youtube
The video hosting site which is ranked 5th in Alexa web site statistics is mainly used for video upload and viewing.Starting from cricket match to college hostel prank,the wide range of videos are daily uploaded and viewed by many.In fact unknowingly sometimes we post some videos in facebook which actually originated in youtube.The usage of this site mostly depends on users choice.
- All three founders (Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim) of Youtube were working for Paypal when they started Youtube.
- Youtube domain was registered on Valentines Day (February 14, 2005).
- 70% of Youtube’s registered users are from USA and half of Youtube users are under 20 years old.
- If Youtube was Hollywood, they have enough material to release 60,000 new films every week.
- More videos were uploaded on Youtube in last two months than if NBC, ABC, CBS had be airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948 (Since ABC started broadcasting).
- The total amount of bandwidth used by Youtube is about the same as used by entire internet in 2000.
- One needs over 1000 years of time to watch all videos on Youtube (but there will be billion of more videos uploaded on Youtube by then).
- Most popular category for uploaded videos is ‘Music’ having around 20% Youtube videos.
- United States users upload most of Youtube videos followed by UK and USA users also watch most Youtube videos followed by Japan.
- The first ever video that was uploaded on Youtube is by Jawed Karim (one of Youtube founders) titled “Me at zoo” on April 23rd, 2005 which is 18 seconds long
Rediff one of india's leading web site offering wide range of service(from Shopping to Dating) is still in the kick among the top giants like yahoo,gmail,hotmail.The site is offers a view in indian essence much like our own "Jaga da" of the local tea shop..offering the part of the pie thats very indian.Even with blogging service and matrimonials..he..he.Frankly speaking I had never used rediff so cant give a clear picture thus users opinion will definitely be put on priority.
10.Twitter
Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.As of recent Nov 10,there are around 2 milion users from india using twitter.Frankly speaking its just a message or like a wall post which your friends can see.But there is more than meets the eye.As against to facebook's status update the tweets(the call messages by this name) are more clearly visible,thanks to the interface.Its simple and limits the post to 140 words.Checkout the following site for some interesting tweets http://yearinreview.twitter.com/powerful-tweets/.
- Here is a link to fun facts about twitter
- •Twitter was created mainly to stay connected with a group of friends through SMS channels. It was never meant to be used on the internet much and that was the reason for its 140 character limit.
- Twitter was mostly funded through venture capitalists who funded most of the $ 50 million, Twitter is still operating on.
- Twitter was founded in 2006 and for the first 3 years as a company Twitter made a total of ‘zero’ dollars in revenues.
- Twitter is expected to make 1.54 billion dollars by the end of 2013 with over a billion users.
- Twitter has over over 65 millions tweets everyday and that averages to 750 tweets per second.
- There are over 70,000 registered applications for Twitter created mostly by people who have no connection to Twitter.
- The first tweet on Twitter was by Jack Dorsey and the tweet was “Just setting up my twttr” on 21st March 2006.
- There are over 75 million Twitter accounts of which only 2546 accounts are verified.
- Tweets like “i am having lunch’ became known as pointless babbles. A research showed that about 40% of the tweets are in this category.
- Twitter handles 24 billion search queries a month. Yahoo handles 9.4 billion search queries and Bing handles about 4.1 search queries. This means Twitter is the ranked #2 search engine behind Google which handles about 88 billion search queries
Well this pretty much wraps up the list.Now just to let you know the the numbering of the websites are not as per ranking,they are simply how i choose to write.And now that I come to think of it all my fellow Indian brothers and sisters(left one) should arm themself with the digital tools and start expressing themself.Or if not so then atleast listen to what others have to say.This may be actually a better planet if we all start to blog or use twitter or use the farmville to plant some trees??God what was I thinking.But in reality if you plant a tree and upload the pics or if you help a stray dog and tell a tale about it people can be influenced by it.
"Angels and Demons can't cross over onto our plane. So, instead we get what I call half-breeds. The influence peddlers. They can only whisper in our ears. But a single word can give you courage, or turn your favorite pleasure into your worst nightmare. Those with the demon's touch like those part angel, living alongside us. They call it the balance. I call it hypocritical bullshit. "
John Constantine
Dont ask me who he is.Watch the movie Constantine
2005 Release.
Well may be I got a little bit centy over the last paragraph..hey but this article was long and boring enough...See ya all next time with either of these 3 articles:
- Vampires
- Web Browsers make your life easy
- Kolkata from a different angle
Santanu Ghosal
i really useful article.thanks for sharing..
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