GOOGLE TO COMPETE WITH FACEBOOK???

What's this? The internet's search giant, GOOGLE is said to compete with the famous and number one social networking site FACEBOOK.

Wall Street Journal says Google is on their way on developing another social networking site aside from ORKUT which is a big business in South America and India. Some reports said the new networking site will be named as GOOGLE ME. Back in February, Google has launched Twitter's competitor Buzz but was condemned for its privacy isssues.

Facebook has a lot of games to offer as we know and Google is on their way to be the best rival as there have been reports that they are negotiating with Electronic Arts Inc.'s PLAYFISH, PLAYDOM INC., and Zynga Network. 

PLAYDOM INC. has a lot of networking games such as Sorority Life, Social City, Fanglies, Market Street, World Series Poker, Mobsters, Verdonia, Tiki Resort, Treetopia, Mobsters2(vendetta), Big City Life, Wildones, BOLA, and Mobsters Overdrive. Walt Disney Co. said earlier on Tuesday(July 27) that they are planning to buy PLAYDOM INC. for $ 563.2 M.

Now my question is would social networking fanatics and social gamers waste time on another social networking site? Will they leave facebook for Google Me as what they do to Friendster? We'll see...

PHILIPPINES, THE SOCIAL NETWORKING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD part 3

I have already given some information on the 2 biggest social networking site that has dominated the Philippines, now it's time to put some credits on other social networking site which were commonly used by fellow Filipinos.

Twitter is both a social networking and microblogging service site. It is known as a rich source of instant information.  It enables users to send and receive messages thru text messages otherwise  known as "tweets". Created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey who came up with an idea to put an sms service by an individual to small groups via the internet partially inspired by the sms group messaging service TXTMob. Its original name was twttr which was inspired by Flickr. It was first used for Odeo employees which later on introduced publicly on July of 2006. As of today twitter gained 1,500 percent growth in its registered users  with almost 500 percent growth on its employees.


Software Engineer Jack Dorsey, born on November 19, 1976 (33) Creator, Co-founder and Chairman of twitter. CEO of square and Advisor of UStream. Dorsey studied at New York University where he dropped out of to and left his job at a bike courier service as programmer in 1999 to move to San Francisco.

tumblr is a blogging site that allows user to post images, text, links, videos, quotes, and audio. Like twitter, users are allowed to follow other users and see their post on their dashboards and can click on the "like" button. Lately, tumblr has been accessible by way of an application for Blackberry mobile phone created by Mobelux. Tumblr is now averaging 15,000 new registered users daily.


Born on July 6, 1986, young multimillionaire David Karp (23), founder of tumblr,  grew  up in Manhattan. He studied in Calhoun School where his mother is a Science teacher. He dropped out at the age of 15. He then continue his studies by homeschooling. He is now known as the "wonder boy of the internet".

Plurk is now popular in the Philippines, like twitter it is a social networking and micro-blogging site that allows users to send short messages also known as "plurks". It also uses timeline which list the updates received in chronological order. Plurk was developed as a way of communication medium meant to form a balance between blogs and social networking. Plurk was developed and launched on the second quarter of  2008. It is created by a team called "The A-Team".

PHILIPPINES, THE SOCIAL NETWORKING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD part II

Here's another reason why Philippines was tagged as the social networking capital of the world.  Well, I have discussed about friendster on my previous post. Now, let me show you some information about the top social networking site FACEBOOK. Well, it is pretty obvious that Facebook is now a part of the Filipino's cyberculture.

ABOUT FACEBOOK
Facebook was launched in February 2004 and operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc.This site got its name from an annual book of Harvard University given students at the start of each school year to help them know each other better. Facebook's  idea started when it's founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote facemash on October 28, 2003 while attending Harvard University as a sophomore. He wrote it to represent Harvard's version of "HOT or NOT" and to made this possible he had to hacked into the university's  computer network.
On January of 2004, Zuckerberg began writing new codes for a new website 'thefacebook" which he then launched on February 4, 2004.Upon finishing the site he immediately put it on Kirkland's mailing list with the help of his friend Dustin Moskovitz, and at the end of the day they already got around 1200 to 1500 registrants.After 6 days from its launch, Zuckerberg faced accusations from fellow Harvard students who filed lawsuit against him but was later dismissed due to technicality.


Today,  facebook has about 9 million users from the Philippines alone. Gone are the days when you would probably hear your friends asking you to add them on friendster. There are a lot of reasons why people left friendster for facebook. It is obvious that that the latter has a nice and clean interface, it offers different applications from zynga like farmville, yoville, poker, nightclub city and many more that suits different ages, quizzes,  status box where you can let your friends know what is on your mind on a particular time, comments for your friends activities, post and status, chatbox where you can directly talk to your online friends without having to sign in to your instant messengers, you can also leave messages to your friend without having to log in to your e-mail and it also becomes an ideal site for those who has an organizations to update their members about their new projects and meetings and lately a place for politicians to gain support for their campaigns. Facebook also has its mobile version and not to forget the unlimited photo storage.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (26), the man behind the famous social networking site "facebook" . Born on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York and was raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He is also the CEO and President of facebook. His net worth?  $ 4.0 billion.

PHILIPPINES, THE SOCIAL NETWORKING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

Friendster is one of the 1st networking site in the internet. It was first introduced in 2002 and was launched on March 2003. It slowly gained popularity in the Southeast Asia through the Philippines.  Friendster's Engineering Director Chris Lunt who was by then curious of the web traffic that usually happens at night who noticed that  it was coming from the Philippines, and did you know that he trailed that it was Fil-Am marketing consultant Carmen Leilanie de Jesus as the first user who introduced Friendster to the Philppines.

Friendster was once the most visited website by Filipinos with almost 7 Million users. Their VP for global marketing David Jones said that the biggest percentage of their users is from the Philippines. Unfortunately, many Filipinos who loved Friendster left their account and are now on Facebook and their reason is that Friendster has a lot of technical problem and server delays. It was also been commented that it was a source of malwares such as "Koobface" worm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking_in_the_Philippines


ABOUT FRIENDSTER

Founded on March 22, 2002 by computer programmers Jonathan Abrams and Cris Emmanuel in Mountain View, California. It was officially launched on March 2003 with $12 million investment by Kleiner, Caufield, Byers, Benchmark Capital and private investigators and was quickly adopted by 3 million users.

PURPOSE
To offer a safe and enjoyable environment for users to interact with friends as well as to meet new individuals.

Jonathan Abrams, now aged 40 was the founder of friendster. Abrams received a  proposal from Goggle offering $30million for the site but turned it down and instead went the venture route taking $13million from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and Benchmark Capital. He now owns a bar and started a new networking site Socialzr.