Social networking services

Popular in this category (147)

Facebook

Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American technology giant Meta Platforms. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to only Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities and, since 2006, anyone over 13 years old. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed 2.96 billion monthly active users, and ranked third worldwide among the most visited websites. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.

Entertainment, Society, Business and economy

TikTok

TikTok, and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 3 seconds to 10 minutes.

Entertainment, Society, Business and economy

Instagram

Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location — via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed.

Entertainment, Society

Twitter

Twitter, currently rebranding to X, is an online social media and social networking service operated by the American company X Corp., the successor of Twitter, Inc. On Twitter, users can post texts, images and videos known as "tweets". Registered users can tweet, like, "retweet" tweets, and direct message other registered users. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its application programming interfaces (APIs).

Entertainment, Business and economy

Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website.

Entertainment, Society, Business and economy

LinkedIn is a business and employment-oriented service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Founded on December 28, 2002, and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs. As of 2015, most of the company's revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals. As of April 2017, LinkedIn had 500 million members in 200 countries, out of which more than 106 million members are active. LinkedIn allows members to create profiles and "connections" to each other in an online social network which may represent real-world professional relationships. Members can invite anyone to become a connection. The "gated-access approach" is intended to build trust among the service's members. LinkedIn participated in the EU's International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles.

Entertainment

Snapchat

Snapchat is a multimedia messaging app used globally, created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, former students at Stanford University, and developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc.

Entertainment

Tinder

Tinder is a location-based social search mobile app that allows users to like or dislike other users, and allows users to chat if both parties swiped to the right. The app is often used as a hookup app. Information available to the users is based on pictures from Facebook, a short bio that users write themselves, and optionally, a linked Instagram or Spotify account.

Entertainment, Society

Messenger

Messenger is a non-free instant messaging app and platform developed by Meta Platforms. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the company revamped its messaging service in 2010, released standalone iOS and Android apps in 2011, and released standalone Facebook Portal hardware for Messenger calling in 2018. Later, Facebook launched a dedicated website interface, Messenger.com, and separated the messaging functionality from the main Facebook app, allowing users to use the web interface or download one of the standalone apps. In April 2020, Facebook released a Messenger desktop app for Windows and macOS.

Entertainment, Society, Business and economy

Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information on the World Wide Web using images and, on a smaller scale, GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. The site was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp and had 300 million monthly active users as of August 2019. It is operated by Pinterest, Inc., based in San Francisco.

Entertainment, Society, Technology and industry

Skype

Skype is a telecommunications application software product that specializes in providing video chat and voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, the Xbox One console, and smartwatches via the Internet and to regular telephones. Skype additionally provides instant messaging services. Users may transmit both text and video messages, and may exchange digital documents such as images, text, and video. Skype allows video conference calls.

Entertainment, Architecture, Society

Steam

Steam is a video game digital distribution service platform developed by Valve Corporation. It was launched in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games, but eventually expanded to include games from third-party publishers. Initially launched as a software client component to help keep Valve's games up-to-date, the Steam service has expanded to include web- and mobile-based interfaces for consumers and developers for third-party games. Between the standalone software client and online services, Steam offers digital rights management (DRM), matchmaking servers, video streaming, and social networking services. It also provides the user with installation and automatic updating of games, and community features such as friends lists and groups, cloud saving, and in-game voice and chat functionality.

Entertainment

SoundCloud

SoundCloud is an online audio distribution platform and music sharing website based in Berlin, Germany that enables its users to upload, promote, and share audio.

Entertainment, Society, Business and economy

Myspace

Myspace is an American social networking service. From 2005 to 2008, it was the largest social networking site in the world, reaching more than 100 million users per month.

Entertainment

WeChat

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. It was first released in 2011, and by 2018 it was one of the world's largest standalone mobile apps by monthly active users, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Described as one of the world's most powerful apps by Forbes, it is also known as China's "app for everything" and a "super app" because of its wide range of functions and platforms. In addition to China, it is also the most popular messaging app in Bhutan.

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