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Social Media History - Growth
By: Christy Young
April 4, 2012
Table of Contents
Facebook: ................................................................................................................4
Milestones ...................................................................................................................................................................5
Financials ....................................................................................................................................................................6
Technology Growth: ...............................................................................................................................................7
Community Growth: ...............................................................................................................................................9
Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 10
Instagram Acquistion .......................................................................................................................................... 11
Twitter: ................................................................................................................... 13
Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 15
Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 15
Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 16
Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 17
Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 18
Pinterest: ................................................................................................................ 20
Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 23
Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 23
Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 23
Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 24
Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 24
Why it‘s the fastest growing: ........................................................................................................................... 24
Google+:................................................................................................................. 26
Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 28
Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 28
Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 29
Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 30
Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 30
Linkedin: ................................................................................................................ 31
Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 32
Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 32
Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 33
Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 34
Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 34
Myspace ................................................................................................................. 35
Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 35
Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 35
Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 36
Community Growth: ............................................................................................................................................ 37
Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 37
Tumblr: ................................................................................................................... 38
Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 40
Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 40
Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 42
Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 42
Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 42



                                                                                                                                                                             2
Foursquare: ........................................................................................................... 43
Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 44
Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 44
Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 44
Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 45
Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 46
StumbleUpon: ....................................................................................................... 47
Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 48
Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 48
Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 49
Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 49
Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 50
Reddit: .................................................................................................................... 51
Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 53
Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 53
Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 53
Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 54
Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 54
Sources: ................................................................................................................. 56




                                                                                                                                                                            3
Facebook:




            4
Facebook is a social networking service and website.

Milestones

Feb 2004   Launched, only Harvard students invited
March 2004 Ivy league schools and Stanford
June 2004 First Investment from PayPal co cofounder Peter Thiel US$500,000
           in exchange for 7% of the company
Dec 2004   One million members have created profiles on the site.
Sep. 2005 High School version launched on invite basis
Oct. 2005  Global expansion, 21 English Universitys, 30 Uni. in Mexico, Puerto
           Rico, US Virgin Islands
Dec 2005   Global Expansion bringing its size to 2,000+ colleges and 25,000 +
           high schools throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the
           United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland.
Sept 2006 Open to 13 and older with valid email address
Sept 2006 Facebook launched the news feed and mini feed feature. At the
           time it was a big step change for Facebook users, who were not
           used to their every move being tracked in a general stream by all of
           their Facebook friends
May 2007   Facebook opened up its API to developers, allowing them to use to
           platform to launch widgets and games. This development led to a
           major reinvention of the network as a social games platform, with
           the advent of popular games such as Farmville.
Sept. 2009 The aim of the service was to exploit the power of "word of mouth"
           marketing. It inserted details of purchases made at participating
           websites in to the news feed of Facebook users, making it visible to
           all their friends. But some users complained that that they had not
           been aware these details would be shared. Zuckerberg, was forced
           in to a humiliating U-turn, admitting that the service had been a
           mistake, and changing the rules so that Beacon became opt-in
           rather than opt-out. Beacon was shut down completely in
           September 2009, following a class-action lawsuit from disgruntled
           Facebook users.
2010       Began to pro-actively involve its users in running the website by
           inviting them to become beta testers after passing a question-and-
           answer-based selection process
July 2010  Facebook.com was the top social network across eight individual
           markets in the Southeast Asia/Oceania region (Philippines,
           Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong
           Kong and Vietnam
           Facebook reached 500 million registered members, the equivalent
           of connecting with eight per cent of the world‘s population.
Today      Facebook has over 800 million monthly active users according to
           their own statistics. Over 350 million of these participants are
           accessing Facebook through their mobile phones. Facebook has


                                                                             5
successfully integrated various mobile platforms that are modelled
             for iPhones, iPads, androids, blackberries and other forums to
             provide access to the site at all times. In total, 33% of Facebook
             traffic comes from mobile phone accessibility.
April 2012   Facebook acquires Instagram

Financials




June 2004    First Investment from PayPal co cofounder Peter Thiel US$500,000
             in exchange for 7% of the company




                                                                             6
June 2005  $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, and then
           $27.5 million more from Greylock Partners. A leaked cash flow
           statement showed that during the 2005 fiscal year, Facebook had a
           net loss of $3.63 million.
March 2006 Facebook reportedly declined an offer of $750 million from an
           unknown bidder, and it was rumored the asking price rose as high
           as $2 billion
Sept. 2006 Serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo! took place concerning
           acquisition of Facebook, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion.
           Thiel, by then a board member of Facebook, indicated that
           Facebook's internal valuation was around $8 billion based on their
           projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, comparable to Viacom's
           MTV brand, a company with a shared target demographic
           audience.
Oct 2007   Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of
           Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of
           around $15 billion.
           Microsoft's purchase also included rights to place international ads
           on Facebook.
Nov 2007   Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing invested $60 million in Facebook.
Sept 2009 Facebook claimed that it had turned cash flow positive for the
           first time.
Early 2012 Facebook disclosed that its profits had jumped 65% to $1 billion in
           the previous year as its revenue which is mainly from advertising
           had jumped almost 90% to $3.71 billion. 56% of its advertising
           revenue comes from the U.S alone, it also reported that 12% of its
           revenue comes from Zynga the popular social network game
           development company. Payments and other fees were $557 million
           up from $106 million the previous year.
IPO info:  The New York Post reported that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
           has told Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and
           other banks that are involved the value of $75 billion to $100 billion
           IPO in his company, which is use to stop leaking details to the
           press about the upcoming event.


Technology Growth:

             In August 2009, Facebook acquired social media real-time news
             aggregator FriendFeed, a startup created by the former Google
             employee and Gmail's first engineer Paul Buchheit who, while at
             Google, coined the phrase "Don't be evil".In September 2009,
             Facebook claimed that it had turned cash flow positive for the first
             time.In February 2010, Facebook acquired Malaysian contact-
             importing startup Octazen Solutions.On April 2, 2010, Facebook
             announced acquisition of photo-sharing service called Divvyshot for


                                                                               7
an undisclosed amount.In June 2010, an online marketplace for
            trading private company stock reflected a valuation of $11.5 billion.
Early Years Facebook users were limited to 60 photos per album.
Aug 2006    Facebook Notes was introduced, a blogging feature that allowed
            tags and embeddable images. Users were later able to import blogs
            from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services.
Sept 2006 News Feed was announced, which appears on every user's
            homepage and highlights information including profile changes,
            upcoming events, and birthdays of the user's friends.
                    Initially, the News Feed caused dissatisfaction among Facebook users;
                    some complained it was too cluttered and full of undesired information,
                    others were concerned that it made it too easy for others to track
                    individual activities (such as relationship status changes, events, and
                    conversations with other users).

                    In response, Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include
                    appropriate customizable privacy features. Since then, users have been
                    able to control what types of information are shared automatically with
                    friends.
Feb 2007     Facebook launched Gifts on which allows users to send virtual gifts
             to their friends that appear on the recipient's profile. Gifts cost $1.00
             each to purchase, and a personalized message can be attached to
             each gift.
May 2007     Facebook launched Marketplace, which lets users post free
             classified ads
July 2007    Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall,
             whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only.
April 2008   Facebook released a Comet-based instant messaging application
             called "Chat" to several networks, which allows users to
             communicate with friends and is similar in functionality to desktop-
             based instant messengers.
July 2008    Facebook introduced "Facebook Beta", a significant redesign of its
             user interface on selected networks. The Mini-Feed and Wall were
             consolidated, profiles were separated into tabbed sections, and an
             effort was made to create a "cleaner" look. Users have choice to
             switch
Sept 2008    Facebook began migrating all users to the new version of Minifeed
             and Wall
Dec 2008     Facebook was testing a simpler signup process
May 2009     Photo limit has been increased to 200 photos per album.
June 2009    Facebook introduced a "Usernames" feature, whereby pages can
             be        linked       with     simpler       URLs          such       as
             http://www.facebook.com/facebook                  instead              of
             http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20531316728
June 2009    Facebook available on most Smart Phones. More than 425 million
             active users access Facebook through mobile devices across 200
             mobile operators in 60 countries



                                                                                             8
Feb 2010   Facebook was granted a patenton certain aspects of its News
           Feed.
Nov 2010   Facebook announced a new "Facebook Messages" service.
           Facebook Messages took 15 months to develop.
April 2011 Facebook users have had the ability to make live voice calls via
           Facebook Chat, allowing users to chat with others from all over the
           world. This feature, which is provided free through T-Mobile's new
           Bobsled service, lets the user add voice to the current Facebook
           Chat as well as leave voice messages on Facebook
July 2011  Facebook launched its video calling services using Skype as its
           technology partner. It allows one to one calling using a Skype Rest
           API.
Sept 2011 Facebook launched a Subscribe button. The feature allows for
           users to follow public updates, and these are the people most often
           broadcasting their ideas.
Feb 2012   Facebook is introducing ‗Verified Account‘ concept like that of
           Twitter & Google+. Though as of 3 March 2012, verified accounts
           don‘t get any badges or denotations, but such accounts will get
           more priority in ‗Subscription Suggestions‘ of Facebook.
March 2012 Facebook officially launched its Messenger for Windows
April 2012 Facebook acquires Instagram

Community Growth:




                                                                            9
April 2008 Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly
           unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace
March 2010 Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people
           visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010
June 2011 Release of statistics by DoubleClick showed that Facebook
           reached one trillion pageviews in the month, making it the most
           visited website in the world.




Leadership / Staffing:

Jan 2004 – 2
Mar 2004 – 4
Aug 2009 –1000
Feb 2010 – 1200
May 2011 - 2000
July 2011 - 2500
March 2012 - 3200
This is a particularly tough metric, as Facebook doesn't release that data. The
latest estimate, from an in-depth profile of chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg
in the current issue of The New Yorker, came in at 2,500 employees. That's close
to double the estimates reported for early 2010.




                                                                                 10
Originally called thefacebook, Facebook was founded by former-Harvard student
Mark Zuckerberg (while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with
some financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Within months, Facebook and its core
idea spread across the dorm rooms of Harvard where it was very well received.
Soon enough, it was extended to Stanford and Yale where, like Harvard, it was
widely endorsed.

Before he knew it, Mark Zuckerberg was joined by two other fellow Harvard-
students – Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes – to help him grow the site to the
next level. Only months later when it was officially a national student network
phenomenon, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their
dreams and run Facebook full time. In August 2005, thefacebook was officially
called Facebook and the domain facebook.com was purchased for a reported
$200,000.


Instagram Acquistion

What: Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take a
photo, apply a digital filter to it, and then share it on a variety of social networking
services, including Instagram's own. A distinctive feature confines photos to a
square shape, similar to Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid images, in contrast to the
4:3 aspect ratio typically used by mobile device cameras.

History of Acquisition:Instagram was initially supported on iPhone, iPad, and
iPod Touch; in April 2012, the company added support for Android camera
phones running 2.2 (Froyo) or higher. It is distributed via the iTunes App Store
and Google Play.

On April 9, 2012, Facebook announced it would acquire the company (and its 13
employees) for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock, with plans to keep it
independently managed.

That same week, Instagram raised $50 million from venture capitalists for a
share of the company that valued it at $500 million. On April 9th, it was
announced that Instagram would be acquired by Facebook for approximately $1
billion in cash and stock. The deal, which was made just before Facebook was
scheduled to go public, cost Facebook about a quarter of the cash-on-hand they
had as of the end of 2011; the deal was for a company characterized as having
"lots of buzz but no business model" and the price was contrasted with the $35
million Yahoo! paid for Flickr in 2007, a website which has since become among
the 50 most popular in the world. Mark Zuckerberg noted that Facebook was
"committed to building and growing Instagram independently", in contrast to its
common practice of, as CNNMoney.com put it, buying "hot startups, kill[ing] their
products, and redeploy[ing] their staff on other projects."




                                                                                     11
Community: By December 2010, Instagram had one million registered users. In
June 2011 Instagram announced five million users, passing ten million in
September the same year.

Instagram announced that 100 million photos had been uploaded to its service as
of July 2011. The total reached 150 million in Augus. In April 2012, it was
announced that over 30 million accounts were set up on Instagram.

Instagram's new Android version in Google Play crossed more than one million
downloads within 12 hours.




                                                                               12
Twitter:




           13
14
Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging
service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts
of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets".

Milestones

March 2006 Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams
            (launched publicly in July 2006)
            The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo
            employees and
July 2006   The full version was introduced publicly
Oct 2006    In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other
            members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo
            and all of its assets – including Odeo.com and Twitter.com – from
            the investors and shareholders
Feb 2007    The 140 character limit to messages is introduced. ―One could
            change the world with 140 characters‖
April 2007 Twitter spun off into its own company
Dec 2007    500,000 tweets posted per quarter
Dec 2008    100 million tweets posted per quarter
2008 – 2009 Twitter had annual growth of 1,382 percent, increasing from
            475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February
            2009
Jan 2009    Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site
            in from its previous rank of twenty-second.
March 2009 A Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing website
            in the Member Communities
April 2009 Twitter adjusted its web interface, adding a search bar and a
            sidebar of "trending topics" — the most common phrases appearing
            in messages. Biz Stone explains that all messages are instantly
            indexed and that "with this newly launched feature, Twitter has
            become something unexpectedly important – a discovery engine for
            finding out what is happening right now.
Dec 2009    2 billion tweets are posted per quarter
June 2010 65 million tweets posted each day (750 tweets/second)
Sept 2010 Twitter launched a redesigned siteincluding a new logo.
March 2011 140 million tweets posted per day
March 2012 Twitter celebrated it's sixth birthday while also announcing that it
            has 140 million users and sees 340 million tweets per day. The
            number of users is up 40% from their September 2011 number,
            which was said to have been at 100 million at the time
March 2012, Twitter became available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu, the
            first right-to-left language versions of the site. About 13,000
            volunteers helped with translating the menu options.

Financials

                                                                             15
Twitter raised over US$57 million from venture capitalist growth funding, although
exact numbers are not publicly disclosed.

Round A Funding 2006/7 ($1-5 million)
As chief executive officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of capital
funding by the venture capitalists who backed the company.Twitter's first A round
of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between
$1 million and $5 million.

Round B Funding 2008 ($22 million)
Its second B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million

Round C Funding 2009 ($35 million)
Its third C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture
Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other
investors including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Insight Venture
Partners. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark
Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.

August 2010 ($800 million)
In August, 2010 Twitter announced a "significant" investment lead by Digital Sky
Technologies that, at $800 million, was reported to be the largest venture round
in history

Dec 2010 ($200 million)
The company raised $200 million in new venture capital in December 2010, at a
valuation of approximately $3.7 billion.

March 2011 sold 35,000 shares
35,000 Twitter shares sold for $34.50 each on Sharespost, an implied valuation
of $7.8 billion.

December 2011 Private Investor
The Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal invested $300 million in Twitter. The
company was valued at $8.4 billion at the time.

Initial Public Offering
Twitter has been identified as a possible candidate for an initial public offering by
2013

Technology Growth

2007-2011     The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework
              deployed on a performance enhanced Ruby Enterprise Edition
              implementation of Ruby.




                                                                                  16
March 2007 The messages were handled by a Ruby persistent queue server
           called Starling
Early 2009 Messages were gradually replaced with a software server written in
           Scala. The service's application programming interface (API) allows
           other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter.[
April 2010 Twitter acquired application developer Atebits. They had developed
           the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for the Mac
           and iPhone. The application, now called "Twitter" and distributed
           free of charge, is the official Twitter client for the iPhone, iPad and
           Mac
           March 2010 URL Shorterner - Having previously used the services
           of third parties TinyURL and bit.ly,Twitter began experimenting with
           its own URL shortening service for direct messages in March 2010
           using the twt.tl domain, before it purchased the t.co domain. The
           service was tested on the main site using the accounts
           @TwitterAPI, @rsarver and @raffi. On September 2, 2010, an
           email from Twitter to users said they would be expanding the roll-
           out of the service to users. On June 7, 2011, Twitter announced
           that it was rolling out the feature.

Sept 2010    The company began rolling out "New Twitter", an entirely revamped
             edition of twitter.com. Changes included the ability to see pictures
             and videos without leaving Twitter itself by clicking on individual
             tweets which contain links to images and clips from a variety of
             supported websites including YouTube and Flickr, and a complete
             overhaul of the interface, which shifted links such as '@mentions'
             and 'Retweets' above the Twitter stream, while 'Messages' and 'Log
             Out' became accessible via a black bar at the very top of
             twitter.com
April 2011   Twitter tested a new homepage and phased out the "Old Twitter."
April 2011   Twitter engineers confirmed they had switched away from their
             Ruby on Rails search-stack, to a Java server they call Blender
Dec 2011     Twitter overhauled its website once more to feature the "Fly"
             design, which the service says is easier for new users to follow and
             promotes advertising. In addition to the Home button, the Connect
             and Discover buttons were introduced along with a redesigned
             profile and timeline of Tweets.
Feb 2012     Twitter and Yandex agreed to a partnership. Yandex, a Russian
             search engine, finds value within the partnership due to Twitter‘s
             real time news feeds. Twitter‘s director of business development
             explained that it is important to have Twitter content where Twitter
             users go.



Community Growth


                                                                               17
March 2007 The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by
           Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference. During the event,
           Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000."The
           Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the
           conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages,"
           remarked Newsweek‘s Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-
           goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and
           speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance
           touted it.
2007       It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007.
2008       It had 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008
Feb 2010   Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day
March 2010 The company recorded over 70,000 registered applications
June 2010 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets
           sent each second, according to Twitter.
March 2011 140 million tweets posted daily.

      Twitter has a user retention rate of forty percent.

      Twitter's usage spikes during prominent events. When American singer
      Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after
      users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at
      a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.

      Twitter is mainly used by older adults who might not have used other
      social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst
      studying social media. "Adults are just catching up to what teens have
      been doing for years," he said.According to comScore only eleven percent
      of Twitter's users are aged twelve to seventeen



                                                            Content of Tweets according to
                                                            Pear Analytics
                                                             News
                                                             Spam
                                                             Self-promotion
                                                             Pointless babble
                                                             Conversational
                                                             Pass-along value




                                     Leadership / Staffing:

Jan 2009 – 22


                                                                                       18
Jan 2010 – 110
March 2010 - 140
June 2010 - 200

Twitter is also increasingly used for making TV more interactive and social. This
effect is sometimes referred to as the "virtual watercooler" or social television —
the practice has been called "chatterboxing".




                                                                                19
Pinterest:




             20
21
22
Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that
allows users to create and manage theme-based image
collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more.

Milestones

Dec 2009- June 2011       Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site
            out of a small apartment until the summer of 2011.
Dec 2009    Development of Pinterest began by co-founders Ben Silbermann
            and Paul Sciarra
March 2010 Launch closed Beta. it was available to a small group of colleges
            and family members.
            Founder Ben Silbermann said he personally wrote to the site's first
            5,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting
            with some of its users
Dec 2010    Nine months after launch the website had 10,000 users
Sept 2011 Pinterest Mobile, launched September 2011, is the version of
            website for non-iPhone users.
Dec 2011    the site became one of the top 10 largest social network services,
            according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week
Jan 2012    it drove more referral traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube,
            and Google+. The site had 11.7 million unique users, making it
            the fastest site in history to break through the 10 million
            unique visitor mark.



Financials

Early 2011   The company secured a $10 million USD Series A financing led by
             Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners.
Oct 2011     The company secured $27 million USD in funding from Andreessen
             Horowitz, which valued the company at $200 million USD.
Pinterest has received further funding from Andreessen Horowitz in the form of a
             Series B investment valued at $37.5 million USD.

Since its inception three years ago, it has developed into a well-funded site
financially supported by a group of successful entrepreneurs and investors
including: Jack Abraham (Milo), Michael Birch (Bebo), Scott Belsky (Behance),
Shana Fisher (Highline Venture Partners), Ron Conway (SV Angel), Kevin Hartz
(EventBrite), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Hank Vigil, Fritz Lanman, and Brian S.
Cohen

Technology Growth



                                                                             23
Pinterest currently uses the Skimlinks server to generate income by modifying
users' affiliate links to commercial sites. This works by replacing the original
affiliate tracking code with Pinterest's tracking code, where any payment is
passed to Pinterest instead of the original affiliate.
In other words, Pinterest receives a portion of the sale when a user purchases an
item since Pinterest connects (seamlessly through Skimlinks) users directly to
the company‘s commercial website. Unfortunately the model ―does not seem to
add up to a major amount of money, because a large majority of posts originate
from Tumblr and Facebook, and are not commercial products.

Community Growth

Pinterest's wide reach helped it achieve an average of 11 million visits each week
in December 2011. Most of the site's users are female, with 97% of the site's
Facebook "likes" being made by women.

The site has been popular with American women and, in 2012, it was reported
that 83% of the US users were women. In Britain, however, 56% of the user were
male and their age profile was different too, being about 10 years younger than
the US, where the age range was typically 35-44.

Leadership / Staffing:

March 2012 Small Pinterest staff (last reported at under 20)

Why it’s the fastest growing:

Pinterest that acts as a clipping service of storing ideas is a fast growing social
networking site. Most of the women have become addicted since it is about
sharing images and ideas alone dissimilar to other online media, which create
negativity to some extent revealing competitive spirit. Sharing the amazing things
that you find in your lifespan through Pinterest, it helps you to adorn your living
place, organize various events, and prepare yummy recipes. It features like
surfing pins of your interest collectively as pin boards from people you follow,
repinning, commenting, 'liking' on pins of your choice and pinning your own
unique                            photographed                             images.

Spending an average of 98 minutes a month on Pinterest in comparison to 150
minutes on Tumblr and 420 minutes on Facebook as per the survey taken for six
months it is noted that monthly visits by the users to the Pinterest raised to
866%. What would be the triggering factors for this popularity in a short time? Let
me    look    into   the   secrets     of    this    addiction     for    Pinterest.

Simplicity
Major reason for the success is the simpleness in its outward design that lets the


                                                                                 24
users to scroll over the images without much dig and deviation of the content.
Images that have been finely photographed and look artful are center of
attraction filling most of the space with minimal comments neatly piled under
photographs. Information has been kept free of icon in a sleek manner with
action buttons left concealed unless the users scroll them over. Compilation of
images fascinates the Pinterest users to get addicted to the site. Are you crazy to
watch over teal-shaded guitars? You can find an image board for amazing
guitars                                  in                                    teal.

Free of personal content
Since Pinterest has evolved primarily as a photo-sharing medium its simple and
appealing look is interest-evoked for surfers who are already fatigued with
Facebook/Twitter/Orkut and so on. Pinterest allows the users to be more public
only about what they are interested but not exhibiting personal content or
privacy-related                                                        issues.

Easily accessible
Pinterest can be easily accessed from the app to the browser plug-in. You can
access without logging into the site unlike Facebook or other sites and make pin
boards with the Pin-it browser plug-in. Through repin button images viewed on
the    current    web     site   can      be   tapped    into    the    Pinterest.

Becoming popular
You would become popular through Pinterest social catalog of images pinned by
you because your new pins/photos are featured on the front page. Added to this,
since you are connected to Facebook/Twitter Pinterest allows your buddies from
Facebook/Twitter   to    follow  your    pins     and     promote    repinning.

Boosting confidence
Pinterest boosts the confidence level into the users' mind with idea boards
encouraging 'I too can do that.' The users who would like to pin revisits Pinterest
often desirous of creating something new with great fervor.




                                                                                 25
Google+:




           26
27
Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus,
sometimes abbreviated as G+) is a social networking and
identity service, operated by Google Inc.


Milestones

June 28 ‗11 The service was launched on June 28, 2011, in an invitation-only
            "field testing" phase.
June 29 ‗11 (The following day) existing users were allowed to invite friends
            who were over 18 years of age to the service to create their own
            accounts. This was suspended the next day due to an "insane
            demand" for accounts.
July 14 ‗11 Google announced that Google+ had reached 10 million users just
            two weeks after the launch of a "limited" trial phase. After four
            weeks in operation, it had reached 25 million unique visitors.
Aug 6 ‗11   Each Google+ member had 150 invitations to give out,
Sept 2011 Google+ was opened to everyone 18 years of age or older without
            the need for an invitation.
Oct 2011    The service reached 40 million users
Oct 2011    Google announced that Google+ now supports Google Apps users
            (if the user's domain administrator has enabled the service).
Oct 2011    Google implements hastags
Nov 2011    Google launched Google+ Pages, which will let businesses connect
            with fans in a manner similar to Facebook Pages. These
            businesses will receive corporate accounts to start sharing
            information about themselves and invite others to join in on the
            conversation.
Dec 2011    The site was adding an estimated number of 625,000 new users a
            day, adding almost a quarter of its total user base joining in
            December alone which may total 400 million members by the end
            of 2012
Jan 2012    It was opened for a younger age group (13+ years old in US and
            most countries, 14+ in South Korea and Spain, 16+ in Netherlands)
Jan 2012    Google+ had surpassed a user base of 90 million.
Feb 2012    Users are only spending 3.3 minutes monthly on Google+ which is
            a downward trend from 4.8 minutes in December and 5.1 minutes
            in November compared to Facebook users currently spending 7.5
            hours using Facebook monthly.

Financials

It‘s a well-known fact that Google is a generally wealthy company. This is why
Google+ is not making revenue generation on the social platform a priority.




                                                                           28
With money coming in all over the place via AdWords and AdSense, Google+
has the potential to remain ad-free for years without needing to tweak the
service. Services like Facebook, on the other hand, need to make
advertisements a priority as these serve as their main form of income.

Google‘s VP of Product Bradley Horowitz has also confirmed our speculations
that Google+‘s main objective will not be to monetize the social network. ―It‘s not
the highest priority. And it would be premature to come up with that before we
understand how it‘s used. But if we do a good job of serving users, we can stick
to the Google philosophy that ads are a kind of tax on the product. So, for
example, if you and I are talking about where we‘re going for dinner on Sunday,
and the system is smart enough to recognize the nature of that discussion and
offer me a 20 percent discount for a local restaurant, that‘s not a nuisance. That‘s
an incredibly valuable offer.‖

Google+ users can rejoice in knowing that future use on the platform won‘t be
inundated with several ads pestering them to check out this or that. As Horowitz
mentioned, advertisements will instead add value to the conversations we have
on Google+ versus simply spamming us with irrelevant nonsense.

Google‘s IPO: Our Initial Public Offering of 19,605,052 shares of Class A
common stock took place on Wall Street on August 18, 2004.

Technology Growth

According to Joseph Smarr, technical lead on the Google+ team (former Plaxo
CTO) Google+ is a typical Google web application: it uses Java servlets for the
server code and JavaScript for the browser-side of the UI, largely built with
Google's Closure framework, including the JavaScript compiler and the template
system. They use the HTML5 History API to maintain good looking URLs in
modern browsers despite it being an AJAX app. To achieve fast response times
Google often renders the Closure templates on the server-side to render it before
any JavaScript is loaded; then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes, hooks
up event handlers etc. The backends are built mostly on top of BigTable and
Colossus/GFS, and other common Google technologies such as MapReduce.

June 2011     Released with features such as the ―Stream‖ which occupies the
              middle of three columns on the page, users see updates from those
              in their Circles; ―Circles‖ enable users to organize people into
              groups for sharing; ―Hangouts‖ are places used to facilitate group
              video chat (with a maximum of 10 people participating in a single
              Hangout at any point in time); ―Messenger‖ ―Instant Upload‖
              ―Sparks‖ a front-end to Google Search;
Aug 2011      "Games" (social gaming) had 16 games when launched on August
              11, 2011, which has since been expanded to 38.




                                                                                 29
Aug 2011    Google added a new addition to "Hangouts" - clicking on the Share
            button under any YouTube video reveals an icon that suggests
            watching the video with friends in a Google+ hangout.
Sep 2011    Users can share Circles; it's a one-time share, so if the creator of
            the Circle updates the members, people's shared copies won't be
            updated.
Oct 2011    Google implements hastags
Oct 2011    Creative Kit, ―What‘s hot‖ stream and Ripples are introduced.
            Google + is now available to all Google Apps
Nov 2011    Google+ launches Pages and Direct Connect
Nov 2011    Google+ Badges are officially available
Dec 2011    New integrations with Gmail and Contacts are introduced
Dec 2011    New features: stream slider, more useful notifications, multiple
            administrators for pages, new lightbox for photos
Jan 2012    Google released "Search plus Your World", which inserts content
            shared on Google+ profiles and brand pages under Web Search
            results. The feature, which is opt-in, was received with controversy
            over the emphasis of Google+ profiles over other social networking
            services' user profiles (i.e., Facebook and Twitter). The feature
            builds upon the earlier "Social Search" feature which indexes
            content shared or published by authors; "Social Search", however,
            relied partly upon returns from non-Google services, such as
            Twitter and Flickr.

Community Growth

     Early adopters of Google+ have been mostly male (71.24%). The
     dominant age bracket (35%) is between 25 and 34
     A survey estimates 13% of U.S. adults have joined Google+; it is projected
     to have 22% of U.S. adults in a year

June 2011   Google+ introduced
July 2011   Google+ has 10 million users
Aug 2011    All Google+ users receive 150 invitations to give out
Sept 2011   Google+ open to everyone 18 or older (invites not required)
Oct 2011    Google+ has 40 million users
Dec 2011    Google+ has 49 million users
Dec 2011    Google+ has 62 million users
Jan 2012    Google+ has 90 million users

Dec 2012    Google+ is expected to reach 400 million users

Leadership / Staffing:

Jan 2012    Google added 8,067 employees in 2011, bringing total headcount
            to 32,467.


                                                                             30
Linkedin:




            31
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site.


Milestones

Dec 2002    Reid Hoffman founded Linkedin
May 5 2003 Launch of Linkedin with its five founders and 350 of their friends
May 31 2003 By month end, it had 4,500 members
Dec 2003    LinkedIn‘s membership had grown to 81,000
April 2007 LinkedIn boasted 10 million active user accounts.
July 2008   LinkedIn launched its Spanish-language version of the popular
            website
     2010   India and France are the fastest growing countries with a 76
            percent and 72 percent growth rate, respectfully, each year and of
            the site's current 100 million users, 45 million reside in the U.S. and
            56 million reside in the rest of the world.
July 2010   LinkedIn logged 50 million unique visitors, a 16 percent change
            from November 2009.
      2010  Every fortune 500 company could be found on Linkein
Dec 2010    LinkedIn was ranked No. 47 in the 50 Hottest Web properties list
            with 266,577 unique visitors.
Feb 2011    LinkedIn jumped to No. 36 on the Top 50 Hottest Web Properties
            list with 28,280 visitors, and currently, LinkedIn ranks No. 17 on the
            Alexa Traffic Rank chart, and is the 12th-most trafficked site in the
            U.S.

Financials

It is funded by Sequoia Capital, Greylock, Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer
Venture Partners and the European Founders Fund. Through January 2011, the
company had received a total of $103 million of investment.

      2003 Sequoia Capital led the Series A investment in the company.
      2004 Its second round of financing, of $10 million, was led by Greylock,
           an early-stage investor that has a reputation of leading the most
           number of its investments to IPO status
March 2006 LinkedIn reached profitability
June 2008 Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and other venture capital firms
           purchased a 5% stake in the company for $53 million, giving the
           company a post-money valuation of approximately $1 billion.
      2010 LinkedIn opened a European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland,
           received a $20 million investment from Tiger Global Management
           LLC at a valuation of approximately $2 billion, and announced its
           first acquisition, Mspoke and improved its 1% premium subscription
           ratio.



                                                                                 32
Oct 2010     Silicon Valley Insider ranked the company No. 10 on its Top 100
             List of most valuable start ups.
Dec 2010     The company was valued at $1.575 billion in private markets.
Jan 2011     LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on January 27,
             2011and the IPO occurred on May 19.
May 2011     LinkedIn said it sold its IPO shares at $45. That means LinkedIn will
             kick off trading at a market value of roughly $4.3 billion

It was reported that LinkedIn earned $154.6 million dollars in advertising revenue
alone in 2011. This number was actually higher than that of Twitter who earned
$139.5 million dollars respectively.

LinkedIn‘s fourth-quarter earnings have recently soared. LinkedIn‘s shares rose
9.5% to $83.68 in premarket trading. The increase in value is due to its increase
in success in the social media world.

Technology Growth

The Search, Network, and Analytics team at LinkedIn has a web site that hosts
the open source projects built by the group. Notable among these projects is
Project Voldemort, a distributed key-value structured storage system with low-
latency similar in purpose to Amazon.com's Dynamo and Google's BigTable

Feb 2008     A mobile version of the site was launched which gives access to a
             reduced feature set over a mobile phone. The mobile service is
             available in six languages: Chinese, English, French, German,
             Japanese and Spanish
July 2008    LinkedIn launched LinkedIn DirectAds as a form of sponsored
             advertising
Oct 2008     LinkedIn enabled an "applications platform" that allows other online
             services to be embedded within a member's profile page. Among
             the initial applications were an Amazon Reading List that allows
             LinkedIn members to display books they are reading, a connection
             to Tripit, and a Six Apart, WordPress and TypePad application that
             allows members to display their latest blog postings within their
             LinkedIn profile
Nov 2010     LinkedIn allowed businesses to list products and services on
             company profile pages; it also permitted LinkedIn members to
             "recommend" products and services and write reviews.
Jan 2011     LinkedIn acquired CardMunch, a mobile app maker that scans
             business cards and converts into contacts. LinkedIn plans to
             integrate this functionality into their services in the near future
July 2011    LinkedIn launched a new feature allowing companies to include an
             "Apply with LinkedIn" button on job listing pages.
Feb 2012     LinkedIn announced it's acquisition of the start-up Rapportive,
             which created a browser plug-in that takes contact information from


                                                                               33
social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and places them
             into Google's Gmail. LinkedIn has not stated yet how they will use
             the Rapportive's technology and talent.


Community Growth

The membership grows by approximately two new members every second.
     About half of the members are in the United States and 11 million are from
     Europe. With 3 million users, India has the fastest-growing network of
     users as of 2009. The Netherlands has the highest adoption rate per
     capita outside the US at 30%.. LinkedIn recently reached 4 million users in
     UK,1 million in Spain, and nearly 1 million in Pakistan.




Leadership / Staffing:

May 2003            5 Founders launch Linkedin
Dec 2003            Staff of 14 employees
Employees 2011      1,797



                                                                             34
Myspace
Milestones

Aug 2003     Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolf founded MySpace in 2003 with
             InterMix. MySpace's initial purpose was to cater to the "Hollywood
             elite," such as actors, musicians and other local artists of Southern
             California.
Aug 2003     Within 10 days, the first version of Myspace was ready for launch
April 2004   It then grew into a "place for friends" eight months later and, now, is
             geared toward anyone in the 13-to-25-year-old crowd.

Nov 2004   MySpace had gained 5 million active users,
July 2005  News Corp Fox Interactive bought InterMix and thus MySpace for
           $580 million
Jan 2006   Fox announced plans to launch a UK version of Myspace in a bid to
           "tap into the UK music scene"
April 2006 MySpace was the fifth most trafficked website in the world with
           more than 80 million active user profiles.
June 2006 MySpace had 66,401 million total unique visitors, surpassing June
           Google as the most visited website in the USA
March 2007 MySpace had reached 100 million worldwide active user accounts
           and later launched its developer platform in February 2008.
June 2007 MySpace fell to the second place spot behind Facebook, but still
           grew 3 percent with 117,582 million total unique visitors.
July 2007  MySpace had 114,147 million total unique visitors. This placed
           MySpace in the number one spot of all reported social networking
           sites that year.
April 2008 Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique
           worldwide visitors
March 2009 MySpace was No. 38 on the hottest web property list with 68,205
           million visitors
May 2009   Facebook surpassed Myspace in the number of unique U.S. visitors
Dec 2010   MySpace fell off the Hottest Web Properties list.
Feb 2011   News Corp officially put the site up for sale, which was estimated to
           be worth $50–200 million.
June 2011 Myspace was sold to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for
           approximately $35 million

Financials

     2004    eWolfe suggested they charge a fee for the basic Myspace service.
             Brad Greenspan nixed the idea, believing that keeping Myspace
             free was necessary to make it a successful community.


                                                                                 35
July 2005     News Corp Fox Interactive bought InterMix and thus MySpace for
              $580 million
Feb 2011      News Corp officially put the site up for sale, which was estimated to
              be worth $50–200 million.
June 2011     Myspace was sold to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for
              approximately $35 million

Myspace operates solely on revenues generated by advertising as its revenue
model possesses no user-paid features.Through its Web site and affiliated ad
networks, Myspace is second only to Yahoo! in its capacity to collect data about
its users and thus in its ability to use behavioral targeting to select the ads each
visitor sees.

On August 8, 2006, search engine Google signed a $900 million deal to provide
a Google search facility and advertising on Myspace


Technology Growth

Early 2006 Myspace introduced MySpaceIM, an instant messenger that uses
           one's Myspace account as a screen name
Aug 2006   Began offering full service classifieds listing
Early 2007 Myspace introduced MySpaceTV, a service similar to the YouTube
           video sharing website
April 2007 Myspace launched a news service called Myspace News which
           displays news from RSS feeds that users submit.
Late 2007  The site launched The Myspace Transmissions, a series of live-in-
           studio recordings by well-known artists.
Feb 2008   Myspace set up a developer platform which allows developers to
           share their ideas and write their own Myspace applications
April 2008 Ksolo.myspace.com is a combination of Myspace and kSolo, which
           allows users to upload audio recordings of themselves singing onto
           their profile page.
In 2008    Myspace introduced an API with which users could create
           applications for other users to post on their profiles
In 2008    Myspace Polls is a feature on Myspace that was brought back in
           2008 to enable users to post polls on their profile and share them
           with other users
In 2009    Myspace also added a new status update feature. If a Myspace
           user has a Twitter account, the tweet will also update the Myspace
           status.
March 2010 Myspace had some new features added like recommendation
           engine for new users which suggests games, music and videos
           based on their previous search habits.
Summer ‘10 The color scene of Myspace changed. The classic blue was
           replaced by a more white interface, to resemble the look and feel of


                                                                                   36
Facebook, and to attract users of Facebook to join or rejoin
              Myspace
Sept. 2010    Myspace continued to work on improving the website. A photos
              section was added and the Fotoflexer app was added to photos
Nov 2007      Myspace and Bebo joined the Google-led OpenSocial alliance,
              which already includes Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and
              SixApart. OpenSocial was to promote a common set of standards
              for software developers to write programs for social networks.
              Facebook remained independent. Community Growth

The first Myspace users were eUniverse employees. The company held contests
to see who could sign up the most users.

While Facebook focused on creating a platform that allowed outside developers
to build new applications, Myspace built everything in-house. Shawn Gold,
Myspace's former head of marketing and content, said "Myspace went too wide
and not deep enough in its product development. We went with a lot of products
that were shallow and not the best products in the world." The products division
had introduced many features (communication tools such as instant messaging,
a classifieds program, a video player, a music player, a virtual karaoke machine,
a self-serve advertising platform, profile-editing tools, security systems, privacy
filters, and Myspace book lists, among others), however these were often buggy
and slow as there was insufficient testing, measuring, and iterating.

Community Growth:

a

Leadership / Staffing:

June 2009      Myspace employed approximately 1,600 workers
June 2009     A layoff of 37.5% of its workforce, reducing employees from 1,600
              to 1,000.
June 2011     Myspace had reduced its staff to around 200
Jan 2011      It was announced that the Myspace staff would be reduced by 47%.




                                                                                 37
Tumblr:




          38
39
Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking
website.

Milestones

April 2007   Tumblr was launched Beta stage on April 27, 2007 by David Karp
May 2007     Within two weeks of its launch, the service had gained 75,000
             users.
Nov 2007     Tumblr officially launched on Nov. 1, 2007, after a few months in
             beta mode
July 2010    The site receives 25,000 new users each day
June 2011    Tumblr passed competitor WordPress in number of blogs hosted --
             more than 20 million
July 2011    Tumblr scored 13.4 million unique visitors in the U.S
Feb 2012     Tumblr had over 46.2 million blogs

Financials




                                                                            40
Oct 2007     750,000 K by Union Square and Spark Capital
Dec 2008     4.5 million by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital
April 2010   10 million by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital
Nov 2010     30 million by Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, and Union Square
             Ventures
Sep 2011     85 million led by Greylock Partners and insight Venture partners,
             also including The Cherning Group, Sir Richard Branson, Spark
             Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital

Tumblr's original funding came from Karp's earnings as a software consultant at
parenting site UrbanBaby. Tumblr has raised funding from Union Square
Ventures, Spark Capital, Martín Varsavsky, John Borthwick (Betaworks), Fred
Seibert, and Sequoia Capital(among other investors).
The company had a $800 million valuation in August 2011


                                                                                 41
September 2011, the company raised $85 million in a round of funding led by
Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners

Technology Growth

On 28 February, 2012, Tumblr launched a redesign of its dashboard icons

Community Growth

      500million page views go through Tumblr every single day

      40krequests added each second at Tumblr‘s peak usage hours; and it‘s
      growing, too
      50GBof posts added each day; follower list updates are roughly another
      2.7 terabytes daily
      1Mnumber of writes made through the dashboard each second, and
      50,000 reads per second source

The service is most popular with the teen and college-aged user segments; fifty
percent of Tumblr's visitor base is under the age of 25. As of 2009, Tumblr had
an 85% retention rate, compared with 40% for Twitter.

February 27, 2012, Tumblr had over 46.2 million blogs and more than 18 billion
total posts


Leadership / Staffing:

April 2007 CEO and COO are only employees
As of mid-2011, Tumblr has around 10 employees
Current employees listed on Linkedin: 51-200




                                                                              42
Foursquare:




              43
Foursquare is a web and mobile application that allows
registered users to post their location at a venue ("check-in")
and connect with friends.


Milestones

March 2009 Launched with limited availability in only 100 worldwide metro
areas.
Jan 2010   Foursquare changed their location model to allow check-ins from
           any location worldwide.
Feb 2011   Foursquare reached 7 million users IDs
June 2011 The company reported it had 10 million registered users


Financials

Foursquare is principally funded by Union Square Ventures, Andreessen
Horowitz, and O‘Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The company raised $1.35 million in
its Series A and $20 million in its Series B round. On June 24, 2011 foursquare
raised $50 million on a $600 million valuation.


Technology Growth

August 26, 2010, foursquare rolled out a new feature which notifies users of the
number of days left before he or she is crowned "Mayor"

September 23, 2010, foursquare announced that users can now earn badges for
completing tasks as well as checking in.

Each time the user checks into a place, he or she receives points. Scores break
down as follows
       Checking in to a new place – 5 points
       Adding a new venue – 5 points
       Being the first of the user's friends to check into a new location - 3 points
       Checking in to a place the user has been before – 1 point
       Location multiplier for each place a user goes in a day – 1 point per
       location
       Points for checking in with the same friend at multiple locations - BFF
       bonus

Foursquare Brands allows companies to create pages of tips and allows users
to ―follow‖ the company and receive special, expert tips from them when they




                                                                                  44
check-in at certain locations. Some of the companies even allow users to unlock
special badges with enough check-ins.

The service provides three levels of "Superuser status" (which is not to be
confused with the "Super User" badge). Superuser status is conferred on users
who have been selected by foursquare staff for their helpful contributions to the
community.

      All superusers can review a queue of requested changes for a single city,
and can select a new city at will.

      Superuser level 1 can edit venue info (name, address, cross street,
      phone, Twitter names, map pin location), mark venues as open or closed,
      request venue merges and deletions, and edit venue tags.
      Superuser level 2 can additionally merge duplicate venue listings, adjust
      the latitude and longitude of a venue, add a web address, and add
      categories.
      Superuser level 3 adds the ability to create and remove venue aliases, as
      well as access a "global queue" of pending requests needing superuser
      attention.

Community Growth




                                                                                45
Male/female users are equally represented and also 50 percent of users are
outside the US

Users as of April 2012: 15 million


Leadership / Staffing:

Employees as of 2012: approx. 100 (51-200)




                                                                       46
StumbleUpon:




               47
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine (a form of web search
engine) that finds and recommends web content to its users.

Milestones

Nov 2001     Founded by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric
Boyd
May 2007     StumbleUpon was purchased by eBay
April 2009   Founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith and other investors
             including Ram Shriram bought the company

2005       The site caught the interest of angel investors, where it landed $1.2
           million in funding and then in 2005, $1.5 million in seed funding.
2006       Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith moved to San Francisco and
           launched StumbleUpon Video
2007       StumbleThru launched, allowing stumbling content on specific sites
           like YouTube and Flickr
May 2007   StumbleUpon was bought by eBay for $75 million (5.5 years after
           its initial founding)
2008       Traffic dropped by around 70% in comparison to the previous year
2009       It launches su.pr, bringing in the toolbar and allowing users to
           stumble directly from the site
March 2009 A couple of months later, StumbleUpon raises Series A funding
           (rumored to be at $29 million), which is folded into buying back the
           company from eBay. Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith buy back the
           company (along with various investors) for a rumored $25 million
Late 2009  StumbleUpon introduces the ―New‖ StumbleUpon, which allows
           stumbling without signing up
2010       Marc Leibowitz leaves Google and joins StumbleUpon as the VP of
           Business Development and Marketing
2011       StumbleUpon raises $17 million in Series B funding along with
           reports of the site generating 800 recommendations a month
2011       The site reports 20 million users and 1 billion stumbles a month
Oct 2011   StumbleUpon made changes to the site by deleting their user-
           generated content, HTML blogging, standalone blog posts, and
           ability to photoblog. All their previous blog posts converted from
           HTML to plain text and all photos were deleted. This was done to
           focus their efforts on their recommendation engine rather than
           expand to include blogging platforms.

Financials

StumbleUpon is now an independent, investor-backed startup once again, with
offices in San Francisco and New York City.




                                                                              48
2005       The site caught the interest of angel investor, Brad O'Neill who took
           notice of the company and assisted with a move to San Francisco,
           as well as brought in subsequent fund-raising totaling $1.2 million
           from other angel investors including Ram Shriram (Google), Mitch
           Kapor (Mozilla Foundation), First Round Capital, and Ron Conway,
           and then in 2005, $1.5 million in seed funding.
May 2007   StumbleUpon was bought by eBay for $75 million (5.5 years after
           its initial founding)
March 2009 StumbleUpon raises Series A funding (rumored to be at $29
           million), which is folded into buying back the company from eBay.
April 2009 Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith buy back the company (along with
           various investors) for a rumored $25 million
2011       StumbleUpon raises $17 million in Series B funding along with
           reports of the site generating 800 recommendations a month


Technology Growth

The algorithm behind StumbleUpon uses three data points to determine the type
of new sites that users ―stumble‖ across. The first is based off of the interests that
users have identified as relevant to them. The second is based off of the sites
that have been deemed as ―thumbs up‖ and ―thumbs down,‖ which helps the
algorithm identify other users who have exhibited similar voting behavior. The
third is based off of the types of individuals that users have befriended on the
site.

Oct 2011   StumbleUpon deleted years worth of user-generated content, and
           removed HTML blogging, standalone blog posts, and
           photoblogging capabilities. Additionally, all previous blog posts
           were converted from HTML to plain text, and all photos were
           deleted from previous blog posts.
Dec 2006   StumbleUpon       launched       their    StumbleVideo    site   at
           http://video.stumbleupon.com/. The new site allows users without a
           toolbar to "stumble" through all the videos that toolbar users have
           submitted and rate them using an Ajax interface.
Feb 2007   StumbleUpon launched a version of StumbleVideo for the Internet
           Channel Web browser that runs on the Wii console
April 2007 StumbleUpon launched the StumbleThru service, allowing users of
           the toolbar to stumble within sites such as YouTube, The Onion,
           Public Broadcasting Service and Wikipedia
March 2009 StumbleUpon launched the Su.pr an URL shortening service Beta.
May 2009   The su.pr service is available to all StumbleUpon users

Community Growth

Dec 2002      StumbleUpon had 1 million users.


                                                                                   49
May 2010    StumbleUpon has more than 10 million users
Aug 2011    StumbleUpon reached the 25 billion stumble mark, at which point
            they were adding over 1 billion stumbles per month.
Oct 2011    StumbleUpon announced that it had over 20 million registered
            users of the service




Leadership / Staffing:

Current: 51-200 Employees




                                                                        50
Reddit:




          51
52
Reddit is a social news website where the registered users
submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post.

Milestones

June 2005    Reddit was originally founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis
             Ohanian.
June 2005    Received $100 K in fuding from Y Combinator
             In the beginning Steve and Alexis submitted most of the links from
             many fake accounts
Oct 2006     It was acquired by Condé Nast Publications; had 500,000 daily
             unique
Jan 2008     Added the ability to allow anyone to create their own subreddits
             visitors for an estimated $20 million
June 2008    Reddit became an open source
Oct 2009     Steve Huffman left Reddit
Dec 2009     First RedditGift exchange, 4,500 Redditors spent $185,000
Dec 2009     Reddit launches Selfserce Advertising
July 2010    Reddit Gold launched
Aug 2010     Digg v4 released
Aug 2010     Reddit post‘s took over the homepage of Digg, starting the mass
             exodus to Reddit
Sept 2010    Restoring Truthiness Campaign started on Reddit; ended up raising
             $600,000 for Donors Choose
Nov 2010     Alexis Ohanian left and joined Steve Huffman to found Hipmunk
Dec 2010     2nd RedditGift exchange with 17,000+ participants spending over
             $660,000
Aug 2011     Reddit acquires RedditGifts
April 2011   Reddit takes over Digg in ranking
Feb 2011     Surpassed 1 billion page views a month; average time on site 15
             min 40 sec
Sept 2011    Hits 1.6 billion page views per month
Sept 2011    Reddit was split from Condé Nast, and now operates as a
             subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications.


Financials

June 2005    Reddit was originally founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis
             Ohanian.
June 2005    Received $100 K in fuding from Y Combinator


Technology Growth



                                                                            53
Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp but was rewritten in Python in
2005. The reasons given for the switch were faster performance, wider access to
code libraries, and greater development flexibility. The Python web framework
that former Reddit employee Aaron Swartz developed to run the site, web.py, is
now available as an open-source project.

Reddit currently uses Pylons as its web framework. As of November 2009,
Reddit has decommissioned their physical servers and migrated to Amazon Web
Services.

Reddit uses PostgreSQL as primary datastore and slowly moving to Apache
Cassandra, a column oriented datastore. It uses RabbitMQ for offline processing,
HAProxy for load balancing and memcached for caching. In early 2009, Reddit
started using jQuery.

On July 21, 2010, Reddit outsourced the Reddit search engine to Flaptor, who
used its search product IndexTank

Community Growth

The median U.S. Reddit user is male (72%), 25–34 years of age, has some
college education, and is in the lowest income bracket of US$0–$24,999. The
analysis also shows that many of the top ten audience interests are in the tech
field, suggesting a computer savvy demographic

Leadership / Staffing:

July 2010, after explosive traffic growth, reddit introduced Reddit Gold, offering
new features for a price of US$3.99/month or US$29.99/year. The revenue and
attention got them approval to buy more servers and employ more people.

Current staff 1-10 employees




                                                                               54
55
Sources:
Facebook
www.facebook.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=11&ved=0CI
cBEBYwCg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Ftechnology%2F2007
%2Fjul%2F25%2Fmedia.newmedia&ei=M5SET_P3LoSy8QOQ-
73DBw&usg=AFQjCNE1h9OT-kuurgicG8qmBaVjn7Z3iA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram
http://www.itproportal.com/2009/08/24/facebook-increase-employee-numbers-50-
percent-end-2009/
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218177/Google_vs._Facebook_by_the_
numbers

Twitter
www.twitter.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-04-13/tech/29957143_1_jack-dorsey-
twitter-podcasting
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/tech-news/the-history-of-
twitter-140-characters-at-a-time/article1949299/
http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/twitter-history-infographic/
http://marketingconversation.com/2010/12/11/a-twitter-history-timeline/

Pinterest
www.pinterest.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest
http://llsocial.com/2012/03/pinterest-adds-zendesk-deal-customer-support-
issues/
http://marketingonpinterest.com/2012/02/09/pinterest-growth-faster-than-any-
other-stand-alone-site-in-history/
http://tweets.fabiomoro.com/tweets/185783189258772483
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-10-28/pinterest-Ben-
Silbermann/50979542/1
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2127078/Pinterest-popular-social-media-
network-beating-LinkedIn-Tumblr.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Google+
https://plus.google.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B
http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/07/12/the-story-behind-socialstatistics-
com/



                                                                              56
http://9to5google.com/2011/08/03/google-becomes-fastest-growing-website-in-
history-with-25-million-unique-users/
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/72788.html
http://www.circlecount.com/statistics/
http://mashable.com/2011/08/02/google-plus-25-million-visitors/

Linkedin
http://www.linkedin.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkedin
http://knol.google.com/k/stephen-wilson/a-brief-history-of-
linkedin/qkgetcb5gnql/16#
http://www.sophisticatededge.com/history-of-linkedin.html
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/feeds/linkedin-a-little-historical-nugget-of-an-
infographic-just-for-you/3799
http://www.linktoprosper.com/blog/2009/03/the-history-and-future-of-linkedin/

Myspace
http://www.myspace.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/29/myspace-history-
timeline_n_887059.html#s299496&title=August_2003_Myspace
http://www.webhostingreport.com/learn/myspace.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/as-myspace-sells-for-35-
million-a-history-of-the-networks-valuation/241224/
http://vator.tv/news/2011-06-30-the-brief-rise-of-myspace-and-its-long-slow-
demise
http://www.stepforth.com/blog/2011/myspace-timeline-history/#.T4Sako5gGkI
http://mashable.com/follow/topics/myspace

Tumblr
www.tumblr.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/what-hell-tumblr-and-
other-worthwhile-questions
http://blog.gcflearnfree.org/2012/02/what-is-tumblr/
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architecture-15-billion-page-
views-a-month-and-harder.html
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/tumblr-integrates-facebook-timeline-news-feed-
ticker-updates/

StumbleUpon
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon
http://www.distilled.net/blog/infographics/history-of-stumbleupon-from-startup-to-
influential-social-media-network-site-infographic/
http://www.othersidegroup.com/2011/08/milestones-in-stumbleupon-history/



                                                                                57
http://www.stumbleupon.com/interest/history
http://socialtimes.com/history-of-stumbleupons-influence-on-the-internet-
infographic_b82227

Reddit
www.reddit.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/10/14/a-rundown-of-reddits-history-and-
community-infographic/
http://sortable.com/blog/the-reddit-invasion/
http://bigbusinessideas.org/the-history-of-reddit-com/
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/reddit




                                                                            58

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History of Social Media Platform Growth

  • 1. Social Media History - Growth By: Christy Young April 4, 2012
  • 2. Table of Contents Facebook: ................................................................................................................4 Milestones ...................................................................................................................................................................5 Financials ....................................................................................................................................................................6 Technology Growth: ...............................................................................................................................................7 Community Growth: ...............................................................................................................................................9 Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 10 Instagram Acquistion .......................................................................................................................................... 11 Twitter: ................................................................................................................... 13 Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 15 Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 15 Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 16 Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 17 Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 18 Pinterest: ................................................................................................................ 20 Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 23 Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 23 Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 23 Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 24 Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 24 Why it‘s the fastest growing: ........................................................................................................................... 24 Google+:................................................................................................................. 26 Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 28 Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 28 Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 29 Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 30 Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 30 Linkedin: ................................................................................................................ 31 Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 32 Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 32 Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 33 Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 34 Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 34 Myspace ................................................................................................................. 35 Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 35 Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 35 Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 36 Community Growth: ............................................................................................................................................ 37 Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 37 Tumblr: ................................................................................................................... 38 Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 40 Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 40 Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 42 Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 42 Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 42 2
  • 3. Foursquare: ........................................................................................................... 43 Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 44 Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 44 Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 44 Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 45 Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 46 StumbleUpon: ....................................................................................................... 47 Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 48 Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 48 Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 49 Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 49 Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 50 Reddit: .................................................................................................................... 51 Milestones ................................................................................................................................................................ 53 Financials ................................................................................................................................................................. 53 Technology Growth ............................................................................................................................................. 53 Community Growth .............................................................................................................................................. 54 Leadership / Staffing: ......................................................................................................................................... 54 Sources: ................................................................................................................. 56 3
  • 5. Facebook is a social networking service and website. Milestones Feb 2004 Launched, only Harvard students invited March 2004 Ivy league schools and Stanford June 2004 First Investment from PayPal co cofounder Peter Thiel US$500,000 in exchange for 7% of the company Dec 2004 One million members have created profiles on the site. Sep. 2005 High School version launched on invite basis Oct. 2005 Global expansion, 21 English Universitys, 30 Uni. in Mexico, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands Dec 2005 Global Expansion bringing its size to 2,000+ colleges and 25,000 + high schools throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. Sept 2006 Open to 13 and older with valid email address Sept 2006 Facebook launched the news feed and mini feed feature. At the time it was a big step change for Facebook users, who were not used to their every move being tracked in a general stream by all of their Facebook friends May 2007 Facebook opened up its API to developers, allowing them to use to platform to launch widgets and games. This development led to a major reinvention of the network as a social games platform, with the advent of popular games such as Farmville. Sept. 2009 The aim of the service was to exploit the power of "word of mouth" marketing. It inserted details of purchases made at participating websites in to the news feed of Facebook users, making it visible to all their friends. But some users complained that that they had not been aware these details would be shared. Zuckerberg, was forced in to a humiliating U-turn, admitting that the service had been a mistake, and changing the rules so that Beacon became opt-in rather than opt-out. Beacon was shut down completely in September 2009, following a class-action lawsuit from disgruntled Facebook users. 2010 Began to pro-actively involve its users in running the website by inviting them to become beta testers after passing a question-and- answer-based selection process July 2010 Facebook.com was the top social network across eight individual markets in the Southeast Asia/Oceania region (Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Vietnam Facebook reached 500 million registered members, the equivalent of connecting with eight per cent of the world‘s population. Today Facebook has over 800 million monthly active users according to their own statistics. Over 350 million of these participants are accessing Facebook through their mobile phones. Facebook has 5
  • 6. successfully integrated various mobile platforms that are modelled for iPhones, iPads, androids, blackberries and other forums to provide access to the site at all times. In total, 33% of Facebook traffic comes from mobile phone accessibility. April 2012 Facebook acquires Instagram Financials June 2004 First Investment from PayPal co cofounder Peter Thiel US$500,000 in exchange for 7% of the company 6
  • 7. June 2005 $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, and then $27.5 million more from Greylock Partners. A leaked cash flow statement showed that during the 2005 fiscal year, Facebook had a net loss of $3.63 million. March 2006 Facebook reportedly declined an offer of $750 million from an unknown bidder, and it was rumored the asking price rose as high as $2 billion Sept. 2006 Serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo! took place concerning acquisition of Facebook, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion. Thiel, by then a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook's internal valuation was around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, comparable to Viacom's MTV brand, a company with a shared target demographic audience. Oct 2007 Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion. Microsoft's purchase also included rights to place international ads on Facebook. Nov 2007 Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing invested $60 million in Facebook. Sept 2009 Facebook claimed that it had turned cash flow positive for the first time. Early 2012 Facebook disclosed that its profits had jumped 65% to $1 billion in the previous year as its revenue which is mainly from advertising had jumped almost 90% to $3.71 billion. 56% of its advertising revenue comes from the U.S alone, it also reported that 12% of its revenue comes from Zynga the popular social network game development company. Payments and other fees were $557 million up from $106 million the previous year. IPO info: The New York Post reported that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and other banks that are involved the value of $75 billion to $100 billion IPO in his company, which is use to stop leaking details to the press about the upcoming event. Technology Growth: In August 2009, Facebook acquired social media real-time news aggregator FriendFeed, a startup created by the former Google employee and Gmail's first engineer Paul Buchheit who, while at Google, coined the phrase "Don't be evil".In September 2009, Facebook claimed that it had turned cash flow positive for the first time.In February 2010, Facebook acquired Malaysian contact- importing startup Octazen Solutions.On April 2, 2010, Facebook announced acquisition of photo-sharing service called Divvyshot for 7
  • 8. an undisclosed amount.In June 2010, an online marketplace for trading private company stock reflected a valuation of $11.5 billion. Early Years Facebook users were limited to 60 photos per album. Aug 2006 Facebook Notes was introduced, a blogging feature that allowed tags and embeddable images. Users were later able to import blogs from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services. Sept 2006 News Feed was announced, which appears on every user's homepage and highlights information including profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays of the user's friends. Initially, the News Feed caused dissatisfaction among Facebook users; some complained it was too cluttered and full of undesired information, others were concerned that it made it too easy for others to track individual activities (such as relationship status changes, events, and conversations with other users). In response, Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Since then, users have been able to control what types of information are shared automatically with friends. Feb 2007 Facebook launched Gifts on which allows users to send virtual gifts to their friends that appear on the recipient's profile. Gifts cost $1.00 each to purchase, and a personalized message can be attached to each gift. May 2007 Facebook launched Marketplace, which lets users post free classified ads July 2007 Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only. April 2008 Facebook released a Comet-based instant messaging application called "Chat" to several networks, which allows users to communicate with friends and is similar in functionality to desktop- based instant messengers. July 2008 Facebook introduced "Facebook Beta", a significant redesign of its user interface on selected networks. The Mini-Feed and Wall were consolidated, profiles were separated into tabbed sections, and an effort was made to create a "cleaner" look. Users have choice to switch Sept 2008 Facebook began migrating all users to the new version of Minifeed and Wall Dec 2008 Facebook was testing a simpler signup process May 2009 Photo limit has been increased to 200 photos per album. June 2009 Facebook introduced a "Usernames" feature, whereby pages can be linked with simpler URLs such as http://www.facebook.com/facebook instead of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20531316728 June 2009 Facebook available on most Smart Phones. More than 425 million active users access Facebook through mobile devices across 200 mobile operators in 60 countries 8
  • 9. Feb 2010 Facebook was granted a patenton certain aspects of its News Feed. Nov 2010 Facebook announced a new "Facebook Messages" service. Facebook Messages took 15 months to develop. April 2011 Facebook users have had the ability to make live voice calls via Facebook Chat, allowing users to chat with others from all over the world. This feature, which is provided free through T-Mobile's new Bobsled service, lets the user add voice to the current Facebook Chat as well as leave voice messages on Facebook July 2011 Facebook launched its video calling services using Skype as its technology partner. It allows one to one calling using a Skype Rest API. Sept 2011 Facebook launched a Subscribe button. The feature allows for users to follow public updates, and these are the people most often broadcasting their ideas. Feb 2012 Facebook is introducing ‗Verified Account‘ concept like that of Twitter & Google+. Though as of 3 March 2012, verified accounts don‘t get any badges or denotations, but such accounts will get more priority in ‗Subscription Suggestions‘ of Facebook. March 2012 Facebook officially launched its Messenger for Windows April 2012 Facebook acquires Instagram Community Growth: 9
  • 10. April 2008 Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace March 2010 Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010 June 2011 Release of statistics by DoubleClick showed that Facebook reached one trillion pageviews in the month, making it the most visited website in the world. Leadership / Staffing: Jan 2004 – 2 Mar 2004 – 4 Aug 2009 –1000 Feb 2010 – 1200 May 2011 - 2000 July 2011 - 2500 March 2012 - 3200 This is a particularly tough metric, as Facebook doesn't release that data. The latest estimate, from an in-depth profile of chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in the current issue of The New Yorker, came in at 2,500 employees. That's close to double the estimates reported for early 2010. 10
  • 11. Originally called thefacebook, Facebook was founded by former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Within months, Facebook and its core idea spread across the dorm rooms of Harvard where it was very well received. Soon enough, it was extended to Stanford and Yale where, like Harvard, it was widely endorsed. Before he knew it, Mark Zuckerberg was joined by two other fellow Harvard- students – Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes – to help him grow the site to the next level. Only months later when it was officially a national student network phenomenon, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams and run Facebook full time. In August 2005, thefacebook was officially called Facebook and the domain facebook.com was purchased for a reported $200,000. Instagram Acquistion What: Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take a photo, apply a digital filter to it, and then share it on a variety of social networking services, including Instagram's own. A distinctive feature confines photos to a square shape, similar to Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid images, in contrast to the 4:3 aspect ratio typically used by mobile device cameras. History of Acquisition:Instagram was initially supported on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch; in April 2012, the company added support for Android camera phones running 2.2 (Froyo) or higher. It is distributed via the iTunes App Store and Google Play. On April 9, 2012, Facebook announced it would acquire the company (and its 13 employees) for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock, with plans to keep it independently managed. That same week, Instagram raised $50 million from venture capitalists for a share of the company that valued it at $500 million. On April 9th, it was announced that Instagram would be acquired by Facebook for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock. The deal, which was made just before Facebook was scheduled to go public, cost Facebook about a quarter of the cash-on-hand they had as of the end of 2011; the deal was for a company characterized as having "lots of buzz but no business model" and the price was contrasted with the $35 million Yahoo! paid for Flickr in 2007, a website which has since become among the 50 most popular in the world. Mark Zuckerberg noted that Facebook was "committed to building and growing Instagram independently", in contrast to its common practice of, as CNNMoney.com put it, buying "hot startups, kill[ing] their products, and redeploy[ing] their staff on other projects." 11
  • 12. Community: By December 2010, Instagram had one million registered users. In June 2011 Instagram announced five million users, passing ten million in September the same year. Instagram announced that 100 million photos had been uploaded to its service as of July 2011. The total reached 150 million in Augus. In April 2012, it was announced that over 30 million accounts were set up on Instagram. Instagram's new Android version in Google Play crossed more than one million downloads within 12 hours. 12
  • 13. Twitter: 13
  • 14. 14
  • 15. Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". Milestones March 2006 Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams (launched publicly in July 2006) The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and July 2006 The full version was introduced publicly Oct 2006 In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets – including Odeo.com and Twitter.com – from the investors and shareholders Feb 2007 The 140 character limit to messages is introduced. ―One could change the world with 140 characters‖ April 2007 Twitter spun off into its own company Dec 2007 500,000 tweets posted per quarter Dec 2008 100 million tweets posted per quarter 2008 – 2009 Twitter had annual growth of 1,382 percent, increasing from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009 Jan 2009 Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in from its previous rank of twenty-second. March 2009 A Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing website in the Member Communities April 2009 Twitter adjusted its web interface, adding a search bar and a sidebar of "trending topics" — the most common phrases appearing in messages. Biz Stone explains that all messages are instantly indexed and that "with this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important – a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now. Dec 2009 2 billion tweets are posted per quarter June 2010 65 million tweets posted each day (750 tweets/second) Sept 2010 Twitter launched a redesigned siteincluding a new logo. March 2011 140 million tweets posted per day March 2012 Twitter celebrated it's sixth birthday while also announcing that it has 140 million users and sees 340 million tweets per day. The number of users is up 40% from their September 2011 number, which was said to have been at 100 million at the time March 2012, Twitter became available in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu, the first right-to-left language versions of the site. About 13,000 volunteers helped with translating the menu options. Financials 15
  • 16. Twitter raised over US$57 million from venture capitalist growth funding, although exact numbers are not publicly disclosed. Round A Funding 2006/7 ($1-5 million) As chief executive officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of capital funding by the venture capitalists who backed the company.Twitter's first A round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 million. Round B Funding 2008 ($22 million) Its second B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million Round C Funding 2009 ($35 million) Its third C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Insight Venture Partners. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. August 2010 ($800 million) In August, 2010 Twitter announced a "significant" investment lead by Digital Sky Technologies that, at $800 million, was reported to be the largest venture round in history Dec 2010 ($200 million) The company raised $200 million in new venture capital in December 2010, at a valuation of approximately $3.7 billion. March 2011 sold 35,000 shares 35,000 Twitter shares sold for $34.50 each on Sharespost, an implied valuation of $7.8 billion. December 2011 Private Investor The Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal invested $300 million in Twitter. The company was valued at $8.4 billion at the time. Initial Public Offering Twitter has been identified as a possible candidate for an initial public offering by 2013 Technology Growth 2007-2011 The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework deployed on a performance enhanced Ruby Enterprise Edition implementation of Ruby. 16
  • 17. March 2007 The messages were handled by a Ruby persistent queue server called Starling Early 2009 Messages were gradually replaced with a software server written in Scala. The service's application programming interface (API) allows other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter.[ April 2010 Twitter acquired application developer Atebits. They had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for the Mac and iPhone. The application, now called "Twitter" and distributed free of charge, is the official Twitter client for the iPhone, iPad and Mac March 2010 URL Shorterner - Having previously used the services of third parties TinyURL and bit.ly,Twitter began experimenting with its own URL shortening service for direct messages in March 2010 using the twt.tl domain, before it purchased the t.co domain. The service was tested on the main site using the accounts @TwitterAPI, @rsarver and @raffi. On September 2, 2010, an email from Twitter to users said they would be expanding the roll- out of the service to users. On June 7, 2011, Twitter announced that it was rolling out the feature. Sept 2010 The company began rolling out "New Twitter", an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com. Changes included the ability to see pictures and videos without leaving Twitter itself by clicking on individual tweets which contain links to images and clips from a variety of supported websites including YouTube and Flickr, and a complete overhaul of the interface, which shifted links such as '@mentions' and 'Retweets' above the Twitter stream, while 'Messages' and 'Log Out' became accessible via a black bar at the very top of twitter.com April 2011 Twitter tested a new homepage and phased out the "Old Twitter." April 2011 Twitter engineers confirmed they had switched away from their Ruby on Rails search-stack, to a Java server they call Blender Dec 2011 Twitter overhauled its website once more to feature the "Fly" design, which the service says is easier for new users to follow and promotes advertising. In addition to the Home button, the Connect and Discover buttons were introduced along with a redesigned profile and timeline of Tweets. Feb 2012 Twitter and Yandex agreed to a partnership. Yandex, a Russian search engine, finds value within the partnership due to Twitter‘s real time news feeds. Twitter‘s director of business development explained that it is important to have Twitter content where Twitter users go. Community Growth 17
  • 18. March 2007 The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000."The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," remarked Newsweek‘s Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference- goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it. 2007 It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007. 2008 It had 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008 Feb 2010 Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day March 2010 The company recorded over 70,000 registered applications June 2010 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. March 2011 140 million tweets posted daily. Twitter has a user retention rate of forty percent. Twitter's usage spikes during prominent events. When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour. Twitter is mainly used by older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. "Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years," he said.According to comScore only eleven percent of Twitter's users are aged twelve to seventeen Content of Tweets according to Pear Analytics News Spam Self-promotion Pointless babble Conversational Pass-along value Leadership / Staffing: Jan 2009 – 22 18
  • 19. Jan 2010 – 110 March 2010 - 140 June 2010 - 200 Twitter is also increasingly used for making TV more interactive and social. This effect is sometimes referred to as the "virtual watercooler" or social television — the practice has been called "chatterboxing". 19
  • 21. 21
  • 22. 22
  • 23. Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Milestones Dec 2009- June 2011 Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until the summer of 2011. Dec 2009 Development of Pinterest began by co-founders Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra March 2010 Launch closed Beta. it was available to a small group of colleges and family members. Founder Ben Silbermann said he personally wrote to the site's first 5,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users Dec 2010 Nine months after launch the website had 10,000 users Sept 2011 Pinterest Mobile, launched September 2011, is the version of website for non-iPhone users. Dec 2011 the site became one of the top 10 largest social network services, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week Jan 2012 it drove more referral traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+. The site had 11.7 million unique users, making it the fastest site in history to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. Financials Early 2011 The company secured a $10 million USD Series A financing led by Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners. Oct 2011 The company secured $27 million USD in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at $200 million USD. Pinterest has received further funding from Andreessen Horowitz in the form of a Series B investment valued at $37.5 million USD. Since its inception three years ago, it has developed into a well-funded site financially supported by a group of successful entrepreneurs and investors including: Jack Abraham (Milo), Michael Birch (Bebo), Scott Belsky (Behance), Shana Fisher (Highline Venture Partners), Ron Conway (SV Angel), Kevin Hartz (EventBrite), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Hank Vigil, Fritz Lanman, and Brian S. Cohen Technology Growth 23
  • 24. Pinterest currently uses the Skimlinks server to generate income by modifying users' affiliate links to commercial sites. This works by replacing the original affiliate tracking code with Pinterest's tracking code, where any payment is passed to Pinterest instead of the original affiliate. In other words, Pinterest receives a portion of the sale when a user purchases an item since Pinterest connects (seamlessly through Skimlinks) users directly to the company‘s commercial website. Unfortunately the model ―does not seem to add up to a major amount of money, because a large majority of posts originate from Tumblr and Facebook, and are not commercial products. Community Growth Pinterest's wide reach helped it achieve an average of 11 million visits each week in December 2011. Most of the site's users are female, with 97% of the site's Facebook "likes" being made by women. The site has been popular with American women and, in 2012, it was reported that 83% of the US users were women. In Britain, however, 56% of the user were male and their age profile was different too, being about 10 years younger than the US, where the age range was typically 35-44. Leadership / Staffing: March 2012 Small Pinterest staff (last reported at under 20) Why it’s the fastest growing: Pinterest that acts as a clipping service of storing ideas is a fast growing social networking site. Most of the women have become addicted since it is about sharing images and ideas alone dissimilar to other online media, which create negativity to some extent revealing competitive spirit. Sharing the amazing things that you find in your lifespan through Pinterest, it helps you to adorn your living place, organize various events, and prepare yummy recipes. It features like surfing pins of your interest collectively as pin boards from people you follow, repinning, commenting, 'liking' on pins of your choice and pinning your own unique photographed images. Spending an average of 98 minutes a month on Pinterest in comparison to 150 minutes on Tumblr and 420 minutes on Facebook as per the survey taken for six months it is noted that monthly visits by the users to the Pinterest raised to 866%. What would be the triggering factors for this popularity in a short time? Let me look into the secrets of this addiction for Pinterest. Simplicity Major reason for the success is the simpleness in its outward design that lets the 24
  • 25. users to scroll over the images without much dig and deviation of the content. Images that have been finely photographed and look artful are center of attraction filling most of the space with minimal comments neatly piled under photographs. Information has been kept free of icon in a sleek manner with action buttons left concealed unless the users scroll them over. Compilation of images fascinates the Pinterest users to get addicted to the site. Are you crazy to watch over teal-shaded guitars? You can find an image board for amazing guitars in teal. Free of personal content Since Pinterest has evolved primarily as a photo-sharing medium its simple and appealing look is interest-evoked for surfers who are already fatigued with Facebook/Twitter/Orkut and so on. Pinterest allows the users to be more public only about what they are interested but not exhibiting personal content or privacy-related issues. Easily accessible Pinterest can be easily accessed from the app to the browser plug-in. You can access without logging into the site unlike Facebook or other sites and make pin boards with the Pin-it browser plug-in. Through repin button images viewed on the current web site can be tapped into the Pinterest. Becoming popular You would become popular through Pinterest social catalog of images pinned by you because your new pins/photos are featured on the front page. Added to this, since you are connected to Facebook/Twitter Pinterest allows your buddies from Facebook/Twitter to follow your pins and promote repinning. Boosting confidence Pinterest boosts the confidence level into the users' mind with idea boards encouraging 'I too can do that.' The users who would like to pin revisits Pinterest often desirous of creating something new with great fervor. 25
  • 26. Google+: 26
  • 27. 27
  • 28. Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus, sometimes abbreviated as G+) is a social networking and identity service, operated by Google Inc. Milestones June 28 ‗11 The service was launched on June 28, 2011, in an invitation-only "field testing" phase. June 29 ‗11 (The following day) existing users were allowed to invite friends who were over 18 years of age to the service to create their own accounts. This was suspended the next day due to an "insane demand" for accounts. July 14 ‗11 Google announced that Google+ had reached 10 million users just two weeks after the launch of a "limited" trial phase. After four weeks in operation, it had reached 25 million unique visitors. Aug 6 ‗11 Each Google+ member had 150 invitations to give out, Sept 2011 Google+ was opened to everyone 18 years of age or older without the need for an invitation. Oct 2011 The service reached 40 million users Oct 2011 Google announced that Google+ now supports Google Apps users (if the user's domain administrator has enabled the service). Oct 2011 Google implements hastags Nov 2011 Google launched Google+ Pages, which will let businesses connect with fans in a manner similar to Facebook Pages. These businesses will receive corporate accounts to start sharing information about themselves and invite others to join in on the conversation. Dec 2011 The site was adding an estimated number of 625,000 new users a day, adding almost a quarter of its total user base joining in December alone which may total 400 million members by the end of 2012 Jan 2012 It was opened for a younger age group (13+ years old in US and most countries, 14+ in South Korea and Spain, 16+ in Netherlands) Jan 2012 Google+ had surpassed a user base of 90 million. Feb 2012 Users are only spending 3.3 minutes monthly on Google+ which is a downward trend from 4.8 minutes in December and 5.1 minutes in November compared to Facebook users currently spending 7.5 hours using Facebook monthly. Financials It‘s a well-known fact that Google is a generally wealthy company. This is why Google+ is not making revenue generation on the social platform a priority. 28
  • 29. With money coming in all over the place via AdWords and AdSense, Google+ has the potential to remain ad-free for years without needing to tweak the service. Services like Facebook, on the other hand, need to make advertisements a priority as these serve as their main form of income. Google‘s VP of Product Bradley Horowitz has also confirmed our speculations that Google+‘s main objective will not be to monetize the social network. ―It‘s not the highest priority. And it would be premature to come up with that before we understand how it‘s used. But if we do a good job of serving users, we can stick to the Google philosophy that ads are a kind of tax on the product. So, for example, if you and I are talking about where we‘re going for dinner on Sunday, and the system is smart enough to recognize the nature of that discussion and offer me a 20 percent discount for a local restaurant, that‘s not a nuisance. That‘s an incredibly valuable offer.‖ Google+ users can rejoice in knowing that future use on the platform won‘t be inundated with several ads pestering them to check out this or that. As Horowitz mentioned, advertisements will instead add value to the conversations we have on Google+ versus simply spamming us with irrelevant nonsense. Google‘s IPO: Our Initial Public Offering of 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock took place on Wall Street on August 18, 2004. Technology Growth According to Joseph Smarr, technical lead on the Google+ team (former Plaxo CTO) Google+ is a typical Google web application: it uses Java servlets for the server code and JavaScript for the browser-side of the UI, largely built with Google's Closure framework, including the JavaScript compiler and the template system. They use the HTML5 History API to maintain good looking URLs in modern browsers despite it being an AJAX app. To achieve fast response times Google often renders the Closure templates on the server-side to render it before any JavaScript is loaded; then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes, hooks up event handlers etc. The backends are built mostly on top of BigTable and Colossus/GFS, and other common Google technologies such as MapReduce. June 2011 Released with features such as the ―Stream‖ which occupies the middle of three columns on the page, users see updates from those in their Circles; ―Circles‖ enable users to organize people into groups for sharing; ―Hangouts‖ are places used to facilitate group video chat (with a maximum of 10 people participating in a single Hangout at any point in time); ―Messenger‖ ―Instant Upload‖ ―Sparks‖ a front-end to Google Search; Aug 2011 "Games" (social gaming) had 16 games when launched on August 11, 2011, which has since been expanded to 38. 29
  • 30. Aug 2011 Google added a new addition to "Hangouts" - clicking on the Share button under any YouTube video reveals an icon that suggests watching the video with friends in a Google+ hangout. Sep 2011 Users can share Circles; it's a one-time share, so if the creator of the Circle updates the members, people's shared copies won't be updated. Oct 2011 Google implements hastags Oct 2011 Creative Kit, ―What‘s hot‖ stream and Ripples are introduced. Google + is now available to all Google Apps Nov 2011 Google+ launches Pages and Direct Connect Nov 2011 Google+ Badges are officially available Dec 2011 New integrations with Gmail and Contacts are introduced Dec 2011 New features: stream slider, more useful notifications, multiple administrators for pages, new lightbox for photos Jan 2012 Google released "Search plus Your World", which inserts content shared on Google+ profiles and brand pages under Web Search results. The feature, which is opt-in, was received with controversy over the emphasis of Google+ profiles over other social networking services' user profiles (i.e., Facebook and Twitter). The feature builds upon the earlier "Social Search" feature which indexes content shared or published by authors; "Social Search", however, relied partly upon returns from non-Google services, such as Twitter and Flickr. Community Growth Early adopters of Google+ have been mostly male (71.24%). The dominant age bracket (35%) is between 25 and 34 A survey estimates 13% of U.S. adults have joined Google+; it is projected to have 22% of U.S. adults in a year June 2011 Google+ introduced July 2011 Google+ has 10 million users Aug 2011 All Google+ users receive 150 invitations to give out Sept 2011 Google+ open to everyone 18 or older (invites not required) Oct 2011 Google+ has 40 million users Dec 2011 Google+ has 49 million users Dec 2011 Google+ has 62 million users Jan 2012 Google+ has 90 million users Dec 2012 Google+ is expected to reach 400 million users Leadership / Staffing: Jan 2012 Google added 8,067 employees in 2011, bringing total headcount to 32,467. 30
  • 31. Linkedin: 31
  • 32. LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Milestones Dec 2002 Reid Hoffman founded Linkedin May 5 2003 Launch of Linkedin with its five founders and 350 of their friends May 31 2003 By month end, it had 4,500 members Dec 2003 LinkedIn‘s membership had grown to 81,000 April 2007 LinkedIn boasted 10 million active user accounts. July 2008 LinkedIn launched its Spanish-language version of the popular website 2010 India and France are the fastest growing countries with a 76 percent and 72 percent growth rate, respectfully, each year and of the site's current 100 million users, 45 million reside in the U.S. and 56 million reside in the rest of the world. July 2010 LinkedIn logged 50 million unique visitors, a 16 percent change from November 2009. 2010 Every fortune 500 company could be found on Linkein Dec 2010 LinkedIn was ranked No. 47 in the 50 Hottest Web properties list with 266,577 unique visitors. Feb 2011 LinkedIn jumped to No. 36 on the Top 50 Hottest Web Properties list with 28,280 visitors, and currently, LinkedIn ranks No. 17 on the Alexa Traffic Rank chart, and is the 12th-most trafficked site in the U.S. Financials It is funded by Sequoia Capital, Greylock, Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and the European Founders Fund. Through January 2011, the company had received a total of $103 million of investment. 2003 Sequoia Capital led the Series A investment in the company. 2004 Its second round of financing, of $10 million, was led by Greylock, an early-stage investor that has a reputation of leading the most number of its investments to IPO status March 2006 LinkedIn reached profitability June 2008 Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and other venture capital firms purchased a 5% stake in the company for $53 million, giving the company a post-money valuation of approximately $1 billion. 2010 LinkedIn opened a European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, received a $20 million investment from Tiger Global Management LLC at a valuation of approximately $2 billion, and announced its first acquisition, Mspoke and improved its 1% premium subscription ratio. 32
  • 33. Oct 2010 Silicon Valley Insider ranked the company No. 10 on its Top 100 List of most valuable start ups. Dec 2010 The company was valued at $1.575 billion in private markets. Jan 2011 LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on January 27, 2011and the IPO occurred on May 19. May 2011 LinkedIn said it sold its IPO shares at $45. That means LinkedIn will kick off trading at a market value of roughly $4.3 billion It was reported that LinkedIn earned $154.6 million dollars in advertising revenue alone in 2011. This number was actually higher than that of Twitter who earned $139.5 million dollars respectively. LinkedIn‘s fourth-quarter earnings have recently soared. LinkedIn‘s shares rose 9.5% to $83.68 in premarket trading. The increase in value is due to its increase in success in the social media world. Technology Growth The Search, Network, and Analytics team at LinkedIn has a web site that hosts the open source projects built by the group. Notable among these projects is Project Voldemort, a distributed key-value structured storage system with low- latency similar in purpose to Amazon.com's Dynamo and Google's BigTable Feb 2008 A mobile version of the site was launched which gives access to a reduced feature set over a mobile phone. The mobile service is available in six languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish July 2008 LinkedIn launched LinkedIn DirectAds as a form of sponsored advertising Oct 2008 LinkedIn enabled an "applications platform" that allows other online services to be embedded within a member's profile page. Among the initial applications were an Amazon Reading List that allows LinkedIn members to display books they are reading, a connection to Tripit, and a Six Apart, WordPress and TypePad application that allows members to display their latest blog postings within their LinkedIn profile Nov 2010 LinkedIn allowed businesses to list products and services on company profile pages; it also permitted LinkedIn members to "recommend" products and services and write reviews. Jan 2011 LinkedIn acquired CardMunch, a mobile app maker that scans business cards and converts into contacts. LinkedIn plans to integrate this functionality into their services in the near future July 2011 LinkedIn launched a new feature allowing companies to include an "Apply with LinkedIn" button on job listing pages. Feb 2012 LinkedIn announced it's acquisition of the start-up Rapportive, which created a browser plug-in that takes contact information from 33
  • 34. social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and places them into Google's Gmail. LinkedIn has not stated yet how they will use the Rapportive's technology and talent. Community Growth The membership grows by approximately two new members every second. About half of the members are in the United States and 11 million are from Europe. With 3 million users, India has the fastest-growing network of users as of 2009. The Netherlands has the highest adoption rate per capita outside the US at 30%.. LinkedIn recently reached 4 million users in UK,1 million in Spain, and nearly 1 million in Pakistan. Leadership / Staffing: May 2003 5 Founders launch Linkedin Dec 2003 Staff of 14 employees Employees 2011 1,797 34
  • 35. Myspace Milestones Aug 2003 Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolf founded MySpace in 2003 with InterMix. MySpace's initial purpose was to cater to the "Hollywood elite," such as actors, musicians and other local artists of Southern California. Aug 2003 Within 10 days, the first version of Myspace was ready for launch April 2004 It then grew into a "place for friends" eight months later and, now, is geared toward anyone in the 13-to-25-year-old crowd. Nov 2004 MySpace had gained 5 million active users, July 2005 News Corp Fox Interactive bought InterMix and thus MySpace for $580 million Jan 2006 Fox announced plans to launch a UK version of Myspace in a bid to "tap into the UK music scene" April 2006 MySpace was the fifth most trafficked website in the world with more than 80 million active user profiles. June 2006 MySpace had 66,401 million total unique visitors, surpassing June Google as the most visited website in the USA March 2007 MySpace had reached 100 million worldwide active user accounts and later launched its developer platform in February 2008. June 2007 MySpace fell to the second place spot behind Facebook, but still grew 3 percent with 117,582 million total unique visitors. July 2007 MySpace had 114,147 million total unique visitors. This placed MySpace in the number one spot of all reported social networking sites that year. April 2008 Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors March 2009 MySpace was No. 38 on the hottest web property list with 68,205 million visitors May 2009 Facebook surpassed Myspace in the number of unique U.S. visitors Dec 2010 MySpace fell off the Hottest Web Properties list. Feb 2011 News Corp officially put the site up for sale, which was estimated to be worth $50–200 million. June 2011 Myspace was sold to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for approximately $35 million Financials 2004 eWolfe suggested they charge a fee for the basic Myspace service. Brad Greenspan nixed the idea, believing that keeping Myspace free was necessary to make it a successful community. 35
  • 36. July 2005 News Corp Fox Interactive bought InterMix and thus MySpace for $580 million Feb 2011 News Corp officially put the site up for sale, which was estimated to be worth $50–200 million. June 2011 Myspace was sold to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for approximately $35 million Myspace operates solely on revenues generated by advertising as its revenue model possesses no user-paid features.Through its Web site and affiliated ad networks, Myspace is second only to Yahoo! in its capacity to collect data about its users and thus in its ability to use behavioral targeting to select the ads each visitor sees. On August 8, 2006, search engine Google signed a $900 million deal to provide a Google search facility and advertising on Myspace Technology Growth Early 2006 Myspace introduced MySpaceIM, an instant messenger that uses one's Myspace account as a screen name Aug 2006 Began offering full service classifieds listing Early 2007 Myspace introduced MySpaceTV, a service similar to the YouTube video sharing website April 2007 Myspace launched a news service called Myspace News which displays news from RSS feeds that users submit. Late 2007 The site launched The Myspace Transmissions, a series of live-in- studio recordings by well-known artists. Feb 2008 Myspace set up a developer platform which allows developers to share their ideas and write their own Myspace applications April 2008 Ksolo.myspace.com is a combination of Myspace and kSolo, which allows users to upload audio recordings of themselves singing onto their profile page. In 2008 Myspace introduced an API with which users could create applications for other users to post on their profiles In 2008 Myspace Polls is a feature on Myspace that was brought back in 2008 to enable users to post polls on their profile and share them with other users In 2009 Myspace also added a new status update feature. If a Myspace user has a Twitter account, the tweet will also update the Myspace status. March 2010 Myspace had some new features added like recommendation engine for new users which suggests games, music and videos based on their previous search habits. Summer ‘10 The color scene of Myspace changed. The classic blue was replaced by a more white interface, to resemble the look and feel of 36
  • 37. Facebook, and to attract users of Facebook to join or rejoin Myspace Sept. 2010 Myspace continued to work on improving the website. A photos section was added and the Fotoflexer app was added to photos Nov 2007 Myspace and Bebo joined the Google-led OpenSocial alliance, which already includes Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and SixApart. OpenSocial was to promote a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks. Facebook remained independent. Community Growth The first Myspace users were eUniverse employees. The company held contests to see who could sign up the most users. While Facebook focused on creating a platform that allowed outside developers to build new applications, Myspace built everything in-house. Shawn Gold, Myspace's former head of marketing and content, said "Myspace went too wide and not deep enough in its product development. We went with a lot of products that were shallow and not the best products in the world." The products division had introduced many features (communication tools such as instant messaging, a classifieds program, a video player, a music player, a virtual karaoke machine, a self-serve advertising platform, profile-editing tools, security systems, privacy filters, and Myspace book lists, among others), however these were often buggy and slow as there was insufficient testing, measuring, and iterating. Community Growth: a Leadership / Staffing: June 2009 Myspace employed approximately 1,600 workers June 2009 A layoff of 37.5% of its workforce, reducing employees from 1,600 to 1,000. June 2011 Myspace had reduced its staff to around 200 Jan 2011 It was announced that the Myspace staff would be reduced by 47%. 37
  • 38. Tumblr: 38
  • 39. 39
  • 40. Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website. Milestones April 2007 Tumblr was launched Beta stage on April 27, 2007 by David Karp May 2007 Within two weeks of its launch, the service had gained 75,000 users. Nov 2007 Tumblr officially launched on Nov. 1, 2007, after a few months in beta mode July 2010 The site receives 25,000 new users each day June 2011 Tumblr passed competitor WordPress in number of blogs hosted -- more than 20 million July 2011 Tumblr scored 13.4 million unique visitors in the U.S Feb 2012 Tumblr had over 46.2 million blogs Financials 40
  • 41. Oct 2007 750,000 K by Union Square and Spark Capital Dec 2008 4.5 million by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital April 2010 10 million by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital Nov 2010 30 million by Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures Sep 2011 85 million led by Greylock Partners and insight Venture partners, also including The Cherning Group, Sir Richard Branson, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital Tumblr's original funding came from Karp's earnings as a software consultant at parenting site UrbanBaby. Tumblr has raised funding from Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Martín Varsavsky, John Borthwick (Betaworks), Fred Seibert, and Sequoia Capital(among other investors). The company had a $800 million valuation in August 2011 41
  • 42. September 2011, the company raised $85 million in a round of funding led by Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners Technology Growth On 28 February, 2012, Tumblr launched a redesign of its dashboard icons Community Growth 500million page views go through Tumblr every single day 40krequests added each second at Tumblr‘s peak usage hours; and it‘s growing, too 50GBof posts added each day; follower list updates are roughly another 2.7 terabytes daily 1Mnumber of writes made through the dashboard each second, and 50,000 reads per second source The service is most popular with the teen and college-aged user segments; fifty percent of Tumblr's visitor base is under the age of 25. As of 2009, Tumblr had an 85% retention rate, compared with 40% for Twitter. February 27, 2012, Tumblr had over 46.2 million blogs and more than 18 billion total posts Leadership / Staffing: April 2007 CEO and COO are only employees As of mid-2011, Tumblr has around 10 employees Current employees listed on Linkedin: 51-200 42
  • 44. Foursquare is a web and mobile application that allows registered users to post their location at a venue ("check-in") and connect with friends. Milestones March 2009 Launched with limited availability in only 100 worldwide metro areas. Jan 2010 Foursquare changed their location model to allow check-ins from any location worldwide. Feb 2011 Foursquare reached 7 million users IDs June 2011 The company reported it had 10 million registered users Financials Foursquare is principally funded by Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and O‘Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The company raised $1.35 million in its Series A and $20 million in its Series B round. On June 24, 2011 foursquare raised $50 million on a $600 million valuation. Technology Growth August 26, 2010, foursquare rolled out a new feature which notifies users of the number of days left before he or she is crowned "Mayor" September 23, 2010, foursquare announced that users can now earn badges for completing tasks as well as checking in. Each time the user checks into a place, he or she receives points. Scores break down as follows Checking in to a new place – 5 points Adding a new venue – 5 points Being the first of the user's friends to check into a new location - 3 points Checking in to a place the user has been before – 1 point Location multiplier for each place a user goes in a day – 1 point per location Points for checking in with the same friend at multiple locations - BFF bonus Foursquare Brands allows companies to create pages of tips and allows users to ―follow‖ the company and receive special, expert tips from them when they 44
  • 45. check-in at certain locations. Some of the companies even allow users to unlock special badges with enough check-ins. The service provides three levels of "Superuser status" (which is not to be confused with the "Super User" badge). Superuser status is conferred on users who have been selected by foursquare staff for their helpful contributions to the community. All superusers can review a queue of requested changes for a single city, and can select a new city at will. Superuser level 1 can edit venue info (name, address, cross street, phone, Twitter names, map pin location), mark venues as open or closed, request venue merges and deletions, and edit venue tags. Superuser level 2 can additionally merge duplicate venue listings, adjust the latitude and longitude of a venue, add a web address, and add categories. Superuser level 3 adds the ability to create and remove venue aliases, as well as access a "global queue" of pending requests needing superuser attention. Community Growth 45
  • 46. Male/female users are equally represented and also 50 percent of users are outside the US Users as of April 2012: 15 million Leadership / Staffing: Employees as of 2012: approx. 100 (51-200) 46
  • 48. StumbleUpon is a discovery engine (a form of web search engine) that finds and recommends web content to its users. Milestones Nov 2001 Founded by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric Boyd May 2007 StumbleUpon was purchased by eBay April 2009 Founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith and other investors including Ram Shriram bought the company 2005 The site caught the interest of angel investors, where it landed $1.2 million in funding and then in 2005, $1.5 million in seed funding. 2006 Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith moved to San Francisco and launched StumbleUpon Video 2007 StumbleThru launched, allowing stumbling content on specific sites like YouTube and Flickr May 2007 StumbleUpon was bought by eBay for $75 million (5.5 years after its initial founding) 2008 Traffic dropped by around 70% in comparison to the previous year 2009 It launches su.pr, bringing in the toolbar and allowing users to stumble directly from the site March 2009 A couple of months later, StumbleUpon raises Series A funding (rumored to be at $29 million), which is folded into buying back the company from eBay. Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith buy back the company (along with various investors) for a rumored $25 million Late 2009 StumbleUpon introduces the ―New‖ StumbleUpon, which allows stumbling without signing up 2010 Marc Leibowitz leaves Google and joins StumbleUpon as the VP of Business Development and Marketing 2011 StumbleUpon raises $17 million in Series B funding along with reports of the site generating 800 recommendations a month 2011 The site reports 20 million users and 1 billion stumbles a month Oct 2011 StumbleUpon made changes to the site by deleting their user- generated content, HTML blogging, standalone blog posts, and ability to photoblog. All their previous blog posts converted from HTML to plain text and all photos were deleted. This was done to focus their efforts on their recommendation engine rather than expand to include blogging platforms. Financials StumbleUpon is now an independent, investor-backed startup once again, with offices in San Francisco and New York City. 48
  • 49. 2005 The site caught the interest of angel investor, Brad O'Neill who took notice of the company and assisted with a move to San Francisco, as well as brought in subsequent fund-raising totaling $1.2 million from other angel investors including Ram Shriram (Google), Mitch Kapor (Mozilla Foundation), First Round Capital, and Ron Conway, and then in 2005, $1.5 million in seed funding. May 2007 StumbleUpon was bought by eBay for $75 million (5.5 years after its initial founding) March 2009 StumbleUpon raises Series A funding (rumored to be at $29 million), which is folded into buying back the company from eBay. April 2009 Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith buy back the company (along with various investors) for a rumored $25 million 2011 StumbleUpon raises $17 million in Series B funding along with reports of the site generating 800 recommendations a month Technology Growth The algorithm behind StumbleUpon uses three data points to determine the type of new sites that users ―stumble‖ across. The first is based off of the interests that users have identified as relevant to them. The second is based off of the sites that have been deemed as ―thumbs up‖ and ―thumbs down,‖ which helps the algorithm identify other users who have exhibited similar voting behavior. The third is based off of the types of individuals that users have befriended on the site. Oct 2011 StumbleUpon deleted years worth of user-generated content, and removed HTML blogging, standalone blog posts, and photoblogging capabilities. Additionally, all previous blog posts were converted from HTML to plain text, and all photos were deleted from previous blog posts. Dec 2006 StumbleUpon launched their StumbleVideo site at http://video.stumbleupon.com/. The new site allows users without a toolbar to "stumble" through all the videos that toolbar users have submitted and rate them using an Ajax interface. Feb 2007 StumbleUpon launched a version of StumbleVideo for the Internet Channel Web browser that runs on the Wii console April 2007 StumbleUpon launched the StumbleThru service, allowing users of the toolbar to stumble within sites such as YouTube, The Onion, Public Broadcasting Service and Wikipedia March 2009 StumbleUpon launched the Su.pr an URL shortening service Beta. May 2009 The su.pr service is available to all StumbleUpon users Community Growth Dec 2002 StumbleUpon had 1 million users. 49
  • 50. May 2010 StumbleUpon has more than 10 million users Aug 2011 StumbleUpon reached the 25 billion stumble mark, at which point they were adding over 1 billion stumbles per month. Oct 2011 StumbleUpon announced that it had over 20 million registered users of the service Leadership / Staffing: Current: 51-200 Employees 50
  • 51. Reddit: 51
  • 52. 52
  • 53. Reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Milestones June 2005 Reddit was originally founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. June 2005 Received $100 K in fuding from Y Combinator In the beginning Steve and Alexis submitted most of the links from many fake accounts Oct 2006 It was acquired by Condé Nast Publications; had 500,000 daily unique Jan 2008 Added the ability to allow anyone to create their own subreddits visitors for an estimated $20 million June 2008 Reddit became an open source Oct 2009 Steve Huffman left Reddit Dec 2009 First RedditGift exchange, 4,500 Redditors spent $185,000 Dec 2009 Reddit launches Selfserce Advertising July 2010 Reddit Gold launched Aug 2010 Digg v4 released Aug 2010 Reddit post‘s took over the homepage of Digg, starting the mass exodus to Reddit Sept 2010 Restoring Truthiness Campaign started on Reddit; ended up raising $600,000 for Donors Choose Nov 2010 Alexis Ohanian left and joined Steve Huffman to found Hipmunk Dec 2010 2nd RedditGift exchange with 17,000+ participants spending over $660,000 Aug 2011 Reddit acquires RedditGifts April 2011 Reddit takes over Digg in ranking Feb 2011 Surpassed 1 billion page views a month; average time on site 15 min 40 sec Sept 2011 Hits 1.6 billion page views per month Sept 2011 Reddit was split from Condé Nast, and now operates as a subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications. Financials June 2005 Reddit was originally founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. June 2005 Received $100 K in fuding from Y Combinator Technology Growth 53
  • 54. Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp but was rewritten in Python in 2005. The reasons given for the switch were faster performance, wider access to code libraries, and greater development flexibility. The Python web framework that former Reddit employee Aaron Swartz developed to run the site, web.py, is now available as an open-source project. Reddit currently uses Pylons as its web framework. As of November 2009, Reddit has decommissioned their physical servers and migrated to Amazon Web Services. Reddit uses PostgreSQL as primary datastore and slowly moving to Apache Cassandra, a column oriented datastore. It uses RabbitMQ for offline processing, HAProxy for load balancing and memcached for caching. In early 2009, Reddit started using jQuery. On July 21, 2010, Reddit outsourced the Reddit search engine to Flaptor, who used its search product IndexTank Community Growth The median U.S. Reddit user is male (72%), 25–34 years of age, has some college education, and is in the lowest income bracket of US$0–$24,999. The analysis also shows that many of the top ten audience interests are in the tech field, suggesting a computer savvy demographic Leadership / Staffing: July 2010, after explosive traffic growth, reddit introduced Reddit Gold, offering new features for a price of US$3.99/month or US$29.99/year. The revenue and attention got them approval to buy more servers and employ more people. Current staff 1-10 employees 54
  • 55. 55
  • 56. Sources: Facebook www.facebook.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3 http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=11&ved=0CI cBEBYwCg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Ftechnology%2F2007 %2Fjul%2F25%2Fmedia.newmedia&ei=M5SET_P3LoSy8QOQ- 73DBw&usg=AFQjCNE1h9OT-kuurgicG8qmBaVjn7Z3iA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram http://www.itproportal.com/2009/08/24/facebook-increase-employee-numbers-50- percent-end-2009/ http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218177/Google_vs._Facebook_by_the_ numbers Twitter www.twitter.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-04-13/tech/29957143_1_jack-dorsey- twitter-podcasting http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/tech-news/the-history-of- twitter-140-characters-at-a-time/article1949299/ http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/twitter-history-infographic/ http://marketingconversation.com/2010/12/11/a-twitter-history-timeline/ Pinterest www.pinterest.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest http://llsocial.com/2012/03/pinterest-adds-zendesk-deal-customer-support- issues/ http://marketingonpinterest.com/2012/02/09/pinterest-growth-faster-than-any- other-stand-alone-site-in-history/ http://tweets.fabiomoro.com/tweets/185783189258772483 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-10-28/pinterest-Ben- Silbermann/50979542/1 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2127078/Pinterest-popular-social-media- network-beating-LinkedIn-Tumblr.html?ito=feeds-newsxml Google+ https://plus.google.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/07/12/the-story-behind-socialstatistics- com/ 56
  • 57. http://9to5google.com/2011/08/03/google-becomes-fastest-growing-website-in- history-with-25-million-unique-users/ http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/72788.html http://www.circlecount.com/statistics/ http://mashable.com/2011/08/02/google-plus-25-million-visitors/ Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkedin http://knol.google.com/k/stephen-wilson/a-brief-history-of- linkedin/qkgetcb5gnql/16# http://www.sophisticatededge.com/history-of-linkedin.html http://www.zdnet.com/blog/feeds/linkedin-a-little-historical-nugget-of-an- infographic-just-for-you/3799 http://www.linktoprosper.com/blog/2009/03/the-history-and-future-of-linkedin/ Myspace http://www.myspace.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/29/myspace-history- timeline_n_887059.html#s299496&title=August_2003_Myspace http://www.webhostingreport.com/learn/myspace.html http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/as-myspace-sells-for-35- million-a-history-of-the-networks-valuation/241224/ http://vator.tv/news/2011-06-30-the-brief-rise-of-myspace-and-its-long-slow- demise http://www.stepforth.com/blog/2011/myspace-timeline-history/#.T4Sako5gGkI http://mashable.com/follow/topics/myspace Tumblr www.tumblr.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/what-hell-tumblr-and- other-worthwhile-questions http://blog.gcflearnfree.org/2012/02/what-is-tumblr/ http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architecture-15-billion-page- views-a-month-and-harder.html http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/tumblr-integrates-facebook-timeline-news-feed- ticker-updates/ StumbleUpon http://www.stumbleupon.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon http://www.distilled.net/blog/infographics/history-of-stumbleupon-from-startup-to- influential-social-media-network-site-infographic/ http://www.othersidegroup.com/2011/08/milestones-in-stumbleupon-history/ 57