KINDS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

• LunarStorm can be accessed at www.LunarStorm.se, it is a commercial virtual site and it is available in Swedish language. Actually, LunarStorm started in 1996 and was design by Rickard Ericsson; it was a social networking website for teenagers and was Europe‟s first digital online community. LunarStorm was officially launched in 2000. In 2001, LunarStorm had grown to over 600,000 members but still experienced economic difficulty. Since the beginning, LunarStorm had been financed by banners and other advertising on the website, but this soon evolved to include more of pay-by-SMS services. An early example was LunarStorm's own pre-paid card "Vrål" ("Bawl"). In 2002, "Kolla" ("Look" or "Check this out") was introduced, which allowed users to visit LunarStorm from their mobile phones. In the same year, members were able to upgrade their membership to "pro" status and get unlimited access to a range of services for a fee. LunarStorm Pro was extremely popular among the member base, and it improved the website's economic situation greatly (Goma, 2001)

•  MySpace, a social networking website, has its head office in Beverly Hills, California, where it shares a building with its owner, News Corporation. In 2006, MySpace became the most popular social networking website in the United States but was overtaken in 2008 by its competitor Facebook, that internationally became the most popular social networking site worldwide. Approximately 43.2 million users visit MySpace on a monthly basis. The company employs approximately 1000 employees. A unique feature of MySpace is the ability for users to customize their profile information to give detailed information about themselves and what they are interested in. MySpace also has a special profile for musical artists were they can download their entire music into mp3 songs (Natta, 2010).

• Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004, and it is privately operated by Facebook, Inc. (Facebook, 2004). Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and others when he was a student at Harvard; though when the site was initially launched, it was restricted to Harvard students only. Later the privilege was extended to high school students and later to everyone that is 13 years or older (Boyd, 2007). As of July 2010, Facebook has more than 500 million active users. In January 2009, Facebook was ranked as the most used social network worldwide. Also, in May 2010, Google announced that more people visited Facebook than any other website in the world. It declares that this was discovered from findings on 1,000 sites across the world. (TIMES, 2010). Users may create a personal profile; add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications, photos and comments when they update their profile. Additionally, Facebook users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, college, or other characteristics. Facebook allows anyone who is at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website. On a daily basis, traffic to Facebook network is on the rise. Facebook also became the top social network across eight individual markets in Asiathe Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Vietnam. On October 24, 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 included rights to place international ads on Facebook; other companies have equally followed suit (STONE, 2007). For example, just during the 2010 FIFA football world cup, Nike did an ad with Facebook, and within minutes, an average of 8 million viewers had registered with Facebook (kevthefont, 2010). 

•  YouTube, founded in 2005, is the world's most popular online video community, where millions of people can discover, watch and share originally-created videos (YouTube, 2005). YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a major distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers, large and small. YouTube is based in San Bruno, California and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. In November 2006, within a year of its launch, YouTube was purchased by Google Inc. in one of the most talkedabout acquisitions to date. YouTube has entered into a number of partnership relations with content providers such as CBS, BBC, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, NBA, The Sundance Channel and many others (YouTube, 2005). YouTube offered the public a beta site of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005. The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006, the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day (YouTube, 2005).

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686