Tuesday, 10 January 2012

The Winklevoss twins

The Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler  attended Harvard at the same time as Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg from 2002-2004. They claim to have come up with the initial idea for facebook and when Zukerberg went ahead with it without them they were furious. They took action and sued Zukerberg and won the case in 2008, walking away with 65 million dollars, 20 million in cash and 45 million in facebook shares.
Although the twins won this first part of the case, the notion that Zukerberg stole their idea came accross mostly when the film 'the social network' came out. The film in many people's eyes portrayed Mark Zukerberg as a lying thief with no friends off his facebook page.
 MARK ZUKERBERG

winklevoss lawsuit judge facebook 300x201 Winklevoss Twins must accept $65 million settlementCAMERON AND TYLER WINKLEVOSS

Facebook

Facebook ( originally called 'The Facebook' ) began to really kick off around 2009 and 2010 especially in Ireland. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes in Cambridge, Massachusettes in the United States.
 It began with the website's membership being exclusive to Harvard students and then began to spread around that area, the founders then new they were on to something huge when they started to sell advertising on the website for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Facebook went from being exclusive to a few schools when it launched in February 2004, to having over 800 million active users across the globe in July 2011, the oldest woman to join was 102 in 2008.
Facebook has been blocked intermittently in numerous countries such as Vietnam, Pakistan, Iran and Syria for different reasons depending on the country, for expample in many countries it was banned due to religious discrimination being posted without any consequences. Facebook's privacy is also and on going problem due to the fact that the settings are not automatically private.

Friday, 9 December 2011

Bebo

Although Myspace was around first, when bebo made it's launch in 2005 it quickly began to overtake it becoming more popular in Ireland than in the UK where people still leaned towards Myspace.
Bebo came about when Michael and Californian Xochi Birch met in a london pub. They were married and after a few years had invented three social networking sites.

 Bebo, like Myspace is used by over 23m around the world and provides these users with a page of their own, on which they can post how they're feeling, music videos they like, pictures and comments on their friends pages.It was made for talking to friends and  'if you use Bebo to bully, Xochi says sternly, 'your account will be cancelled'.

 Bebo in Ireland peaked from 2008-2010 but  people began deleting their accounts and switching to the more popluar Facebook around the end of 2010. The Birches still own the firm of bebo, paying themselves 'below average' salaries, and reportedly resisting $100m offers to sell. Although it is now less popluar than it has been in recent years, bebo is still used by people in different countries all around the world.

Friday, 2 December 2011

Introduction

Hi I'm Rachel and I'll be doing my blog on the geography of social networking. I chose to do this topic for my blog because social networking is something that goes on all around the world, with many differrent sites to connect with your friends and family on. Facebook is something i would use everyday so i decided it would be good to find out more about it and other sites people are using such as twitter, bebo and tuenti. I hope you enjoy! :)