Social Media Networking Sites You Need to Know About - part 3

Part Three of a Three-Part Report

24 Social Media Networking Sites You Need to Know About

In general, young people are more likely to use social media than older people. But some platforms are much more popular among older people. 

The increase in social media use over the last decade has, of course, come together with a large increase in the amount of time that people spend online.

In the US many adults spend more than 6 hours per day on digital media.

They do this via apps and websites accessed through mobile phones, tablets, computers and other connected devices such as game consoles.

Social media sites reviewed in this final part of the Report:

41 - Skyrock

Skyrock.com is a social networking site offering its members a free, personal web space. One can create a blog, add a profile, and exchange messages with other registered members. The site also offers a specific space for members who create blogs showcasing their original musical compositions.

Skyrock is a French social networking site that offers its users a free and personal web space to create and post blogs, add profiles and exchange messages.

Skyrock.com began as a blogging site, Skyblog.com, founded by Skyrock CEO Pierre Bellanger in December 2002. In May 2007, after abandoning the Skyblog.com brand, Skyrock.com was launched as a full-scale social network.

As of June 2008 Skyrock was ranked as the world's seventh largest social network with over 21 million visitors.

Driven in large part by its French traffic, Skyrock Network has established itself as the second largest European social networking site.

The site’s European traffic has grown 22 percent since the start of the year and now encompasses 13.8 million unique European visitors. This surpasses the 12.1 million unique European visitors recorded by the largest UK social networking site, Bebo.com.

Skyrock’s traffic has been boosted by the site’s French language focus. As a result, it has attracted a substantial portion of unique visitors from other French-speaking European countries, including 856,000 from Belgium and 371,000 from Switzerland.

Apart from French and English, it is also available in five other languages.

Skyrock has a high penetration rate in France. In several French middle schools, students used the platform to malign school personnel resulting in their expulsion and in the issuing of alerts by schools to warn parents and students about such behavior.

Furthermore, certain American newspapers attempted to associate the breakout of the 2005 civil unrest in France to users of Skyblogs. 

However, institutions of the French state never filed any formal complaint indicting the usage of Skyrock Blogs.

A few prominent French institutions created a Skyrock Blog as a preferred tool to communicate messages.

42 - Snapchat

This is an image messaging social platform that enables you to chat with friends by using pictures.

Snapchat is an American multimedia messaging app developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before they become inaccessible to their recipients.

It allows you to explore news and even check out live stories that are happening around the world.

Snapchat is not shutting down in June 2020. 

Snapchat isn't shutting down on June 28th, 2020, or any other time during the year as it's just a baseless rumour designed to cause hysteria.

This goes all the way back to 2017 with even 2019 having been home to hoax rumours about Snapchat closing down.

Snapchat will soon be less of a walled garden: the company will soon experiment with making public content available outside of its app. 

The change will roll out as a test, but could eventually expand more widely. “We’re always exploring ways to make it even easier to view Snapchat’s engaging and topical content and share it with your friends,” a Snap spokesperson said in a statement.

It could be a significant update for Snap. The company has typically eschewed the sharing dynamics of most of its competitors, instead preferring to focus on private conversations between friends. At the same time, Snap has been making significant investments in original programming.

Number of active users per month: 200 million approximately.

43 - Snapfish

Snapfish is a web-based photo sharing social networking site that offers unlimited storage to its members for uploading photos.

Snapfish is a web-based photo sharing and photo printing service owned by Shutterfly.

Snapfish is based in San Francisco, California.

Snapfish was launched in 1999 by business partners Rajil Kapoor, Bala Parthasarathy, Suneet Wadhwa, and Shripati Acharya.

Ben Nelson joined soon thereafter as corporate development operations lead, to become CFO and later president. Jasbir Patel was named president and CEO of Snapfish in January 2017.

On October 30, 2001, Snapfish was acquired by District Photo for an undisclosed amount.

In 2005, Snapfish was bought by Hewlett-Packard. A Merrill Lynch report estimated that HP may have paid between $300 million and $400 million for Snapfish, while Snapfish’s revenue was less than $100 million. 

Snapfish co-founder Raj Kapoor confirmed in a 2011 interview that the acquisition price was $300 million.

In 2004, Snapfish opened a physical retail concept store in Alexandria, Virginia, but later closed it.

In August 2013, Snapfish announced on their local websites (and through a mailing to members) that they were shutting down the service in Belgium, India, the Netherlands and Spain.

In April 2015, HP reached an agreement to sell Snapfish back to District Photo. Under the terms of the sale, HP allowed the company to continue to use its printing services.

During a website conversion in 2016 Snapfish had a data loss while converting to their new web system. Photos prior to January 2014 were unable to be migrated to the new website system. Snapfish said that although some photo albums were recovered, others will remain empty.

Typically, Snapfish has three versions of images: high resolution, low resolution, and printable images. Both the high resolution and low resolution were lost and the backup files for the printable images were not recoverable.

On September 28, 2018 it was announced that Snapfish would acquire CafePress for more than $25 Million. The acquisition of CafePress was completed on November 9, 2018.

On June 10, 2019, Apollo Global Management announced that it would acquire both Snapfish and its rival Shutterfly in separate deals valued at around $3 billion in total.

The two companies merged into a single entity, with Snapfish parent company District Photo as a minority stakeholder. The merger of Shutterfly and Snapfish was completed on January 8, 2020.

On May 4, 2020 it was announced that Snapfish will no longer be providing the platform for Boots Photo in the UK and Ireland from May 13, 2020.

44 - Spreely

Spreely is a social media platform that is free from censorship and free from shadow bans.

Spreely or speak freely is a social networking platform for “free people”.

The overall look at first is a bit like Facebook, but in addition to groups and pages, Spreely caters to video content from the channel tab. You can source videos from YouTube, Vimeo, And Dailymotion, so it’s literally a whole new home for your video content curation. 

Spreely has practical features, such as tourism information, forums and advanced forums, and events. Currently the discussions are mostly directed towards American politics and improving the platform to make it better.

Some say while Spreely shows promise as a platform, the app is often claimed to be not so easy to use and is not very user friendly. You cannot see past posts you made either on your personal account or pages you’ve created, which is annoying.

This social media service provides competition to Facebook. Some say Facebook has grown too big, and as result is monopolising social media.

However, Spreely is constantly updating, and it is very difficult to follow posts.

Pornography, nudity or overtly sexual content is not welcome on Spreely.  There are thousands of sites on the Net for this kind of content, and if that is what you are after we suggest you visit one of them. 

Spreely is a forum for the preservation of everyone’s God given right to express their opinions and speak freely.

45 - StumbleUpon - which is now part of Mix.com

StumbleUpon was an intelligent social networking platform that found or discovers content and recommended the same to its users.

Founded in November 2001, StumbleUpon offers a simple way to discover sites on the web: create an account, input some information about yourself, and hit the "stumble" button to see a random webpage that matches your interests.

StumbleUpon was a discovery and advertisement engine that pushed web content recommendations to its users. Its features allowed users to discover and rate Web pages, photos and videos that are personalised to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing, social-networking and advertising principles. 

You are thus empowered to discover webpages, images, videos and so on and then rate them as per your interest and taste.

Stumble had its heyday, and peaked probably sometime in 2010-2012. Since then, it was on a decline, laying off 30% of their workers in 2013, and finally shutting its doors in the middle of 2018.

With Stumble closing, the founder and the formula have been given new life in the form of Mix.com.

Mix is the next generation of the Stumble formula, taking what they learned from the highs and lows of Stumble and applying it to a new platform and a new tool. Mix is, for all intents and purposes, StumbleUpon 2.0. Well, or 3.0, depending on how you count the Stumble redesign.

One of the first high-profile services that gave people a way to discover new websites and online content, it was enjoyed by over 40 million users.

The closure came out of the blue, and was announced by co-founder Garrett Camp in a blog post. He suggests that users might like to migrate to another one of his creations, Mix.com, and says that switching to the newer service has been made "as smooth as possible".

Camp says that times have changed dramatically since the inception of StumbleUpon. "Since starting SU the number of people with Internet access has grown nearly 10x, and mobile phones and social media have changed our lives.

“The number of platforms to share or host content has increased significantly, yet we still need better tools to help us filter through the exploding amount of content on the web, and find signal within the noise."

This means SU users were able to migrate their accounts over, to add some continuity and give the new platform a basic user-base. It didn’t carry over the full 40 million users from SU’s heyday, but it has more than a few million to start with, and it’s growing.

Mix is a social content curation site that allows you to collect articles, and content about specific interests or topics that you like. When you curate and add to your collections, your content is shared with friends and made discoverable to others on Mix who share similar interests.

The number of active StumbleUpon users was around 40 million approximately but is now down to around 3 million via Mix.com.

46 - Tagged

Tagged is a social discovery website based in San Francisco, California, founded in 2004. It allows members to browse the profiles of any other members, and share tags and virtual gifts.

This is a great social media site based on friendship and dating and, in 2011, it acquired another social networking platform called hi5.

Tagged.com is a free-to-use online dating service where users can meet new people and talk online. Initially the service was set up for users under 18 and was a popular meeting site for teens.

It enables you to socialise with others through games, browsing profiles, common interests and so on.

You can customise your user profile, add friends, view your timeline and engage in fun activities like updating your status or playing games. You also get notification alerts to see your interactions and a messaging feature so you can chat privately with others.

Tagged was created in 2004 by two entrepreneurs: Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith. They wanted to create a "Yahoo!" for teens, or maybe even the next MTV.

The purpose of the social networking service is to connect people for the purpose of friendship or dating. 

Tagged is widely commended for continuously growing and not dying out during the rise of Facebook.

The current number of active users is approximately over 100 million a month and it has over 300 million registered users.

47 - Taringa!

Taringa! is one of the largest social networking platform in Latin America, which is based in Argentina and allows users to share their experiences, content and more.

Taringa! has been described as a combination of Reddit and Facebook in that content is divided into topics where users can create the content themselves and then receive feedback in the form of comments and upvotes/down votes.

Posts are categorised into one of three sections: Highlights, Emerging and Most Recent.

The platform has a presence in every country in the Spanish-speaking world and its main markets are Argentina, Spain, Colombia, Chile, Peru and the US Spanish speaking community.

It is the 4th most popular Latin American Social Network and the second one in traffic only after Facebook.

In September 2017, Taringa! suffered a database breach when almost 28 million database entries were leaked.

One of Taringa!'s most important aspects is the posts. The users create the content themselves and receive feedback from the community (except new users, being experts or not) in the form of comments, points, recommendations, and favorites.

Top-rated content gets featured on a special section of the site called Tops. Posts can be about many different subjects. They can be created with text, images, gifs, videos, and/or links. 

Taringa! has partnered with MakerDAO and e-wallet provider Airtm to launch a stablecoin-powered points system 

The number of active users every month is approximately 75 million and it consists of a 30 million registered user base.

48 - Telegram

Telegram is a cloud-based instant messaging, video-telephony and voice over IP service. Telegram client apps are available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux. Users can send messages and exchange photos, videos, stickers, audio and files of any type. 

This instant messaging network is similar to WhatsApp and is available across platforms in more than eight languages.

However, Telegram has always focused more on the privacy and security of the messages you send over the Internet by using its platform.

So, it empowers you to send messages that are encrypted and self-destructive. This encryption feature has only just been made available for WhatsApp, whereas Telegram has always provided it.

Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security, it's super-fast, simple and free. You can use Telegram on all your devices at the same time and your messages sync seamlessly across any number of your phones, tablets or computers.

Number of active users per month, in 7 years, has grown to approximately 400 million.

49 - The Dots

The Dots is a networking platform that helps everyone involved in the creative process connect, collaborate and commercialise helping build a stronger, more profitable and diverse creative sector.

The Dots is a completely free promotional tool for students specifically designed to help you connect to industry, clients and jobs. 

Born out of an idea to make the creative industries more open and meritocratic, founder Pip Jamieson launched the platform in the UK in 2014.

She commented: “We decided to launch The Dots in the UK first, as the creative sectors here are really thriving. 

“A recent government report highlighted that the UK’s creative industries are now worth £71.4bn to the local economy and more than 1.68 million people are currently working in these sectors”.

The Dots is aimed at an estimated 80 million ‘Non collar’ millennial professionals and has over a quarter of a million registered users and is aimed at similar users to LinkedIn.

50 - TikTok

TikTok is incredibly popular with children. If you’re under 16 then this is the place to be.

TikTok is a social video app that allows its users to share short videos. There’s plenty of stickers, filters and augmented reality features to add to your videos.

It was the 4th most downloaded app in 2018 and looks like it might top that list in 2020.

TikTok is known in China as Douyin, which means “Vibrating Sound”. Available on iOS and Android, TikTok is popular for creating short music videos of between 3 and 15 seconds.

You can also create short looping videos of between 3 and 60 seconds.

However, Donald Trump’s trade war with China has forced ByteDance, the privately owned Beijing-based parent of the video-sharing site TikTok, to pursue a sale of its US business after the president signed an executive order.

51 - Tumblr

Tumblr is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic.

The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs. Bloggers can also make their blogs private.

Now having been owned by Yahoo since 2013, Tumblr serves as a social media cum micro blogging platform that can be used to find and follow things that you like.

You can also use it to post anything, including multimedia, to a short-form blog. Moreover, it gives you the flexibility to customise almost everything.

Tumblr is making a change to how it deals with hate speech on its blogging platform. The company announced recently that it will also remove the reblogs (re-postings) from any blogs that were suspended for violating its policies around hate speech.

Already, the company says it’s identified nearly 1,000 blogs that were banned for blatant violations of its hate-speech rules. Most of these blogs contained Nazi-related content, it said.

Tumblr has removed all the reblogs from these previously banned sites, as well, a number totaling 4.47 million individual posts.

Tumblr said, ‘We’ve listened to your feedback and have reassessed how we can more effectively remove hateful content from Tumblr. In our own research, and from your helpful reports, we found that much of the existing hate speech stemmed from blogs that have actually already been terminated.

‘While their original posts were deleted upon blog termination, the content of those posts still lived on in reblogs. Those reblogs rarely contained the kind of counter-speech that serves to keep hateful rhetoric in check, so we’re changing how we deal with them’.

Number of active users per month: 555 million approximately.

52 - Twitter

This social networking site enables you to post short text messages containing a limited number of characters, up to 280, to convey your message to the world.

Twitter is an American micro-blogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them.

With the growing craze for online shopping, Twitter also makes it possible to promote your businesses and even shop directly through tweets.

Recently Twitter has confirmed hackers made use of tools that were supposed to have only been available to its own staff and they used them to hack attack.

The breach saw the accounts of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye West and Bill Gates among other celebrities used to tweet a Bitcoin scam.

Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass Biz Stone and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion searches every day.

Jack Dorsey, came up with the concept of a service allowing users to share personal status updates via SMS to groups of people. By March 2006, they had a working prototype, and a name Twttr, which was inspired in part by bird sounds.

Within six months after the launch, Twttr had become Twitter.

Once the service went public, its founders imposed a 140-character limit for messages, based on the maximum length of text messages at the time; this was later expanded to the current 280 characters.

Most tweets, the company explained, hover around 50 characters; when people needed more characters, they simply sent more tweets. The character increase was designed to help Twitter users spend less time condensing their thoughts and more time talking.

Though Twitter’s user base is much smaller than that of Facebook (which has more than 2 billion monthly active users as of 2019), it has increasingly become a source of breaking news and information, especially for younger users.

Twitter is banned completely in Iran, China and N. Korea and has been intermittently blocked in numerous countries including Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Venezuela and Turkmenistan on different bases.

In an attempt to compete with Twitter's leadership in TV, Facebook introduced a number of features in 2013 to drive conversation about TV including hashtags, verified profiles and embeddable posts.

It also opened up new data visualisation APIs for TV news and other media outlets, enabling them to search for a word and see a firehose of public posts that mention it as well as show how many people mentioned a word in both public and private posts during a set time frame, with a demographic breakdown of the age, gender, and location of these people.

In January 2014, Facebook announced a partnership with UK-based social TV analytics company SecondSync which saw the social network make its social TV available outside the company for the first time.

Facebook struck the partnership to help marketers understand how people are using the social network to talk about topics such as TV.

Number of active users per month is around 320 million.

53 - Vero

Vero says that it’s “a social network for anyone who loves anything enough to share it, and wants control over who they share it with. Just like we do in real life.” 

Vero is a subscription based social network which has no ads and does not collect any personal user data. It’s a great alternative to Facebook as has some really lovely features.

It’s a totally different model to Facebook in the sense that Facebook needs user data in order to make money from them.

Vero does collect some usage data which is used to see how often the app is used.

Another great thing about the usage data they collect is how its displayed to you.  Vero want to address the issue of social media addiction.

Vero's content feed resembles Instagram's although users can share a wider variety of content and the app has a chronological content feed whereas Facebook and Instagram's feeds are algorithm based.

Vero's business plan is also distinct from similar social media apps.

Whereas its competitors such as Facebook or Instagram make money from in-app advertising revenue and the sale of user data, Vero's business plan was to invite the first one million users to use the app for free then charge any subsequent users a subscription fee.

54 - Viadeo

Viadeo is an online business-based social networking site that helps business people, mostly those in Europe, connect with one another.

Viadeo is a Web 2.0 professional social network whose members include business owners, ... In August 2015, Viadeo announced they had engaged in an advertising campaign in France to promote a 'new vision' and that the member base 

It is available in different languages.

Viadeo was founded under its original name, Viaduc, in May 2004 by Dan Serfaty, a graduate of the HEC School of Management in Paris, and Thierry Lunati, a graduate of Ecole Centrale Paris. The name was changed to Viadeo in November 2006.

From November 2006 to August 2007, Viadeo raised €5 million twice in funding from investors AGF Private Equity and Ventech. Later that year, Viadeo announced the acquisition of Tianji, a Chinese business social network.

Six months after purchasing Tianji, in July 2008 Viadeo acquired its Spanish competitor ICTnet. Launched in 1995, ICTnet had 300,000 members and is popular in South America.

In early 2009, Viadeo acquired the Indian professional social networks services, ApnaCircle, with 300,000 members at the time of the acquisition, was founded by Yogesh Bansal and later joined by Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail, as board member.

On 13 October 2009, Viadeo announced the acquisition of the Canadian contact management website, unyk.com. At the time, unyk had 16 million members around the world, and this made Viadeo second only to its main competitor LinkedIn in terms of total membership.

The company is headquartered in Paris and employs a global staff of 450, with offices in London, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Beijing, New Delhi, Mexico City, Montreal and San Francisco In 2009, Viadeo had estimated annual turnover of $40 million and is profitable since last quarter of 2009.

In August 2015, Viadeo announced they had engaged in an advertising campaign in France to promote a 'new vision' and that the member base had passed the 10 million mark in France.

In 2016, after a failed attempt to conquer international markets, the company was taken over by Le Figaro

55 - Viber

Viber is one of the most popular instant messaging apps worldwide and is available on all major mobile devices and operating systems.

This multi-lingual social platform is known for its instant text messaging and voice messaging capabilities.

Viber is a free to download app that allows users to make free calls, send texts, pictures and video messages to other Viber users. It works on both mobile and computer and can be used to connect with people around the world.

Viber say that with their free and secure connection users worldwide communicate with their loved ones through high-quality audio and video calls, messaging, and much more.

All Viber calls and chats are protected by built-in end-to-end encryption, so you can be sure that your conversations are always secure.

It also offers you the ability to call non-Viber users through a feature named Viber Out.

Every fourth Viber user that sees a product advertised on the platform actually proceeds to purchase it. The 25% buy rate is insanely high and many advertisers have already started tapping the platform’s potential.

Viber is currently available in 32 languages. More are being added, as the demand for the free messaging platform increases. Viber stats and data show that the number of languages still needs to increase exponentially.

Viber is used in 193 countries and has been only banned in Tajikistan.

Ukrainians happen to love Viber, with 24.24% of the app’s traffic originating from this country. Russia is the second most common home to Viber users, with 18.59% of traffic coming from Putin’s homeland.

Vietnam and Belarus take the third and the fourth place on the list, while Bulgaria is the fifth, with 3.49% of Viber’s total traffic.

On July 24, 2013, Viber’s support system was defaced by the Syrian Electronic Army. According to the official statement that Viber released after the incident, no sensitive user information was accessed, and the users’ privacy remained unharmed.

The software was developed in 2010 by Israel based Viber Media, which was bought by Rakuten in 2014 for $900 million. Since 2017, its corporate name has been Rakuten Viber.

It is based in Luxembourg and has offices in Amsterdam, Kiev, London, Brest, Barcelona, Tokyo, Sofia, Tel Aviv, Singapore, San Francisco, Moscow, Minsk, Manila and Paris.

The number of active users per month is around 260 million and there are roughly 1.17 Billion registered users.

56 - VKontakte

VKontakte, otherwise known as VK, is the largest social networking service among Europeans.

It was also ranked as one of th largest global social networks with over 100 million active users. VK is available in many different languages, but is found to be extremely popular among Russian-speaking users.

VK is one of the largest social networking platforms in Russia and has quite similar features to Facebook.

As with most social networks, the site's core functionality is based around private messaging and sharing photos, status updates and links with friends. VK also has tools for managing online communities and celebrity pages.

The site allows its users to upload, search and stream media content, such as videos and music.

VK features an advanced search engine, that allows complex queries for finding friends, as well as a real-time news search.

The standout difference is that VK is geared toward Eastern European users, particularly Russian. In fact, it’s the most popular social media platform in Russia by far.

Number of active users per month: 100 million approximately

57 - Wayn

Wayn is a travel- and lifestyle-based social networking platform and offers its users the ability to discover where to go, what to do and how to meet like-minded people to share their experiences.

WAYN enables its users to create a profile and upload photos. Users can search for other users and link them to their profiles as friends. In 2015 it claims to have over 20 million users. 

In late 2016, the website was bought by Lastminute.com for 1.2 million which allows the project to continue but was insufficient to pay off debts. Before the sale the site had been losing money and traffic.

WAYN was founded in 2002 in London by Jérome Touze (Co-CEO), Peter Ward (Co-CEO) and Mike Lines (CTO), after two of them came up with the idea to connect people based on their location while having a few beers in their local pub.

WAYN initially grew through word-of-mouth and reached almost 50,000 members by the end of 2004. Following its relaunch in May 2005 it reached over 2.5 million members by the end of 2005. On 26 March 2012 the site claimed "over 19.1m members".

The business started with initial seed funding in 2003 from the original founder of Friends Reunited.

In 2006, the WAYN founders managed to complete a series of fund raising with $11 million from DFJ Esprit and attracting famous Internet entrepreneurs such as Brent Hoberman (ex founder of lastminute.com).

And Hugo Burge (CEO of cheapflights.co.uk), Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillips (ex founders of Active Hotels) and Tedder (ex CEO of Jagex, an online gaming company) and was referred to at the time as the MySpace of Travel.

In 2016, Lastminute Bought WAYN’s Assets for Just $1.2 Million 

Like many other social media sites, WAYN encourages its users to invite their friends which in turn leads to the contacts of the members to receive an invitation to join. In 2006, some members have vented their frustration claiming they were not aware that an invitation would be sent to their contacts.

The company acknowledged that this process could be improved and has since changed the way in which these invitations get generated and has also signed up with Return Path, one of the few white listing companies in the world which certifies Emails Best Practice.

The site claimed to have over 20 million users.

58 - WeChat

This is an all-in-one communications app for messaging and calling (similar to WhatsApp) that enables you to connect with the people of your choice. It was also developed by Tencent in China and can easily work alongside QQ.

The number of WeChat users are fast catching up with the number of WhatsApp users.

Number of active users per month is nearly 1.2 billion monthly users the app is the preferred mode of communication not only for ordinary Chinese people, but also businesses, investors, academics, and journalists who have a stake in both countries.

WeChat communications conducted entirely among non-China-registered accounts are subject to pervasive content surveillance that was previously thought to be exclusively reserved for China-registered accounts.

Documents and images transmitted entirely among non-China-registered accounts undergo content surveillance wherein these les are analysed for content that is politically sensitive in China.

WeChat is the most popular social media platform in China and third in the world. While the platform dominates the market in China, it also has made efforts to inter-nationalise and attract users globally.

Like any other Internet platform operating in China, WeChat is expected to follow rules and regulations from Chinese authorities around prohibited content.

Previous Citizen Lab research shows the balancing act WeChat must maintain as it attempts to keep within government red lines in China and attract users internationally.

WeChat implements censorship for users with accounts registered to mainland China phone numbers. This censorship is done without notification to users and is dynamically updated, o en in response to current events.

Recently US President Donald Trump ordered US firms to stop doing business with both WeChat and TikTok citing national security concerns. WeChat is apparently not very bothered as only 2% of its income is American.

The potential ban is the latest move in a sweeping tit-for-tat confrontation between China and the US spanning areas including technology, trade, diplomacy and media, a feud that has caused Sino-American relations to deteriorate at a dizzying rate in recent months.

Yet the WeChat ban will perhaps have the most pervasive impact on people straddling both countries, and represents a drastic turn in US policy on issues of cyber sovereignty and freedom of information, setting a controversial precedent with potentially global ramifications.

59 - We Heart It

This photo-sharing social media site, which is available in more than 20 languages, is ideal for users’ daily dose of inspiration or motivation.

It enables users to view and share highly inspirational images with their friends.

We Heart It is an image-based social network. We Heart It describes itself as "A home for your inspiration" and a place to "Organize and share the things you love."

Users can collect (or "heart") their favorite images to share with friends and organise into collections. Users can access the site through a web browser or We Heart It.

We Heart It was founded in 2008 by Fabio Giolito, a native of Brazil. 

He started the site as a side project around the idea of "hearting" photos and saving them for sharing with friends. What started as a tool for himself and friends, the product grew organically from there into something much larger. When growth began to surge, Fabio brought on co-founder Bruno Zanchet to help focus on infrastructure.

The two took on some seed funding and the site became an incorporated business in California in 2011.

We Heart It is a visual platform that supports still images, animated GIFs, and video.

It offers follow icons, live widgets, and share buttons for users who want to incorporate We Heart It on their website or blog.

We Heart It is known for its positive community, since there are no features for commenting, users feel more comfortable posting content since it will not receive negative comments as it might on other social networks.

60 - WhatsApp

WhatsApp is a text and voice messaging app that launched in 2009. It’s become incredibly popular since then, in no small thanks to its features and flexibility.

As a free service, WhatsApp allows for messages and calls on both desktop and mobile devices.

Now, despite having been acquired by Facebook in 2014, this instant messaging platform still exists as an independent entity.

WhatsApp Messenger, or simply WhatsApp, is an American freeware, cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP service owned by Facebook, Inc.

It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other media data. 

It arrived on the scene much later than Facebook, but has been able to capture the imagination of millions of people across the world by giving them the ability to communicate and share instantly with individuals and groups.

WhatsApp has a number of advanced security features. It has end-to-end encryption, just like Apple’s iMessage and Signal. All messages flowing through the platform are secured so that only the sender and the recipient can view them.

This means WhatsApp couldn’t read your message even if it wanted to. The app doesn’t store your personal information, and only people you approve as contacts can message you. 

Number of active users per month: 1 billion approximately

61 - Xanga

Xanga, pronounced ZANG-guh), is a social networking Web site that hosts personal profiles, blog posts and photo sharing.

The site is part of the Web 2.0 movement, where users of Xanga have a great deal of control over the content that gets created. On top of being able to post blogs on nearly any topic of their choosing, members have a good deal of independence over what their personal profiles can look like.

Xanga began in 1999 as a site for sharing book and music reviews.

This blogging-based social networking platform hosts weblogs, photo blogs and social networking profiles for its users.

It became public in 2000, following a series of e-mail recruitment methods via GeoCities. Over the next few years, Xanga underwent several formatting changes. Featured Content was divided in 2002, being replaced by Premium and Classic views.

Eventually, new profile features such as friends, "nudges", and chat forums resembling Facebook were added, and video and audio capability were added in 2006.

According to Alexa Internet, Xanga's ranking peaked in 2007 and fell continually since then. In 2013, Xanga was under threat of shutting down unless it raised $60k by mid-July (for "Xanga 2.0"). Failing to reach that goal, Xanga became an unnavigatable page in late 2013. Xanga 2.0 never launched.

Xanga offered two levels of premium subscriptions: 

Premium; and Premium Plus. Members who subscribed to either service received additional features, including additional photo storage and monthly uploads.

Xanga is free for anyone who wants to use it, but there are a few compromises that regular members have to deal with.

The site has banner advertisements on the top of most pages, something some users feel distract from the actual content.

Of course, banner ads aren't really anything new for people accustomed to surfing the Internet, and most Web surfers just ignore them. Without banner ads, which are paid for by sponsors, Xanga wouldn't be able to remain free for regular users.

To start your own personal blog on Xanga, you'll have to create an account with the site.

This is just a simple one-step process, in which you choose a username and password, enter your e-mail address and date of birth, verify that you're a real person by copying a bit of CAPTCHA text and agree to the Xanga Terms of Service. The regular version of Xanga is free to join. 

One popular feature for users on Xanga is the ability to design their own personal blog pages.

It's similar in nature to how members of the social networking Web site MySpace can change certain aspects of their profile, like the background color or music played from the page. Using markup language like HTML, Xanga users can add a unique background to their pages.

62 - Xing

This professional social networking site offers features that are similar to LinkedIn’s features, with its main users based in Switzerland, Austria and Germany.

However, it is unique in the sense that it enables closed group discussions between the members of a certain company or business.

The platform offers personal profiles, groups, discussion forums, event coordination, and other common social community features. Basic membership is free, but many core functions, like searching for people with specific qualifications or messaging people to whom one is not already connected, can only be accessed by the premium members.

Premium membership comes at a monthly fee from €6.35 to €9.95 depending on the billing interval you choose and the country you are from. The platform uses https and has a rigid privacy and no-spam policy. 

XING has a special Ambassador program for each city or region around the world with a substantial constituency. The Ambassadors hold local events that promote the use of social networking as a business tool, letting members introduce business ideas to one another.

XING also offers the system for closed communities, called Enterprise groups with their own access paths and interface designs. The platform serves as the infrastructure for corporate groups, including IBM, McKinsey, Accenture and others.

About 76% of all page views come from Germany and 90% from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

As of September 15, 2017 XING has changed its legal status to become a Societas Europaea 

If a user wishes to change their name, additional proof is demanded. In case of affirmation of gender for transgender people given names and gender will not be changed without medical testimony or provision of court documents confirming the person's transition in a medical or legal context.

If gender is reassigned, birth names are removed, which is legally required, because any disclosure or investigation would be illegal under German law, as per Sec. 5 para. 1 and Sec. 10 para. 2 Transsexual Act.  

63 - YouTube

YouTube is the world’s largest video-sharing social network site that enables users to upload and share videos, view them, comment on them and like them.

This social network is accessible across the globe and even enables users to create a YouTube channel where they can upload all their personally recorded videos to showcase to their friends and followers.

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, created the service in February 2005.

Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.

YouTube allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to playlists, report, comment on videos and subscribe to other users. It offers a wide variety of user generated and corporate videos.

The user content includes video clips, TV shows, music film and short, audio recordings and movie trailers. Most content on YouTube is uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS and the BBC, Vevo and Hulu offer some of their material via YouTube as part of the YouTube partnership program.

Videos that are age-restricted are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old.

YouTube and selected creators earn advertising revenue from Google AdSense, a program which targets ads according to site content and audience. The vast majority of its videos are free to view, but there are exceptions, including subscription-based premium channels, film rentals.

As of February 2017, there were more than 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube each minute, and one billion hours of content being watched on YouTube every day.

As of August 2018, the website is ranked as the second-most popular site in the world. As of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Based on reported quarterly advertising revenue, YouTube is estimated to have US$15 billion in annual revenues.

YouTube has faced criticism over aspects of its operations, including its handling of copyright content contained within uploaded videos.

The total number of people who use YouTube is 2 Billion worldwide. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day. In an average month, 8 out of 10 18-49 year olds watch YouTube.

79% of Internet users have their own YouTube account. Almost eight out of ten marketers consider YouTube to be the most effective video marketing platform.

64 - YY

YY is a major Chinese video-based social network, a subsidiary of JOYY. It has over 300 million users.

It features a virtual currency which users earn through activities such as karaoke or creating tutorial videos and which is later converted to real cash. 

YY is a large social networking platform in China that enables group video chats. In such chats, more than 100,000 members can watch a single person doing an activity.

Such an activity can be anything from giving a tutorial video to singing karaoke, which helps the users earn virtual currency that they can later convert into cash.

Number of active users per month: 122 million approximately

« Social Media Networking Sites You Need to Know About - part 2
The Dark Side Of The Web »

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