Social Networks...

FACEBOOK 

Facebook is an online social networking service. Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to students at some American universities. Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard Universitystudents Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz andChris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to their high-school students. Facebook now allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old worldwide to become a registered user of the website, even though proof isn't required.

Users must register before using the site, after which they may create apersonal profile, add other users as friends, exchange messages, and receive automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". In September 2012, Facebook had over one billion active users, of which approximately 9% were fake. In 2012, Facebook was adding about half a petabyte of data every 24 hours, amounting to about 180 petabytes per year.

TWITTER

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read short 140-character text messages, called "tweets". Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS, or mobile device app. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco and has offices in New York City, Boston,Austin and Detroit.^]

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass and by July 2006, the site was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 500 million registered users in 2012, who posted 340 million tweets per day. The service also handled 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013 Twitter was one of the ten most-visited websites, and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet."

INSTAGRAM

Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr. A distinctive feature is that it 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. Users are also able to record and share short videos lasting for up to 15 seconds.

Instagram was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and launched in October 2010. The service rapidly gained popularity, with over 100 million active users as of April 2012. Instagram is distributed through the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Windows Phone Store. Support was originally available for only the iPhone,iPad, and iPod Touch; in April 2012, support was added for Android camera phones. Third-party Instagram apps are available for Blackberry 10 and Nokia-Symbian Devices. On October 22, 2013, during the Nokia World at Abu Dhabi, UAE, Kevin Systrom has confirmed that official Instagram app for Windows Phone will be available in the coming weeks. On November 21, 2013, the official Instagram Beta for Windows Phone has been released to Windows Phone 8 to allow Windows Phone user to get faster access to Instagram services although the app is still under development with lack of video recording and capture image through app.The service was acquired by Facebook in April 2012 for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock. In 2013, Instagram grew by 23%, while Facebook, as the mother company, only grew by 3%.