Social Media History Research Report

Research on
Social Media Platform Growth
By: Christy Young
April 4, 2012

By: Christy Young 2
Table of Contents
Facebook:
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4

Milestones
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5

Financials
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6

Technology Growth:
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7

Community Growth:
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9

Leadership / Staffing:
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11

Instagram Acquistion
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11

Twitter:
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13

Milestones
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15

Financials
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15

Technology Growth
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16

Community Growth
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18

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19

Pinterest:
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20

Milestones
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23

Financials
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23

Technology Growth
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23

Community Growth
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24

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24

Why it’s the fastest growing:
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24

Google+:
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26

Milestones
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28

Financials
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28

Technology Growth
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29

Community Growth
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30

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30

Linkedin:
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31

Milestones
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32

Financials
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32

Technology Growth
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33

Community Growth
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34

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34

Myspace
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35

Milestones
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35

Financials
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35

Technology Growth
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36

Community Growth:
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37

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37

Tumblr:
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38

Milestones
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40

Financials
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40

Technology Growth
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42

Community Growth
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42

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42

By: Christy Young 3
Foursquare:
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43

Milestones
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44

Financials
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44

Technology Growth
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44

Community Growth
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45

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46

StumbleUpon:
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47

Milestones
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48

Financials
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48

Technology Growth
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49

Community Growth
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49

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50

Reddit:
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51

Milestones
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53

Financials
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53

Technology Growth
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53

Community Growth
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54

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54

Sources:
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56

By: Christy Young 5
Facebook is a social networking service and website.
Milestones
Feb 2004 Launched the platform, initial community invite extended strictly to
Harvard students.
March 2004 Extended community invitation 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 created profiles on the site.
Sep. 2005 High School version launched on invite only basis.
Oct. 2005 Global expansion, 21 English Universities, 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 Community opens up to now include 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
use 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 Beacon service was launched. 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 into U-turn, admitting that
the service had been a mistake, and changing the rules so that
Beacon became opt-in rather than opt-out. Later in 2009, Beacon
was shut down completely, following a class-action lawsuit from
disgruntled Facebook users.
2010 A shift in how Facebook used their community. They 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 ranked 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.

By: Christy Young 6
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
successfully integrated various mobile platforms that are modeled
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

By: Christy Young 7
June 2004 First Investment from PayPal co cofounder Peter Thiel US$500,000
in exchange for 7% of the company.
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 February 2010,
Facebook acquired Malaysian contact-importing startup Octazen
Solutions. On April 2, 2010, Facebook announced acquisition of

By: Christy Young 8
photo-sharing service called Divvyshot for 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 had choice to
switch.
Sept 2008 Facebook began migrating all users to the new version of Minifeed
and Wall.
Dec 2008 Facebook was tested and implemented 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

By: Christy Young 9
http://www.facebook.com/facebook instead of
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20531316728
June 2009 Facebook became available on most Smart Phones. More than 425
million active users access Facebook through mobile devices
across 200 mobile operators in 60 countries.
Feb 2010 Facebook was granted a patent on 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 was provided free through T-Mobile's
new Bobsled service, let 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 introduced ‘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:
April 2008 Facebook was 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.

By: Christy Young 11
Number of Employees
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 publicly release this data.
An estimate in 2011 came from an in-depth profile of chief operating officer
Sheryl Sandberg in the current issue of The New Yorker, with 2,500 employees,
close to double the estimates reported for early 2010.
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.
Mark Zuckerberg was then joined by two other fellow Harvard students, Dustin
Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, to help him grow the site to the next level. It was
only a few 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.

In April 2009, 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. Instagram would keep its 13 employees and continue to be indepently
managed. 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."
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 also 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.

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 was founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams
(launched publicly in July 2006). The first prototype was used as an
internal service for Odeo employees.
July 2006 The full version was introduced publicly.
Oct 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 was introduced. “One could
change the world with 140 characters.”
April 2007 Twitter spun off into its own company.
Dec 2007 500,000 tweets were posted per quarter.
Dec 2008 100 million tweets were 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" with 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 site including 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

Twitter raised over $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.

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)
allowed 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.
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 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
promote 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, is a Russian
search engine which 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
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 Twitter had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007.
2008 Twitter had 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008.
Feb 2010 Twitter users sent 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 were 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

Jan 2009 – 22
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".

Pinterest:

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 Pinterest launched 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 met with
some of its users.
Dec 2010 Nine months after launch the website had 10,000 users.
Sept 2011 Pinterest Mobile, launched September 2011, which was 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 Pinterest 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 in Series A financing led by
Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners.
Oct 2011 The company secured $27 million in funding from Andreessen
Horowitz, which valued the company at $200 million. Pinterest has
received further funding from Andreessen Horowitz in the form of a
Series B investment valued at $37.5 million.
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

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.
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%. Below are some triggering factors for this popularity in such a short time.
Simplicity
Major reason for the success is the simplicity in its outward design that lets the

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.
Free of personal content
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.

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
overwhelming 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 receive corporate accounts to start sharing information
about themselves and invite others to join in on the conversation.
Dec 2011 The site added 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 Google+ opened to a younger age group (13+ years old in US and
most countries, 14+ in South Korea and Spain, 16+ in Netherlands)
Jan 2012 Google+ 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
The focus of Google+ is to create a successful Google social network. They
create their revenue through AdWords and AdSense. However, Google+ has the
luxury from the parent company Google, to potentially remain ad-free for years
without needing to generate strong revenue for the service. Companies like

Facebook, on the other hand, need to make advertisements a priority as these
serve as their primary form of income.
Google’s VP of Product Bradley Horowitz has further 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’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.
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+ implemented 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 became officially available.
Dec 2011 New integrations with Gmail and Contacts were introduced.
Dec 2011 New features: stream slider, more useful notifications, multiple
administrators for pages, new lightbox for photos were
implemented.
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 was 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.
Jan 2012 Google added 8,067 employees in 2011, bringing total headcount
to 32,467.

Linkedin:

LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site.
Milestones
Dec 2002 Reid Hoffman founded Linkedin.
May 5 2003 Public launch of Linkedin with its five founders and 350 of their
friends
May 31 2003 By the end of the month, 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 were 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.

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, 2011
and the IPO occurred on May 19.
May 2011 LinkedIn said it sold its IPO shares at $45. LinkedIn kicked 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 was
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

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

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.
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 ranked 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 a charge fee for the basic Myspace service. Brad
Greenspan nixed the idea, believing that keeping Myspace free
was necessary to make it a successful community.
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 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 added features like recommendation engine for new
users which suggests games, music and videos based on their
previous search habits.
Summer ’10 Myspace changed their color scheme. The classic blue was
replaced by a more white interface, to resemble the look and feel of
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.
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.
Jan 2011 It was announced that the Myspace staff would be reduced by 47%.
June 2011 Myspace reduced its staff to around 200.

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
with 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

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. In 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
• 500 million page views go through Tumblr every single day.
• 40k requests added each second at Tumblr’s peak usage hours.
• 50GB of posts added each day; follower list updates are roughly another
2.7 terabytes daily.
• 1M number 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.
April 2007 CEO and COO are only employees
As of mid-2011, Tumblr has around 10 employees
Current employees listed on Linkedin: 51-200

Foursquare:

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 could now earn badges
for completing tasks as well as checking in.
Each time a 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

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

Male/female users are equally represented and also 50 percent of users are
outside the US.
Users as of April 2012: 15 million.
Employees as of 2012: approx. 100 (51-200)

StumbleUpon:

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 StumbleUpon launches su.pr, bringing in the toolbar and allowing
users to stumble directly from the site.
March 2009 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.
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 raised 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.
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.
Current: 51-200 Employees

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 Reddit 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 Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast Publications; had 500,000
daily unique.
Jan 2008 Reddit added the ability to allow anyone to create their own
subreddits.
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 Reddit 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 Reddit received $100 K in fuding from Y Combinator.
Technology Growth

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.
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.

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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/

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

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