Personal Portals and Communities Personal Portals, Meeting Places

Personal Portals and Communities

Personal Portals, Meeting Places

Winter 2008 Learning in Retirement - The Evolution of the Web 2

Portals

• A web portal is a site that functions as a point of access to information on the World Wide Web.

• Portals present information from diverse sources in a unified way. Popular portals are MSN, Yahoo, and AOL.

• Aside from the search engine standard, web portals offer other services such as news, stock prices, infotainment and various other features.

• Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.

The information on this slide is extracted from Wikipedia


Personal & Business Portals

• A personal portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content.

• It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources.

• In addition, business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones.



Yahoo• Yahoo! Inc. is an American public

corporation and global Internet services company.

• It provides a range of products and services including a web portal, a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and posting.

• It was founded by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.


• According to Web traffic analysis companies (including Comscore, Alexa Internet and Netcraft), Yahoo! has been one of the most visited websites on the Internet, with more than 130 million unique users.

• The global network of Yahoo! websites received 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2007, making it one of the most visited U.S. websites




http://www.yahoo.com/


My Yahoo

• My own Yahoo Portal.


http://www.my.yahoo.com/index.html

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YouTube

• YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid February 2005.

• YiuTube uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos.


• In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006.

• Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos



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MySpace

• MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos internationally.

• MySpace is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California, USA, where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media; in turn, the owner of Fox Interactive and therefore MySpace, News Corporation, is headquartered in New York City.


• According to Alexa Internet, MySpace is currently the world's sixth most popular English-language website and the sixth most popular website in any language, and the third most popular website in the United States, though it has topped the chart on various weeks.

• The service has gradually gained more popularity than similar websites to achieve nearly 80% of visits to online social networking websites. It has become an increasingly influential part of contemporary popular culture, especially in English speaking countries



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FaceBook• Facebook is a social networking website that

allows people to communicate with their friends and exchange information.

• Launched on February 4, 2004, Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former member of the Harvard Class of 2006 and former Ardsley High School student.

• Initially the membership was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to other Boston area schools (Boston College, Boston University, Harvard, Northeastern University, Tufts University), Rochester, Stanford, NYU, Northwestern, and all Ivy League schools within two months. Many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year.


• Eventually, people with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools and some large companies.

• Since September 11, 2006, Facebook has been made available to users with any email address, if they are within a certain age range. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.

• As of October 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 42 million active members worldwide and expects to pass 60 million users by the end of the year (also from non-collegiate networks).

• From September 2006 to September 2007 it increased its ranking from 60th to 7th most visited web site, and was the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily



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Technorati

• Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google, Yahoo and IceRocket.

• As of August 2007, Technorati indexes over 94 million weblogs.

• The name Technorati is a portmanteau, pointing to the technological version of literati or intellectuals.



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TechRepublic

• A resource for IT professionals.


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LinkedIn

• LinkedIn is a business-oriented networking site (comparable to a social networking site), mainly used for professional networking.

• As of October 2007, it had more than 15 million registered users, spanning 150 industries and more than 400 economic regions (as classified by the service).


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Personal Portals and Communities Personal Portals, Meeting Places