Whatsapp,
Skype, Wickr, Viber,
Twitter and Blog are Ready to Asymptote Globally from All Corners during
Communications in Latest Fast Life
Limbesh B. Aal, Jignesh
N. Parmar, Vishvesh R.
Patel and Prof. Dr. Dhrubo Jyoti
Sen
Postgraduate Research Laboratory, Department of
Quality Assurance and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Shri Sarvajanik Pharmacy College, Gujarat Technological
University, Arvind Baug,
Mehsana-384001, Gujarat, India
*Corresponding Author E-mail:
limbesh17@gmail.com
ABSTRACT:
Smart
Communications is a wholly owned mobile phone and Internet service subsidiary
of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT). On September 2013 the
company reported that it has over 72.5 million cellular subscribers. Smart
introduced the first wireless offerings and also offers 3G, HSPA+, LTE
services, wireless broadband services and an SMS-based money remittance system. WhatsApp Messenger
is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages
without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is
available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows
Phone and Nokia and yes, those phones can all message each other! Because WhatsApp Messenger uses the same internet data plan that
you use for email and web browsing, there is no cost to message and stay in
touch with your friends. In addition to basic messaging WhatsApp
users can create groups, send each other unlimited images, video and audio
media messages.
KEYWORDS: Smart phones, Android, iPhone, Whatsapp, Skype, Wickr, Viber, Twitter, Blog.
INTRODUCTION:
WhatsApp Messenger is a proprietary,
cross-platform instant messaging subscription service for smart
phones that uses the internet for
communication. In addition to text messaging, users can send each other images,
video and audio media messages as well as their location using integrated
mapping features. The client software is available for Google Android, BlackBerry OS, Apple iOS, selected Nokia Series 40, Symbian, selected Nokia Asha
platform, Microsoft Windows Phone and BlackBerry
10. WhatsApp Inc. was founded in 2009 by Americans Brian Acton and Jan
Koum (also
the CEO), both former employees of Yahoo!,
and is based in Mountain View,
California. The company employs 55 people.
Competing with a number of Asian-based messaging services (like LINE, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Telegram), WhatsApp
handled ten billion messages per day in August 2012, growing from two billion in April
2012, and one billion the
previous October. On June 13,
2013, WhatsApp announced that they had reached their
new daily record by processing 27 billion messages.
Figure-1:
Worldwide communication
According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp "has done to SMS on
mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on
landlines." As of 23 April 2014, WhatsApp had
over 450 million monthly active users, 700 million photos are shared each day,
and the messaging system handles more than 10 billion messages each day. In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users use the
service each month. On February 19, 2014, Facebook
Inc. announced it is acquiring WhatsApp Inc. for US$19 billion. Facebook will pay $4 billion in cash,
$12 billion in Facebook shares and $3 billion in restricted stock units to be
granted to WhatsApp founders and employees that will
vest over four years.
History
In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications,
letting developers ping users when they were not using an app. Koum updated WhatsApp so that
each time you changed your status it would ping everyone in the user's network.
WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component
and the active users suddenly swelled to 250,000. Koum
visited Brian Acton, who was still unemployed while managing the
unsuccessful start up, and decided to join the company. In October Acton
persuaded five ex-Yahoo friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and as a
result was granted co-founder status and a stake. He officially joined on November
1. Koum then hired an old friend who lived
in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to make the BlackBerry version
of WhatsApp. WhatsApp was
switched from a free to paid service to avoid growing too fast, mainly because
the primary cost was sending verification texts to users. In December 2009 WhatsApp for the iPhone was
updated to send photos. By early 2011, WhatsApp was
in the top 20 of all apps in the U.S. App Store. The founders agreed to take $7
million from Sequoia Capital on top of their $250,000
seed funding, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.
By February 2013, WhatsApp's user base had swelled to
about 200 million active users and its staff to 50. Sequoia invested another
$50 million, valuing WhatsApp at $1.5 billion. On
February 19, 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19
billion. In April 2014 WhatsApp crossed
half-a-billion user mark.
Figure-2: Founder of Whatsapp
(Jan Koum)
Technical
WhatsApp uses a customized version of the open
standard Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). Upon
installation, it creates a user account using one's phone number as the
username (Jabber ID: [phone
number]@s.whatsapp.net). WhatsApp
software automatically compares all the phone numbers from the device's address
book with its central database of WhatsApp users to
automatically add contacts to the user's WhatsApp
contact list. Previously the Android and S40 versions
used an MD5-hashed,
reversed-version of the phone's IMEI as password,
while the iOS version used the phone's Wi-Fi MAC address instead
of IMEI. A 2012 update now generates a random password on the server side.
WhatsApp is supported on most Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Nokia, and Windows smartphones.
All Android phones running the Android 2.1 and above, all BlackBerry devices
running OS 4.7 and later, including BlackBerry 10, and all iPhones
running iOS 4.3 and later. However, some Dual SIM devices
may not be compatible with WhatsApp, though there are
some workarounds for this. Multimedia messages are sent by uploading the image,
audio or video to be sent to an HTTP server and then sending a link to the
content along with its Base64 encoded thumbnail (if applicable).
Security
In May 2011, a security hole
was reported which left WhatsApp user accounts open
for session hijacking and packet analysis. WhatsApp communications were not encrypted, and data was
sent and received in plaintext, meaning messages could easily be read if packet
traces were available. In September 2011, WhatsApp
released a new version of the Messenger application for iPhones,
closing critical security holes that allowed forged messages to be sent and
messages from any WhatsApp user to be read. On
January 6, 2012, an unknown hacker published a website (WhatsAppStatus.net)
that made it possible to change the status of an arbitrary WhatsApp
user, as long as the phone number was known. To make it work, it only required
a restart of the app. According to the hacker, it is only one of the many
security problems in WhatsApp. On January 9, WhatsApp reported that it had resolved the problem,
although the only measure actually taken was to block the website's IP address.
As a reaction, a Windows tool was made available for download providing the
same functionality. This problem has since been resolved in the form of an IP
address check on currently logged-in sessions. On January 13, 2012, WhatsApp was removed from the iOS App Store, and the reason
was not disclosed. The app was added back to the App Store four days later. In
May 2012, security researchers noticed that new updates of WhatsApp
no longer sent messages as plaintext, but the cryptographic method implemented
was subsequently described as "broken". As of August 15, 2012,
the WhatsApp support staff claim messages are
encrypted in the "latest version" of the WhatsApp
software for iOS and Android (but not BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and Symbian), without specifying the implemented
cryptographic method. German Tech site The H
demonstrated how to use WhatsAPI to hijack any
WhatsApp account on September 14, 2012. Shortly
after, a legal threat to WhatsAPI's developers was
alleged, characterized by The H as "an apparent
reaction" to security reports, and WhatsAPI's
source code was taken down for some days. The WhatsAPI
team has since returned to active development.
Privacy
A major privacy and security
problem has been the subject of a joint Canadian-Dutch government
investigation. The primary concern was that WhatsApp
required users to upload their mobile phone's entire address book to WhatsApp servers so that WhatsApp
could discover who, among the users' contacts, is available via WhatsApp. While this is a fast and convenient way to
quickly find and connect the user with contacts who are also using WhatsApp, it means that their address book was then
mirrored on the WhatsApp servers, including contact
information for contacts who are not using WhatsApp.
This information was stored in hashed, though not salted form and without
"additional" identifying information such as a name, although the
stored identifying information is sufficient to identify every contact. On
March 31, 2013, the telecommunications authority in Saudi Arabia, the Communications and
Information Technology Commission (CITC), issued a statement
regarding possible measures against WhatsApp, among
other applications, unless the service providers took serious steps to comply
with monitoring and privacy regulations. A user does not need to send a friend
request to send messages to another user. However, users can block numbers on WhatsApp. A public corporation of the state of Schleswig-Holstein has advised against
using WhatsApp, as the service lacks privacy
protection such as end-to-end client side encryption technology.
Open WhatsApp Project
WhatsApp Project is an open-source re-implementation
of the WhatsApp client software for mobile phones
done by an independent group. Initially targeted at the Nokia N9 (which
was officially not supported by WhatsApp),
it was later ported to other platforms, including BlackBerry 10.
It uses the WhatsApp service behind-the-scenes, and
is thus not a competitor to WhatsApp, being just a
different front-end, and is also subject to the same privacy and security
concerns as WhatsApp. On February 12, 2014 all WhatsApp related repositories hosted on github
were removed due to a DMCA notice received from WhatsApp
Inc. On March 15, 2014 that was partially reversed. On February 19,
2014, Facebook announced
it would be acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, in
what will be its largest acquisition to date. Facebook, who was advised by
Allen and Co, will pay $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares and
an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp's founders (advised by Morgan Stanley), Jan Koum, Brian Acton, and
employees that will vest over four years subsequent to closing. The
transaction is the largest purchase of a company backed by venture capitalists
ever. The deal happened only months after a venture capital financing
round valued the business at almost $1.5 billion. Just days after the
announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of
service, leading to anger across social media. The acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook was not foreseen, but only weeks
before the acquisition Facebook changed the permissions in the Facebook app for
Android. The Facebook app needed access to the text-messages in the phone from
that moment on. The acquisition caused a considerable amount of users to move,
or try out other message services as well. Telegram claimed to have seen 8 million
additional downloads of its app. Line claimed to have seen 2 million new
users for its service. Also many other messenger apps and services saw a
growth of users such as Threema, TextSecure,
Blackberry Messenger and Viber. Whatsapp not only
experienced an exodus of users, but also gained lots of new users due to the
media attention in regions where Whatsapp is not so
very well known yet. At a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in
February 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that
Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp
was closely related to the Internet.org vision. According
to aTechCrunch
article, Zuckerberg's
vision for Internet.org was as follows: "The idea, he said, is to develop
a group of basic internet services that would be free of charge to use — 'a 911
for the internet.' These could be a social networking service like Facebook, a
messaging service, maybe search and other things like weather. Providing a
bundle of these free of charge to users will work like a gateway drug of sorts
— users who may be able to afford data services and phones these days just
don’t see the point of why they would pay for those data services. This would
give them some context for why they are important, and that will lead them to
paying for more services like this — or so the hope goes."[1]
Skype
It is a freemium voice-over-IP service and instant messaging
client, currently developed by the Microsoft Skype Division. The name
was derived from "sky" and "peer". Skype was first released
in August 2003. It was created by Janus Friis(Denmark) and Niklas Zennström (Sweden) in cooperation with Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn (Estonia), who
supplied the backend which was also used in Kazaa. Skype had 663
million registered users as of the end of 2010. It was bought by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5
billion. Microsoft's Skype division headquarters is in Luxembourg, but most of
the development team and 44% of the overall employees of the division are still
situated in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia. The service allows users to
communicate with peers by voice using a microphone, video by using a webcam, and instant messaging over the Internet.
Phone calls may be placed to recipients on the traditional telephone networks.
Calls to other users within the Skype service are free of charge, while calls
to landline telephones and mobile phones are charged via a debit-based user
account system. Skype has also become popular for its additional features,
including file transfer and video conferencing. Competitors include SIP and H.323-based
services, such as Linphone and Google Hangouts. Unlike most other VoIP services, Skype is a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. It makes
use of background processing on computers running Skype software, and this is
reflected in Skype's original proposed name of Sky Peer-to-Peer. Some network
administrators have banned Skype on corporate, government, home and education
networks, citing reasons such as inappropriate usage of resources, excessive
bandwidth usage, and security concerns.
Figure-4: Barchart
of call market
Wickr
Figure-5: Wickr
founder (Brittany Hillen)
It is pronounced "wicker"
is a proprietary instant messenger for iPhone and
Android. Wickr allows users to exchange end-to-end encrypted and self-destructing
messages, including photos and file attachments. The
"self-destruct" part of the software is designed to use a
"Secure File Shredder" which the company says "forensically
erases unwanted files you deleted from your device". However the company uses a proprietary
algorithm to manage the data, a practice which is prone to error according to
many security experts. On January
15, 2014, Wickr announced it is offering a $100,000
bug bounty for those who find vulnerabilities that significantly impact users. In addition, a recipient can in
general use other software and techniques like screen-capture capabilities or a
separate camera to make permanent copies of the content. In the face of
revelations of surveillance programs like the NSA's PRISM, similar applications like Silent Circle (software) and Lavabit designed by Internet privacy pioneers
decided to shut down rather than put their users at risk of government-ordered
surveillance.
Viber
It is a proprietary cross-platform instant messaging
voice-over-Internet. Protocol application for smartphone application for smartphones developed
by Viber Media. In addition to text messaging,
users can exchange images, video and audio media messages. The client software
is available for Mac OS, Android, BlackBerry OS, iOS, Series 40, Symbian, Bada, Windows Phone, and Microsoft Windows. A Linux version is in
development, with a public beta released. Viber works on
both 3G/4G and Wi-Fi networks. It first requires
installation on a phone in order to work on a desktop operating system
environment. Viber reached 200 million users as of
May 7, 2013. It was founded and co-owned by four Israeli partners: Talmon
Marco, Igor Megzinik, Sani Maroli and Ofer Smocha. Talmon Marco serves as its CEO. On 14 February
2014, the startup was acquired by Japanese Rakuten for $900 million.
History
Viber was initially
launched for iPhone on
December 2, 2010, in direct competition with Skype.
A pre-release version for Android appeared
in May 2011 but was restricted to 50,000 users; an unrestricted version was
released on July 19, 2012. Viber for BlackBerry and
Windows Phone devices was launched on May 8, 2012. On reaching 90 million
users on July 24, 2012, group messaging service and HD Voice engine were added
to both Android and iPhone applications. Applications
for Nokia's Series
40, Symbian
and Samsung's Bada
platform were also announced on the same day. Initially, the voice calling
feature was only available for iPhone and Android
applications, with a promise that voice would be added in upcoming versions for
Bada, Symbian and Windows Phone applications, with no mention of either Series
40 or Blackberry
OS. The limitation seems to lie in core of Blackberry
OS and Series
40 which does not have easy support for VoIP apps. As
promised, on September 22, 2012, HD quality phone calls and hold
group-messaging sessions were made available for Windows
phone but only forNokia users, as
part of exclusive partnership with Nokia. Viber with voice was officially released for all Windows
Phone 8 devices on April 2, 2013. In August 2013, Viber
for Linux was
released as a public beta.
Initially, only 64bit binaries were made available for download. On
February 13, 2014, Rakuten announced
they had acquired Viber for $900 million.
Figure-6: Viber founder (Talmon Marco)
Features and
Functionality
The actual
functionality varies from platform to platform with iOS and Android being the
first to receive new features. Viber includes text,
picture and video messaging across all platforms, with voice calling available
only to iPhone, Android and Microsoft's Windows
Phone although HD voice is planned for Windows Phone
8. The application's user
interface includes tab bar on the bottom giving access to messages,
recent calls, contact, the keypad and a button for accessing more options. Upon
installation, it creates a user account using one's phone number as username. Viber synchronizes with the phone's address book, so users
do not need to add contacts in a separate book. Since all users are registered
with their phone number, the software returns all Viber
users among one's contacts. The newest version of Viber
(Version 2.3) has added smileys and other default
images. Viber is also now available on Windows and
Mac OS X. As of December 2013, Viber Officially
launched Viber Out, a feature that allows all users
the option to call mobile and landline numbers. Therefore Viber
users can call people without the Viber app. Viber Out was originally released in November only to help
Typhoon Haiyan victims in the Philippines connect
with their loved ones. To use the new feature, users have to visit the
"More" tab and choose Viber Out. No update
is needed for the feature. Languages and localization Viber
is currently available in 30 languages and locales: English, Hebrew, Arabic, Albanian, Traditional
Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
Nepali, Persian, Portugese, Urdu, Spanish and
Russian.
Viber Media is a Las
Vegas and Cyprus-registered
company with its development centers in Belarus and
Israel. The
company was founded by Talmon
Marco and Igor Megzinik, who are friends
from the Israel
Defense Forces. The company is run from Israel, with much of its
development outsourced to Belarus in order to lower labour-costs.
Founded in 2010, the company is co-owned by its four Israeli founders: Talman Marco, Igor Megzinik, Sani Maroli and Ofer Smocha, who have each
increased their investment by over 30 times on the startup's $900 million sale
to Rakuten.
Marco and Megzinik are also co-founders of the P2P media
and file-sharing client iMesh.
The company currently does not generate revenues, but announced it would start
generating revenues in 2013 via a "sticker store". The company is
funded by individual investors, who Marco has described as "friends and
family". As of May 2013, $20M had been invested in the company.
Controversy
Concerns about the application's
Israeli origin were raised by many bloggers in the Arab world, with belief that
it may involve spying and these concerns were later featured by AlArabia News website, referring to Marco serving the
Israeli army and having the development facilities in Israel. Later, in an
interview with The
Guardian Marco has confirmed that Viber
was funded entirely by what Marco refers to as “friends and family”. “We never
took a single dollar from the state of Israel; we are not even incorporated in
Israel. We maintain a research and development center in Israel and that’s
it.”
Hacking
On July 24, 2013, Viber's support system was defaced by Syrian
Electronic Army. According to Viber no user
sensitive information was accessed.
Twitter
It 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, San Antonio 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." 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."
History
A blueprint sketch, c. 2006, by Jack
Dorsey, envisioning an SMS-based social network. Twitter's origins
lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the
podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey, then an
undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual
using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project
code name for the service was twitter, an idea that Williams later ascribed to
Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character
length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially considered
"10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404"
for "ease of use and memorability." Work on
the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter
message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr". The first Twitter prototype, developed by
Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an
internal service for Odeo employees and the full
version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan
Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo, formed
Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo, together with
its assets—including Odeo.com and Twitter.com—from the investors and
shareholders. Williams fired Glass, who was silent about his part in Twitter's
startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.
Williams provided insight into the ambiguity that defined this early period in
a 2013 interview:
With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it
a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define,
because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with
something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter
actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we
described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the
insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information
network than it is a social network. 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." Reaction at the
conference was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter
"absolutely rul[ed]"
SXSWi. Social software researcher danah
boyd said Twitter "own[ed]" the conference. Twitter staff received the
festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140
characters or less. And we just did!"
Figure-7: Twitter founder (Jack Dorsey)
Growth
The company experienced rapid growth. It had 400,000
tweets posted per quarter in 2007. This grew to 100 million tweets posted per
quarter in 2008. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets
per day. By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered
applications. As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day,
equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. As of March
2011, that was about 140 million tweets posted daily. As noted on Compete.com,
Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in January
2009 from its previous rank of twenty-second.
Jack Dorsey, a co-founder and the chairman of Twitter, in
2009. Twitter's usage spikes during prominent events. For example, a record was
set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in
the thirty-second period after Japan scored against Cameroon on June 14. The
record was broken again when 3,085 tweets per second were posted after the Los
Angeles Lakers' victory in the 2010 NBA Finals on June 17 and then again at the
close of Japan's victory over Denmark in the World Cup when users published
3,283 tweets per second. The record was set again during the 2011 FIFA Women's
World Cup Final between Japan and the United States, when 7,196 tweets per
second were published. 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. The
current record as of January 1, 2013, was set by all citizens of the Japan
Standard Time Zone as the new year began, reaching a record of 33,388 tweets
per second (and hence beating the previous record of 25,088, also set by Japan
after a television screening of the movie "Castle In The Sky").
Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on
April 11, 2010. Atebits 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. From September through October 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. As of November 1, 2010, the company confirmed that the
"New Twitter experience" had been rolled out to all users. On April
5, 2011, Twitter tested a new homepage and phased out the "Old
Twitter." However, a glitch came about after the page was launched, so the
previous "retro" homepage was still in use until the issues were
resolved; the new homepage was reintroduced on April 20. On December 8, 2011,
Twitter overhauled its website once more to feature the "Fly" design,
which the service says is easier for new users to follow and promotes
advertising. In addition to the Home tab, the Connect and Discover tabs were
introduced along with a redesigned profile and timeline of Tweets. The site's
layout has been compared to that of Facebook. On February 21, 2012, it was
announced that Twitter and Yandex agreed to a partnership.
Yandex, a Russian search engine, 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. On March 21, 2012, Twitter celebrated its 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. In April 2012,
Twitter announced that it was opening an office in Detroit, with the aim of
working with automotive brands and advertising agencies. Twitter also expanded
its office in Dublin. On June 5, 2012, a modified logo was unveiled through the
company blog, removing the text to showcase the slightly redesigned bird as the
sole symbol of Twitter. On October 5, 2012, Twitter acquired a video clip
company called Vine that launched in January 2013. Twitter released Vine as a
standalone app that allows users to create and share six-second looping video
clips on January 24, 2013. Vine videos shared on Twitter are visible directly
in users' Twitter feeds. Due to an influx of inappropriate content, it is now
rated 17+ in Apple's app store. On December 18, 2012, Twitter announced it had
surpassed 200 million monthly active users. Twitter hit 100 million monthly
active users in September 2011. On April 18, 2013, Twitter launched a music app
called Twitter Music for the iPhone. On August 28,
2013, Twitter acquired Trendrr, followed by the
acquisition of MoPub on September 9, 2013. As of
September 2013, the company's data showed that 200 million users send over 400
million tweets daily, with nearly 60% of tweets sent from mobile devices.
Initial public offering (IPO)
On September 12, 2013, Twitter announced that it had filed
papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of a planned
stock market listing. It revealed its prospectus in an 800-page filing. Twitter
planned to raise US$1 billion as the basis for its stock market debut. The IPO
filing states that "200,000,000+ monthly active users" access Twitter
and "500,000,000+ tweets per day" are posted. In an October 15, 2013
amendment to their SEC S-1 filing, Twitter declared that they would list on the
New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), quashing speculation that their stock would
trade on the NASDAQ exchange. This decision was widely viewed to be a reaction
to the botched initial public offering of Facebook. On November 6, 2013, 70
million shares were priced at US$26 and issued by lead underwriter Goldman
Sachs. On November 7, 2013, the first day of trading on the NYSE, Twitter
shares opened at $26.00 and closed at US$44.90, giving the company a valuation
of around US$31 billion. This was $18.90 above the initial offering price and
Twitter ended with a market capitalization of $24.46 billion. The paperwork
from November 7 shows that among the founders, Williams received a sum of
US$2.56 billion and Dorsey received US$1.05 billion, while Costolo's
payment was US$345 million. As of 13 December 2013, Twitter had "a market
capitalization of $32.76 billion". On February 5, 2014, Twitter published
its first results as a public company, showing a net loss of $511 million in
the fourth quarter of 2013.
Leadership
This article is in a list format that may be better
presented using prose. You can help by converting this article to prose, if
appropriate. Editing help is available. (October 2013). As chief executive
officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of capital funding by the
venture capitalists who backed the company.
Implementation
Twitter places great reliance on open-source software. The
Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework, deployed on a
performance enhanced Ruby Enterprise Edition implementation of Ruby. In the
early days of Twitter, tweets were stored in MySQL
databases that were temporally sharded, that is the
databases were split by time of posting. MySQL was
causing problems with both reading and writing to Twitter and the company decided
that the system needed re-engineering.
Privacy and security
Twitter messages are public but users can also send
private messages. Twitter collects personally identifiable information about
its users and shares it with third parties. The service reserves the right to
sell this information as an asset if the company changes hands. While Twitter
displays no advertising, advertisers can target users based on their history of
tweets and may quote tweets in ads directed specifically to the user. A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. Since Twitter used the phone number of the sender
of an SMS message as authentication, malicious users could update someone
else's status page by using SMS spoofing. The vulnerability could be used if
the spoofer knew the phone number registered to their
victim's account. Within a few weeks of this discovery Twitter introduced an
optional personal identification number (PIN) that its users could use to
authenticate their SMS-originating messages.
Issues and controversies
Twitter has been used for a variety of purposes in many
industries and scenarios. For example, it has been used to organize protests,
sometimes referred to as "Twitter Revolutions", which include the
2011 Egyptian revolution, 2010–2011 Tunisian protests, 2009–2010 Iranian
election protests, and 2009 Moldova civil unrest. The governments of Iran and
Egypt blocked the service in retaliation. The Hill on February 28, 2011
described Twitter and other social media as a "strategic weapon ... which
have the apparent ability to re-align the social order in real time, with
little or no advanced warning." During the Arab Spring in early 2011, the
number of hashtags mentioning the uprisings in
Tunisia and Egypt increased. A study by the Dubai School of Government found
that only 0.26% of the Egyptian population, 0.1% of the Tunisian population and
0.04% of the Syrian population are active on Twitter.
Impact
World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of
Twitter's rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter
diplomacy, the use of Twitter to engage with foreign publics and their own
citizens. US Ambassador to Russia, Michael A. McFaul has been attributed as a
pioneer of international Twitter diplomacy. He used Twitter after becoming
ambassador in 2011, posting in English and Russian. A 2013 study by website Twiplomacy found that 153 of the 193 countries represented
at the United Nations had established government Twitter accounts. The same
study also found that those accounts amounted to 505 Twitter handles used by
world leaders and their foreign ministers, with their tweets able to reach a
combined audience of over 106 million followers.
Future
Twitter emphasized its news and information-network
strategy in November 2009 by changing the question asked to users for status
updates from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?"
On November 22, 2010, Biz Stone, a cofounder of the company, expressed for the
first time the idea of a Twitter news network, a concept of a wire-like news
service he has been working on for years.
Figure-8: Blog founder (Evan Williams)
A blog (a truncation of the expression web
log) is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide
Web and consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed
in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first). Until 2009
blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small
group, and often covered a single subject. More recently "multi-author
blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of
authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets,
universities, think tanks, advocacy groups and similar institutions account for
an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other
"microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs
into societal newstreams. Blog can also be
used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. The
emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of
web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical
users. (Previously, a knowledge of such technologies
as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.) A majority are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments
and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs, and it is this
interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that
sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking service. Indeed,
bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs, but also build
social relations with their readers and other bloggers. There are
high-readership blogs which do not allow comments, such as Daring Fireball.
Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more
personal online diaries; others function more as online brand advertising of a
particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, images, and
links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The
ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important
contribution to the popularity of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual,
although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video
blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and
audio (podcasts). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very
short posts. In education, blogs can be used as instructional resources. These
blogs are referred to as edublogs. On 16 February 2011[update],
there were over 156 million public blogs in existence. On 20 February
2014, there were around 172 million Tumblr and 75.8 million WordPress blogs in
existence worldwide. According to critics and other bloggers, Blogger is the
most popular blogging service used today, however Blogger does not offer public
statistics. Technorati has 1.3 million blogs as of February 22, 2014.
History Early
example of a "diary" style blog consisting of text and images
transmitted wirelessly in real time from a wearable computer with head-up
display, 22 February 1995. The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form,
"blog", was coined by Peter Merholz, who
jokingly broke the word weblog
into the phrase we blog
in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Shortly
thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used
"blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog", meaning "to
edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term
"blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs'
Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.
Origins
Before blogging
became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet,
commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin
Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, created running
conversations with "threads". Threads are topical connections between
messages on a virtual "corkboard". From 14 June 1993 Mosaic
Communications Corporation maintained their "What’s New" list of new
websites, updated daily and archived monthly. The page was accessible by a
special "What's New" button in the Mosaic web browser. The modern
blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account
of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists,
journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began
personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally
recognized as one of the earlier bloggers, as is Jerry Pournelle. Dave Winer's Scripting News is also credited with being one of
the older and longer running weblogs. The Australian Netguide
magazine maintained the Daily Net News on their web site from 1996. Daily Net
News ran links and daily reviews of new websites, mostly in Australia. Another
early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person's
personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a
wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site in 1994. This practice of
semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as
sousveillance, and such journals were also used as evidence in legal matters.
Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common Web sites. However,
the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web
articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process
feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this
resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we
recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software
is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by
dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, or on
regular web hosting services. Some early bloggers, such as The Misanthropic
Bitch, who began in 1997, actually referred to their online presence as a zine, before the term blog entered common usage.
Types
There are many
different types of blogs, differing not only in the type of content, but also
in the way that content is delivered or written.
Personal blogs
The personal blog
is an ongoing diary or commentary written by an individual.
Microblogging
Microblogging is
the practice of posting small pieces of digital content—which could be text,
pictures, links, short videos, or other media—on the Internet. Microblogging
offers a portable communication mode that feels organic and spontaneous to many
and has captured the public imagination. Friends use it to keep in touch,
business associates use it to coordinate meetings or share useful resources,
and celebrities and politicians (or their publicists) microblog
about concert dates, lectures, book releases, or tour schedules. A wide and
growing range of add-on tools enables sophisticated updates and interaction
with other applications, and the resulting profusion
of functionality is helping to define new possibilities for this type of
communication. Examples of these include Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and by far
the largest WeiBo.
Corporate and
organizational blogs
A blog can be
private, as in most cases, or it can be for business purposes. Blogs used
internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or
externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes are called
corporate blogs. Similar blogs for clubs and societies are called club blogs,
group blogs, or by similar names; typical use is to inform members and other
interested parties of club and member activities.
By genre
Some blogs focus
on a particular subject, such as political blogs, health blogs, travel
blogs (also known as travelogs),
gardening blogs, house blogs, fashion blogs, project blogs, education blogs, niche
blogs, classical music blogs, quizzing blogs and legal
blogs (often referred to as a blawgs) or dreamlogs. How
To/Tutorial blogs are becoming increasing popular. Two common types of
genre blogs are art blogs and music
blogs. A blog featuring discussions especially about home and family is
not uncommonly called a mom blog and one made popular is by Erica Diamond who
created Womenonthefence.com which is syndicated to over two million readers
monthly. While not a legitimate type of blog, one used for the sole purpose of
spamming is known as a Splog.
By media type
A blog comprising videos is called a vlog, one comprising links is called a linklog, a
site containing a portfolio of sketches is called a sketchblog or one comprising photos is called a
photoblog. Blogs with shorter posts and mixed media types are called tumblelogs. Blogs that are written on typewriters
and then scanned are called typecast or typecast blogs; see typecasting
(blogging).
A rare type of
blog hosted on the Gopher
Protocol is known as a Phlog.
By device
Blogs can also be defined
by which type of device is used to compose it. A blog written by a mobile
device like a mobile phone or PDA could be called a moblog. One early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam,
an online shared diary of a person's personal life combining text, video, and
pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web
site. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with
text was referred to as sousveillance. Such journals have been used as evidence
in legal matters.
Reverse blog
A Reverse Blog is composed by
its users rather than a single blogger. This system has the characteristics of
a blog, and the writing of several authors. These can be written by several
contributing authors on a topic, or opened up for anyone to write. There is
typically some limit to the number of entries to keep it from operating like a Web
Forum.
Popularity
Researchers have
actively analyzed the dynamics of how blogs become popular. There are
essentially two measures of this: popularity through citations, as well as
popularity through affiliation (i.e., blogroll). The basic conclusion from
studies of the structure of blogs is that while it takes time for a blog to
become popular through blogrolls, permalinks can
boost popularity more quickly, and are perhaps more indicative of popularity
and authority than blogrolls, since they denote that
people are actually reading the blog's content and deem it valuable or
noteworthy in specific cases.
The blogdex project was launched by researchers in the MIT
Media Lab to crawl the Web and gather data from
thousands of blogs in order to investigate their social properties. Information
was gathered by the tool for over four years, during which it autonomously
tracked the most contagious information spreading in the blog community,
ranking it by recency and popularity. It can
therefore be considered the first instantiation of a memetracker.
The project was replaced by tailrank.com which in turn has been replaced by
spinn3r.com.
Blogs are given
rankings by blog search engine Technorati based on the number of incoming links
and Alexa Internet (Web hits of Alexa
Toolbar users). In August 2006, Technorati found that the most linked-to blog
on the internet was that of Chinese actress Xu
Jinglei.
Chinese media Xinhua reported that this blog received more than 50 million page
views, claiming it to be the most popular blog in the world. Technorati rated
Boing Boing to be the most-read group-written blog.
The Blogger's
Code of Conduct is a proposal by Tim O'Reilly for bloggers to enforce
civility on their blogs by being civil themselves and moderating comments on
their blog. The code was proposed in 2007 due to threats made to blogger Kathy
Sierra. The idea of the code was first reported by BBC News, who quoted
O'Reilly saying, "I do think we need some code of conduct around what is
acceptable behaviour, I would hope that it doesn't come through any kind of
regulation it would come through self-regulation."
O'Reilly and
others came up with a list of seven proposed ideas:
1.
Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for
the comments you allow on your blog.
2.
Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3.
Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4.
Ignore the trolls.
5.
Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find
an intermediary who can do so.
6.
If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7.
Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.
These ideas were
predictably intensely discussed on the Web and in the media. While the internet
has continued to grow, with online activity and discourse only picking up both
in positive and negative ways in terms of blog interaction, the proposed Code
has drawn more widespread attention to the necessity of monitoring blogging
activity and social norms being as important online as offline.[3]
CONCLUSION:
WhatsApp Messenger is a smartphone messenger available for Android and other smartphones. WhatsApp uses your
3G or WiFi (when available) to message with friends
and family. Switch from SMS to WhatsApp to send and
receive messages, pictures, audio notes, and video messages. First year FREE!
($0.99 USD/year after)
WHATSAPP:
NO HIDDEN COST:
Once you and your friends download the application, you can use it to chat as
much as you want. Send a million messages a day to your friends for free! WhatsApp uses your Internet connection: 3G/EDGE or Wi-Fi
when available.
MULTIMEDIA:
Send Video, Images, and Voice notes to your friends and contacts.
GROUP CHAT:
Enjoy group conversations with your contacts.
NO INTERNATIONAL
CHARGES: Just like there is no added cost to
send an international email, there is no cost to send WhatsApp messages internationally. Chat with your friends
all over the world as long as they have WhatsApp
Messenger installed and avoid those pesky international SMS costs.
SAY NO TO PINS AND
USERNAMES: Why even bother having to remember yet another PIN
or username? WhatsApp works with your phone number,
just like SMS would, and integrates flawlessly with your existing phone address
book.
NO NEED TO LOG
IN/OUT: No more confusion about getting logged off from another
computer or device. With push notifications WhatsApp
is ALWAYS ON and ALWAYS CONNECTED.
NO NEED TO ADD
BUDDIES: Your Address Book is used to automatically connect you
with your contacts. Your contacts who already have WhatsApp Messenger will be automatically displayed.
OFFLINE MESSAGES:
Even if you miss your push notifications or turn off your phone, WhatsApp will save your messages offline until you retrieve
them during the next application use.
AND MUCH MORE:
Share location, Exchange contacts, Custom wallpaper, Custom notification
sounds, Landscape mode, Precise message time stamps, Email chat history,
Broadcast messages and MMS to many contacts at once and much much more!
SKYPE:
Say “hello” to
friends and family with an instant message, voice or video call on Skype for
free. Join the millions of people using Skype today to stay in touch with the
people who matter most. There’s so much you can do, right from the palm of your
hand.
Features:
Find all your friends
and family in an instant - With over 250
million people using Skype, you’re bound to bump into someone you know.
Talk with your
fingers - No matter where you are, your
friends are always at your fingertips with free instant messaging.
Call your world
from Skype - Talk to your heart’s content with
free voice and video calls to all your friends and family on Skype.
Low cost calls to
mobiles and landlines too - Keep in touch,
even if they’re not on Skype, with low cost calls and SMS to mobiles and landlines
on the other side of town or the world.
Share your
favourite snaps - Got a favourite
photo to share? Send it over Skype to friends and family and you won’t have to
worry about email size limits or expensive MMS charges.
Chat with anyone,
anywhere - Skype’s available on smartphones, tablets, PCs, Macs, and even TVs. Whatever device your friends or family use, Skype just
works. Simple.
Video messaging – Record life’s everyday moments and share them with the
people who matter most, with free and unlimited video messaging over Skype.
WICKR:
The Internet is
forever! Your private communications don’t need to be. Wickr’s
mission is to provide a free and easy way for anyone to send encrypted messages
and Leave No Trace.
Both sender and
receiver must have the app to communicate. Only the receiver is able to decrypt
the message once it was sent. Wickr does not have the
decryption keys.
Send and receive
text, photos, videos, voice and pdfs that are:
CONTROLLED
- sender decides who sees what, where and for how long
SECURE - military-grade
encryption AES256, ECDH521, RSA4096 TLS), we do not have the keys.
PRIVATE
- not shared with strangers, deletes metadata (location, time, identification
and edits)
ANONYMOUS
- we require no personal info from you, we collect
nothing about you or what you do
SHREDDED
– Secure File Shredder forensically erases unwanted files you deleted from your
device
COMPLIANT
- FIPS 140-2, HIPAA, exceeds NSA Suite B Compliancy (Compliance for Top Secret
communication)
INTEGRATED
- send PDFs and images from Box, Dropbox, Google Drive
TRUSTED
- featured in BusinessWeek, CNET, Economist, Forbes,
NPR and New York Times.
EASY
- takes less than a minute to get started, easier than email
FREE
- save money on texting
Wickr uses AES256 to protect
data and ECDH521 for the key exchange. RSA4096 is also used as a backup and for
legacy app versions. Wickr also uses SHA256 for
hashing and Transport Layer Security (TLS). Encryption keys are used only once
then destroyed by the sender’s phone. Each message is encrypted with its own
unique key and no two users can have the same AES256 or ECDH521 keys ever. Our
servers do not have the decryption keys, only the intended recipient(s) on the
intended devices can decrypt the messages. Wickr has
hundreds of thousands of downloads in over 113 countries. Celebrities, royalty,
reporters, feds, lawyers, doctors, investors and teens are the early adopters.
VIBER:
Viber for Windows lets you send free messages and
make free calls to other Viber users, on any device
and network, in any country! Viber syncs your
contacts, messages and call history with your mobile device.
Best-quality HD
voice calls
Video calls
Text, photo and
sticker messages
Full sync between
your mobile and Windows
TWITTER: Twitter
is a free app that lets you connect with people, express yourself, and discover
more about all the things you love. See what your favorite celebs and athletes
are chatting about. Be the first to hear breaking news. Catch a glimpse behind
the scenes at the Oscars, concerts, sporting events, and more. Then join the
conversation: Tweet your own text, photos, and video to your followers — and
maybe make a few fans along the way. Get inspired. Be social. Even send private
messages to friends. All in real time, as big (and little) things happen, from
anywhere you happen to be. Transfer ongoing calls between devices.
BLOG:
You can find about
2.6 million answers (and counting) to that specific question via Google but I
wanted to present the answer in a few different ways so that you, as the new
guy or gal, can get it, or if you know someone who wants to know then
you can pass them this post.
A blog originally
came from the word “weblog” or a “web log”.
You can think of
it as an online journal or diary, although blogs are used for much more now,
like online journalism.
A blogger is
someone who blogs, or writes content for a blog.
Blogging is the
act of writing a post for a blog.
A blog is a type
of website which has posts (or entries) appearing in reverse chronological
order.
Blog posts
typically appear with the most recent blog post (or entry, post) first, just
like a diary or journal.
A blog is
typically updated frequently and regularly, although there are some who are
considered “slow bloggers”.
Blogs typically
have an area for people to comment or respond to the blog post.
Blogs may also
have other areas of content and links to other websites.
Blogs can have
individual authors or be a collection of authors.
Blogs have a
history or an archive of previous blog posts.
A blog is a
collection of content that is organized repetitively. This content can take the
form of basic words (copy) as well as rich media (audio, video, and embeddable
objects).
A blog typically
focuses on a particular subject matter for clarity, focus, and
A blog can be
built by hand, manually through writing the post, uploading to a website via
FTP, and then publishing.
A blog can also be
managed by software, sometimes called a CMS (Content Management System), where
a lot of the features are automatically created and populated.
A blog typically
can be read in a number of different formats including the homepage, single
post page, categories, tags, and also via RSS and other such syndication
technologies.
Readers and
visitors can subscribe to the blog so that they can consume the content in a
variety of different means, tools, devices, and applications.
A blog today could
take the form of microblogging (like Twitter, Posterous,
Tumblr), vblogging (video blogging), and more which
can focus on a particular type of content or technology.
REFERENCES:
1. Albergotti, Reed;
MacMillan, Douglas; Rusli, Evelyn M. (February 20,
2014). "Facebook's $19 Billion Deal Sets High
Bar". The Wall Street Journal.
pp. A1, A6.
2. Holton, Avery
E.; Kang Baek, Mark Coddington,
Yaschur, Carolyn (2014). "Seeking and Sharing:
Motivations for Linking on Twitter". Communication Research Reports
31 (1): 33–40.
3. Kierkegaard,
Sylvia (2006). "Blogs, lies and the doocing: The
next hotbed of litigation?". Computer Law and
Security Report 22 (2): 127.