Facebook Unknown 5:49 AM

Facebook

Facebook  is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, theIvy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to high-school students. Facebook now allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website. Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to it by American universities students

History

Zuckerberg wrote a program called Facemash on October 28, 2003 while attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was comparable to Hot or Not and "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person"

To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied private dormitory ID images. Harvard did not have a student "Facebook" (a directory with photos and basic information) at the time, although individual houses had been issuing their own paper facebooks since the mid-1980s. Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.

Gmail Unknown 5:37 AM

Gmail

Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as securewebmail, as well as via POP3 or IMAP4 protocols. Gmail initially started as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though still in beta status at that time.The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, along with the rest of the Google Apps suite.

With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4 MB its competitors such as Hotmail offered at that time. Individual Gmail messages, including attachments, may be up to 25 MB.Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an Internet forum. Gmail is noted by web developers for its pioneering use of Ajax. Gmail runs on Google GFE/2.0 on Linux. As of June 2012, it was the most widely used web-based email provider with over 425 million active users worldwide. According to a 2014 estimate, 60% of mid-sized US companies were using Gmail. In May 2014, Gmail became the first app on the Google Play Store to hit one billion installations on Android devices.

History

The idea for Gmail was pitched by Rajen Sheth during an interview with Google, and went on to be developed by Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. The project was known by the code name Caribou. Initially the email client was available for use only by Google employees internally. Gmail was announced to the public by Google on April 1, 2004 as a limited beta release and was made publicly available on February 7, 2007. Gmail exited from the beta status on July 7, 2009.

As of June 22, 2005, Gmail's canonical URI changed from http://gmail.google.com/gmail/ to http://mail.google.com/mail/. starting in December 2012, those who typed in the former URI were redirected to the latter. Gmail added IMAP support on October 24, 2007.