Other Important Social Media Platforms:

  Linkedin

• LinkedIn is a business and employment-focused social media platform that works through websites and mobile apps. It was launched on May 5, 2003.  Since December 2016, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. The platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job seekers to post their CVs and employers to post jobs. From 2015 most of the company's revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals. LinkedIn has more than 970 million registered members from over 200 countries and territories. LinkedIn allows members (both workers and employers) to create profiles and connect with each other in an online social network which may represent real-world professional relationships.
• LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering in January 2011. The company traded its first shares on May 19, 2011, under the NYSE symbol, In April 2014, LinkedIn announced that it had leased 222 Second Street, a 26-story building under construction in San Francisco's SoMa district, to accommodate up to 2,500 of its employees, with the lease covering 10 years. In 2016, access to LinkedIn was blocked by Russian authorities for non-compliance with the 2015 national legislation that requires social media networks to store citizens' personal data on servers located in Russia.
• As of September 2021, LinkedIn has 774+ million registered members from over 200 countries and territories. LinkedIn is particularly well-suited for personal branding, which, according to Sandra Long, entails "actively managing one's image and unique value" to position oneself for career opportunities. LinkedIn has evolved from being a mere platform for job searchers into a social network which allows users a chance to create a personal brand.

Medium

• Medium is an American online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams and launched in August 2012. It is owned by A Medium Corporation. The platform is an example of social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, or exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium, and is regularly regarded as a blog host. By April 2013, Williams reported there were 30 full-time staff working on the platform, including a vacancy for a "Storyteller" role, and that it was taking "98 percent" of his time.
• Medium has brought in revenue through native advertising and sponsorship of some article series. Medium gained several new publishers to host their content on the platform. In March 2017, Medium announced a membership program for $5 per month, offering access to "well-researched explainers, insightful perspectives, and useful knowledge with a longer shelf life", with authors being paid a flat amount per article. In January 2021, Medium announced that it had acquired the social-based ebook company Glose. In November 2021, Medium acquired browser-based graphic design tool Projector. Projector's team joined Medium and Projector was shut down in 2022. Projector co-founder and CEO Trevor O'Brien became Medium's chief product officer. In November 2021, Medium also acquired audio-based learning platform Knowable.
• Medium does not publish official user stats on its website. According to US blogs, the platform had about 60 million monthly visitors in 2016. In 2015, the total numbers of users was about 25 million. Medium offers users subscriptions to become a member for a $5 monthly or $50 yearly fee. With a Medium membership, access to "exclusive content, audio narrations of popular stories, and an improved bookmark section" is enabled.

Tumblr

• Tumblr  is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Development of Tumblr began in 2006 during a two-week gap between contracts at David Karp's software consulting company, Davidville. Tumblr was launched in February 2007, and within two weeks had gained 75,000 users. Arment left the company in September 2010 to work on Instapaper. 
• On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo and Tumblr had reached an agreement for Yahoo! Inc. to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. Karp announced in November 2017 that he would be leaving Tumblr by the end of the year. Jeff D'Onofrio, Tumblr's president and COO, took over leading the company.

Features

• Blog management
• Dashboard:
• Queue
• Tags
• HTML Editing
• Custom domains

Pinterest

• Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") like recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. The site was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp and it is operated by now Pinterest, Inc., and headquartered in San Francisco. 
• The development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched the prototype as a closed beta in March 2010. Nine months after the launch, the website had 10,000 users. Silbermann said he wrote to the first 5,000 users, offering his phone number and even meeting with some of them. The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011 brought in more downloads than expected. This was followed by an iPad app and Pinterest Mobile, a version of the website for non-iPhone users. Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until the summer of 201.
• In January 2023 at CES, Pinterest announced its partnership with LiveRamp, a data enablement platform to create data 'clean rooms' for selected advertisers on the platform. These 'clean rooms' will allow Pinterest's ad partners to utilize first-party data for personalized ads without having to share the data with Pinterest. Pinterest is a free website that requires registration to use.

Quora

• Quora is a social question-and-answer website and online knowledge market headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that have been submitted by other users. As of 2020, the website was visited by 300 million users a month. Quora was co-founded by former Facebook employees Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever in June 2009.
• In March 2010, Quora, Inc. was valued at $86 million. Quora first became available to the public on June 21, 2010, and was praised for its interface and for the quality of the answers written by its users, many of whom were recognized as experts in their fields. Quora was evolving into "a more organized Yahoo Answers, a classier Reddit, an opinionated Wikipedia", and became popular in tech circles. 
• On April 19, Quora eliminated the requirement that users use their real names and allowed users to use pseudonyms.
• On August 5, Quora began allowing contributors to monetize their content. In addition, the platform launched a subscription service called Quora+ which allows subscribers to pay a $5 monthly fee or a $50 annual subscription to access content that any creator chooses to put behind a paywall. 

Telegram

• Telegram Messenger, commonly known as Telegram, is a cloud-based, cross-platform instant messaging (IM) service. It allows users to exchange messages, share media and files, and hold private and group voice or video calls, as well public livestreams. It is available for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and web browsers. Telegram provides end-to-end encryption in voice and video calls, and in optional private chats, which Telegram calls Secret Chats.
• Telegram also has social networking features, allowing users to post stories, create large public groups with up to 200,000 members, or share one-way updates to unlimited audiences in so-called channels. The service also provides an open API for the creation of custom bots which can perform various tasks, integrate other services into Telegram chats, or work as mini apps.
• Telegram was founded in 2013 by Nikolai and Pavel Durov. Its servers are distributed worldwide, while the headquarters are in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Telegram is the most popular instant messaging application in parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
• As of August 2023, Telegram has more than 800 million monthly active users, with India leading in the number of users. It was the most downloaded app worldwide in January 2021 with 1 billion downloads globally as of late August 2021.

Reddit

• Reddit  is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "communities" or "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are not Reddit employees.  It is operated by Reddit Inc., based in San Francisco.
• As of October 2023, Reddit is the 18th most-visited website in the world. According to data provided by Similarweb, 48.98% of the websites traffic comes from the United States followed by the United Kingdom at 7.06% and Canada at 6.9%.
• Reddit was founded by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, with Aaron Swartz, in 2005. Condé Nast Publications acquired the site in October 2006.
• In June 2023, Black Cat hacker gang claimed responsibility for a February 2023 breach of Reddit's systems. On their data leak site, they claimed that they stole 80 GB of compressed data and demanded a $4.5 million ransom from Reddit. This attack did not involve data encryption like typical ransomware campaigns.

Orkut

• Orkut was a social networking service owned and operated by Google. The service was designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships. The website was named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.
• Orkut was one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil in 2008. In 2008, Google announced that Orkut would be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.
• On June 30, 2014, Google announced it would be closing Orkut on September 30, 2014. No new accounts could be created starting from July 2014. Users could download their profile archive by Google Takeout.
• In April 2022, the website was reactivated.
• Orkut's features and interface changed significantly with time. An Orkut user was also able to add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video with the additional option of creating either restricted or unrestricted polls for polling a community of users,Orkut was the first Google customer to have OpenSocial support.

Google +

• Google+ (sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network that was owned and operated by Google until it ceased operations in 2019. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google products like Google Drive, Blogger and YouTube. The service, Google's fourth foray into social networking, experienced strong growth in its initial years, although usage statistics varied, depending on how the service was defined. Three Google executives oversaw the service, which underwent substantial changes that led to a redesign in November 2015.
• Due to low user engagement and disclosed software design flaws that potentially allowed outside developers access to personal information of its users, the Google+ developer API was discontinued on March 7, 2019, and Google+ was shut down for business and personal use on April 2, 2019.