Personal Portals and Communities
Personal Portals, Meeting Places
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
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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 businessdriven 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.
The information on this slide is extracted from Wikipedia
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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.
The information on this slide is extracted from Wikipedia
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• 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
The information on this slide is extracted from Wikipedia
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http://www.yahoo.com/
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My Yahoo
• My own Yahoo Portal.
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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.
The information on this slide is extracted from Wikipedia
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• 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.
The information on this slide is extracted from Wikipedia
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• 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.
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• 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.
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• 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.
The information on this slide is extracted from Wikipedia
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TechRepublic
• A resource for IT professionals.
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GO
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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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