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Fun Facts

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  • The creators of Instagram got the name from a combination of the fact that old Polaroid cameras marketed themselves as "instant" and the fact that they felt snapshots were like telegrams that got sent over the wire to others.
  • The average Photobucket user shares their photos to four different social media platforms.
  • Pinterest hit 10 million U.S. monthly unique visitors faster than any independent site in history.
  • In 2012, Pinterest is generating more referral traffic to Web sites than YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn combined.
  • There are approximately 2 million check-ins per week on Foursquare.
  • According to Twitter's calculations, the amount of tweets sent in one day is enough to write a 10 million-page book or 8,163 copies of War and Peace.
  • According to Flurry Analytics, consumers downloaded a total of 242 million apps on December 25, 2011.
  • According to Experian Hitwise, “Facebook” was the most-searched term in 2011, making it the third year in a row that the social networking platform topped the most-searched list.
  • Klout was started when founder Joe Fernandez was recovering from jaw surgery and depended entirely on social media for communication.
  • Klout founder and CEO Joe Fernandez paid $5,000 to the original owner of klout.com for the domain name.
  • In December 2011, one in every five smartphone owners in the U.S. scanned a QR code.
  • Meetup staff are called “MEME-teamers.” MEME is an acronym for “Meetups Everywhere about Most Everything."
  • A meetup takes place every 13 seconds.
  • Google+ was developed under the code name “Emerald Sea.” The code name came from the fact that Google+ presented an opportunity to sail to new horizons or drown in the wave of social media sites.
  • Google+ reached 10 million users in just two weeks, despite the fact that it had not officially been released to the public.
  • HootSuite allows its fans to translate any HootSuite application to the language of their choice. So far, users have started translating 21 different languages, including Korean, Welsh, and Turkish.
  • The name “Tumblr” comes from a variation on blogs that are shorter stream-of-consciousness posts known as “tumblelogs.”
  • TweetDeck holds internal "HackDays" once per month where employees are given free reign to prototype, build, or design anything they want to see in TweetDeck.
  • Twitter.com was originally owned by a birding enthusiast, so the microblogging site was first known as “Twttr.”
  • The first day Twitter was made public there were a total of 224 tweets. In July 2011, the rate of tweets was 224 in under one-tenth of a second.
  • The name Formspring comes from “form” which reflects the act of crafting a question, and “spring” to reveal the response.
  • Social media accounts for one in every six minutes spent online.
  • In January 2011, Formspring added a "smile" button to every post on the site, which acts in a similar manner to the "like" button on Facebook. It disappeared, but then came back as a permanent feature in March 2011.
  • More than 500 tweets every minute contain a YouTube link.
  • Facebook users watch more than 150 years' worth of YouTube video every day.
  • 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over New Year’s weekend 2011.
  • NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer was the first person to tweet from space.
  • The average Facebook user spends about 55 minutes a day, about 6.50 hours a week, and about 1.20 days a month on the site.
  • Over 300,000 users translate Facebook into over 70 languages using the translation application.
  • There are over 900 million objects including personal pages, groups, events, and community pages that Facebook users can interact with.
  • The average Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content including links, news stories, photo albums, notes, and videos each month.
  • More than 30 billion pieces of content including links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, and videos are shared on Facebook each month.
  • Over 80 percent of comScore's U.S. Top 100 Web sites and over half of their Global Top 100 Web sites are integrated with Facebook.
  • 70 percent of YouTube traffic comes from outside the United States.
  • As of 2010, to watch all the videos on YouTube, a person would have to live for approximately 1,000 years.
  • YouTube is available across 25 countries and in 43 languages.
  • There are over 200 million blogs on the Internet.
  • 34 percent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
  • 65 percent of bloggers are between the ages of 18 and 44.
  • Approximately two-thirds of bloggers are male.
  • 15 percent of bloggers spend 10 hours a week blogging.
  • More than half of all bloggers are married, parents, or both.
  • More than half of all bloggers have more than one blog.
  • The 10 billionth tweet was posted on Twitter in March 2010.
  • Approximately 190 million tweets are written each day.
  • More than half of LinkedIn users are from outside the United States.
  • By March 2010, Australia itself had over 1 million LinkedIn users.
  • 73 percent of users edit Wikipedia because they want to share knowledge and 69 percent of users edit Wikipedia to fix errors.
  • 19 percent of Wikipedia editors have a Master's degree and 4.4 percent of Wikipedia editors have a PhD.
  • 13 percent of the editors of Wikipedia entries are women.
  • Bad weather results in more edits of Wikipedia entries.
  • Australia has the highest number of established users of social media, followed by the United States and the United Kingdom.
  • Facebook, Blogspot, and Myspace are the top three Web sites visited by people under the age of 18.
  • Every NBA and NHL arena is now included as a featured spot on Gowalla.
  • Musician Ben Folds held a concert for his CD Supersunnyspeedgraphic on Second Life. 75 avatars attended and nearly 300 entered the contest to win a "ticket" to the first concert by a live musician on the avatar-based site.
  • There are Meetups on over 90,000 topics.
  • Plaxo is available in 11 different languages including English, Italian, and Pirate.
  • In 2010, American Idol allowed aspiring singers to submit audition videos via Myspace.
  • Myspace held an online casting call for Fox’s hit series Glee.
  • Queen Elizabeth of England approved the creation of both an official Facebook account for the royal family, and a Flickr account featuring more than 600 photos of the family, in 2010. These two accounts join the royal family's Twitter account that was started in 2009 and YouTube account that was started in 2007.
  • Oscar Mayer tracks the locations of its Weinermobiles, the 27-foot-long, hotdog-and-bun-shaped cars, using Brightkite. The cars also have their own RSS feeds.
  • Gowalla is an amalgamation of the words “Go” and “Wallaby,” a small kangaroo-like marsupial that hops from place to place.
  • Vimeo is a play on the word “video”, inserting the word “me” as a reference to the site’s dedication to user-made video, and is also an anagram of the word “movie.”
  • The 100 millionth Myspace account was created on August 9, 2006, in the Netherlands.
  • Evite has been referenced in popular television shows including The Simpsons, Alias, and The Office.
  • The reason the main color on Facebook is blue is because founder Mark Zuckerberg is red-green color blind, meaning the color he can see best is blue.
  • Dennis Crowley, the founder of Foursquare had an earlier site, which failed, called Dodgeball. He said he chose to name both sites after playground games because they are both designed to be fun and playful.
  • It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube uses the same amount of bandwidth as the entire Internet used in 2000.
  • Twitter adds nearly 500,000 new users every day.
  • The average Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 community pages, groups, and events.
  • Approximately half of the total number of Facebook users log on to Facebook at least once each day.
  • The fastest-growing group of Facebook users is females ages 55-65.
  • At over 5,000 words, Facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the U.S. Constitution.
  • Al Pacino’s face was on the original Facebook homepage.
  • Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the United States.
  • It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users; Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year.
  • If Facebook were a country it would have the world’s third largest population.
  • There are more than 1.6 billion searches on Twitter every day.
  • The Library of Congress now archives all tweets for research and preservation.
  • 80 percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices.
  • Executives from all 2010 Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn.
  • Two new member join LinkedIn every second.
  • Members of LinkedIn come from more than 200 countries and represent every continent.
  • The very first video uploaded to YouTube was called “Me at the Zoo” on April 23, 2005.
  • Approximately 48 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
  • YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
  • 77 percent of Internet users read blogs.
  • Corporate blogging accounts for 14 percent of blogs.
  • One in five bloggers update their blogs daily.
  • Google rents a flock of goats at its headquarters to cut down on weeds and brush.
  • There are 247 billion e-mails sent daily.
  • "Wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick."
  • If you were paid $1 for every article posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1,712.32 per hour.
  • 25 percent of search engine results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
  • 25 percent of Americans say they have watched a short video on their phone in the past month.
  • eBay was originally called "AuctionWeb."
  • The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer.
  • There are seven buildings at eBay’s headquarters and they are all named after eBay.com categories: Collectibles, Jewelry, Motors, Music, Sports, Technology, and Toys.
  • The most expensive eBay purchase was a jet that sold for $4.9 million in 2001.
  • iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in nine months.
  • 80 percent of companies use social media as a recruitment tool. Of those, 95 percent use LinkedIn.
  • According to a 2010 Red Cross Survey, about half of respondents would sign up to receive emergency alerts.
  • A software product called Textecution will disable a phone’s texting and Internet functions when the owner is traveling at 10 mph or above, effectively curbing texting while driving.
  • The first use of SMS (short message service) was allegedly in December 1992 by a 22 year-old engineer who used a computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas.”
  • Podcast comes from a combination of the acronym POD—play on demand—and the word "broadcast."

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