1. Facebook.com
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of January 2011, Facebook has more than 600 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Facebook users must register before using the site. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other better. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the website.
2. Google.com
Google Search or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. and is the most-used search engine on the Web. Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services. The main purpose of Google Search is to hunt for text in webpages, as opposed to other data, such as with Google Image Search. Google Search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997.
Google Search provides at least 22 special features beyond the original word-search capability. These include synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports scores. (See below: Special features). There are special features for numbers, including ranges (70..73), prices, temperatures, money/unit conversions ("10.5 cm in inches"), calculations ("3*4+sqrt(6)-pi/2"), package tracking, patents, area codes, and language translation of displayed pages.
3. Twitter.com
Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page.
The website is based in San Francisco. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio and Boston. Twitter, Inc. was originally incorporated in California, but as of 2011 is incorporated in Delaware.
4. Live.com
Windows Live Personalized Experience (also known as My.Live.com, previously Live.com) was a customizable portal launched by Microsoft in early November 2005. It was one of the first Windows Live services to launch.
Live.com let users add RSS feeds in order to view news at a glance. Building off Microsoft's Start.com experimental page, Live.com could be customized with Gadgets, mini-applications that could serve almost any purpose (e.g. mail readers, weather reports, slide shows, search, games, etc.). Some gadgets integrated with other Windows Live services, including Hotmail, Live Search, and Favorites.
5. MSN.com
MSN (originally The Microsoft Network) is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.
The range of services offered by MSN has changed since its initial release in 1995. MSN was once a simple online service for Windows 95, an early experiment at interactive multimedia content on the Internet, and one of the most popular dial-up Internet service providers.
6. Myspace.com
Myspace, stylized My and previously MySpace, is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California.
Myspace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006, a position that it held throughout 2007 until 2008. However by April 2008, according to comScore, Myspace was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, based on monthly unique visitors.Since then MySpace has declined steadily in spite of several drastic redesigns. Quantcast estimates MySpace's monthly U.S. unique visitors at 19.7 million as of May 2011. The site ranking of Myspace as of June 2011 was 80, as opposed to the number 2 position held by Facebook.
7. Blogger.com
Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via FTP. All such blogs had (or still have) to be moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via Custom URLs.
8. Wikipedia.org
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 19 million articles (over 3.6 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. As of May 2011, there were editions of Wikipedia in 281 languages. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking around seventh among all websites on Alexa and having 365 million readers.
9. Yahoo.com
Yahoo! Inc. is an American internet corporation founded in Santa Clara, California and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video), and social media websites and services. It is one of the largest websites in the United States.
Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairperson of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.
10. YouTube.com
YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share and view videos, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005.
The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS, BBC, Vevo, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.