Missed what happened in social media this week? Here are some of the top stories to catch you up!
Two big events happened on April 1, Gmail’s birthday and April Fool’s Day. Gmail was first launched on April 1, 2004 as an invitation only email that revolutionized the email. The invitation only access helped Gmail keep away spammers. Gmail also offered 1GB of storage capacity, which was way more than the competition, eliminating the notion that free webmail doesn’t have decent storage. Currently, Gmail is one of the most popular webmail services; it offers over 7400MB of free storage and is the foundation for many other Google apps and services.
In addition to celebrating Gmail’s birthday, Google is one of the many tech companies having fun with practical jokes today. Google changed its name to Topeka to repay the tribute to Topeka, Kansas which had changed its name to Google. The viral video site Funny or Die redesigned the whole website around pop sensation Justin Beiber, who bought the website to use it as a tribute to himself. YouTube is promoting watching their videos in TEXTp resolution, which helps save $1 in bandwith cost. Some other companies that decided to play jokes were Reddit, Hulu, Starbucks, Wikipedia and Qualcom.
This week, both YouTube and Twitter received website facelifts. Twitter is in the process of redesigning their home page by making it more dynamic and interactive. It will give potential new twitter users, and idea of who’s in twitter, what they are tweeting about and what big topics they are discussing. YouTube is in the process of redesigning the video page by simplifying the look and functionality of the page.
The company with the biggest buzz this week, I would have to say, is Apple. The release of the iPad is less than two days away. The iPad has already been sold out, and people have started to line up in the Apple stores to be the first to get the iPad. An estimate half a million iPads have been sold and a higher demand is expected. Hulu and Netflix are rumored to create apps that give the Ipad iPad owner the ability to stream movies and TV shows. The iPad apps have already started to appear on iTunes. A couple of the apps that have already showed up in ITunes are Twitterrific for iPad and The Wall Street Journal for iPad.
Stay tuned for future weekly buzz!
