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American company offering online social networking services. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest social network in the world, with more than one billion users as of 2012, and about half that number were using Facebook every day. The company's headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.

Web site for sharing videos. It was registered on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal. They had the idea that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their “home videos.” The company is headquartered in San Bruno, California.

In 2006, in what many in the industry considered the opening salvo in a war with the Microsoft Corporation, Google introduced Google Apps—software hosted by Google that runs through users' Web browsers. The first free programs included Google Calendar (a scheduling program), Google Talk (an instant-messaging program), and Google Page Creator (a Web-page-creation program); in order to use these free programs, users had to tolerate advertisements and be reconciled to having their data stored on Google's equipment. This type of deployment, in which both the data and the programs are located somewhere “out there” on the Internet, is often called cloud computing.

Online microblogging service for distributing short messages among groups of recipients via personal computer or mobile telephone. Twitter incorporates aspects of social networking Web sites, such as Myspace and Facebook, with instant messaging technologies to create networks of users who can communicate throughout the day with brief messages, or “tweets.” A user types a tweet via mobile phone keypad or computer and sends it to Twitter's server, which relays it to a list of other users (known as followers) who have signed up to receive the sender's tweets by either text message to their mobile phones or by instant message to their personal computers. In addition, users can elect to track specific topics, creating a dialogue of sorts and pushing the number of followers in a given Twitter feed into the millions. Tweets may be on any subject, ranging from jokes to news to dinner plans, but they cannot exceed 140 characters.

An integrated set of components for collecting, storing, and processing data and for delivering information, knowledge, and digital products. Business firms and other organizations rely on information systems to carry out and manage their operations, interact with their customers and suppliers, and compete in the marketplace. For instance, corporations use information systems to reach their potential customers with targeted messages over the Web, to process financial accounts, and to manage their human resources. Governments deploy information systems to provide services cost-effectively to citizens. Digital goods, such as electronic books and software, and online services, such as auctions and social networking, are delivered with information systems. Individuals rely on information systems, generally Internet-based, for conducting much of their personal lives: for socializing, study, shopping, banking, and entertainment.