Google Buzz is a social networking and messaging tool from Google that is integrated into the company's web-based email program, Gmail.[1][2] Users can share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in "conversations" and visible in the user's inbox.[3]

Buzz enables users to choose to share publicly with the world or privately to a group of friends each time they post.[4] Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, YouTube, Blogger, FriendFeed, identi.ca and Twitter are currently integrated. The creation of Buzz was seen by industry analysts as an attempt by Google to compete with social networking websites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter.

Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world,[14] and processes over one billion search requests[15] and twenty petabytes of user-generated data every day.[16][17][18] Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond the company's core search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail e-mail software, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz.

Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is the current web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine")[2] from Microsoft.

Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions as queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explorer pane") based on[4] semantic technology from Powerset that Microsoft purchased in 2008.

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.

MySpace is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California[5] where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, News Corp. Digital Media, owned by News Corporation. MySpace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006.

MySpace employs 1,000 employees, after laying off 30 percent of its workforce in June 2009;[9] the company does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. The 100 millionth account was created on August 9, 2006,[10] in the Netherlands.[11]

Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service which enables its users to send and read other users' messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list.

All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as, for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries.[9] While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide and currently has more than 100 million users worldwide.[10] It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."[11]

Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.,[1] with more than 500 million[5] active users in July 2010, which is about one person for every fourteen in the world.[6][N 1] Users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[7] The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.

A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[16] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade 'best-of' list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"

United Parcel Service, Inc. (NYSE: UPS), commonly referred to as UPS, is a package delivery company. Headquartered in Sandy Springs, Georgia, United States,[2][3] UPS delivers more than 15 million packages[4] a day to 6.1 million customers in more than 200 countries and territories around the world.

UPS is well known for its brown trucks, internally known as package cars (hence the company nickname "The Big Brown Machine"). UPS also operates its own airline (IATA: 5X, ICAO: UPS, Callsign: UPS) based in Louisville, Kentucky where its Worldport air hub is also located.

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.

Microsoft used the MSN brand name to promote numerous popular web-based services in the late 1990s, most notably Hotmail and Messenger, before reorganizing many of them in 2005 under another brand name, Windows Live.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American public corporation with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides Internet services worldwide.

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.[3]

The Googleplex is the corporate headquarters complex of Google, Inc., located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, near San Jose.

The four core buildings, totaling 47,038 square meters (506,310 sq ft), were built for and originally occupied by Silicon Graphics (SGI). The office space and corporate campus is located within a larger 26-acre (110,000 m2) site that contains Charleston Park, a 5-acre (20,000 m2) public park; improved access to Permanente Creek; and public trails that connect the corporate site to Shoreline Park and the Bay Trail.