The Masterminds Behind The Internet World, The Nerds Of Social Networking

Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are social networks we use every day without realizing it. It’s become a part of our lives, almost second nature but we never stop to think about the minds behind these sites. We’ve compiled a list of all the genius masterminds behind the creation of the some of the most used and talked about social websites.

Mark Zuckerberg - Founder of Facebook

At the age of 25, Mark Zuckerberg turned down a 1.6 billion dollar offer from Yahoo to buy Facebook. Now, that must have been a hard choice, ho would turn down 1.6 billion dollars right? Zuckerberg dropped out of college to create Facebook, which originally began as a small site displaying photographs of Harvard girls, where one could rate based on hotness scales. Since then, Facebook has grown to be one of the biggest Internet businesses and the world’s biggest social networking site.

Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia Founder

Jimmy Wales is the self-proclaimed founder of Wikipedia.org, one of the biggest free online encyclopedias. Wikipedia’s “Edit This Page” feature is what truly defined it as one of the biggest information sharing websites. This feature allowed the users to edit and publish new pages of information of their own on certain topics and subjects. Other users can then add on to this information however they like as long as it is accurate. To this day. Wikipedia has over 10 million articles in English and together, they exceed the number of articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s by 10 times. Jimmy Wales also serves on a Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, and is also a a founder of Wiki, the provider of Wiki creation and wiki based search services.

Kevin Rose - Founder of Digg

Kevin Rose is the founder of Digg.com, which is a site for sharing and discovering new content by using a point system called “Diggs”, the higher the Diggs, the more popular the post is. Rose created the site after dropping out from University of Nevada as a science major and has been recently named one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential people on the web. The site brings in plenty of traffic, witht 10 to 20 million visitors a month.

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawad Karim - Founders of YouTube

These former PayPal employees went off on their own to create the world’s most widely known video sharing site known as YouTube.com. YouTube was started by these three in February 2005, and since then has taken off and gained millions of users. Hurley and Chen originally developed the idea of YouTube after having trouble uploading a video from a dinner party they had the night before. Jawad Karim came on board later after the idea of YouTube was created. In November 2006, YouTube was bought out by Google for 1.65 billion dollars and is currently run as one of their subsidiaries.

Evan Williams - Founder of Twitter

Evan Williams is the founder of Twitter.com, the site that made actor Ashton Kutcher very public about his everyday life and allowed millions more to let people know what they were up to. Williams has founded many other successful Internet businesses, including PyraLabs (Company that runs Blogger and BlogSpot) which was later sold to Google. After this, Evan Williams teamed up with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone to found Twitter, furthering the notion that social networking sites are the future. Twitter is the third most used social networking site and attracts over 66 million unique monthly visits and 55 monthly visits.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin - Google co-founders

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were studying at Stanford University. They came up with an idea to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. Although, this seemed a little far fetched for two college students, they managed to pull it off. Google has been mentioned in Fortune magazine many times and has been ranked the #1 Best Place to Work. It is also considered the most powerful brand in the world. In the Alexa ranks, Google is listed as the most visited website in the world.

Matt Mullenweg - Founder of WordPress

Matt Mullenweg is a successful entrepreneur and businessman, created many companies throughout his lifetime. He’s most famous for the blogging software site, Wordpress.com. After quitting his job at CNET, Mullenweg ventured out into the world to create Wordpress, along with his other founded companies, Automattic, and the spam protection site, Akismet, all by the age of 25. Wordpress is now one of the few sites that offers free blogs with user customization including domain name purchases.

Pete Cashmore - Founder of Mashable

Pete Cashmore is one of the newest media experts introduced to the tech world and is the founder of Mashable, one of the world’s top 20 blogs according to Technorati. The site founded in 2005 covers all the latest information on the web relating to social networking, websites, technology and news. Cashmore was named one of Forbes’ top 25 web celebs of 2007.

Christopher Poole - Founder of 4Chan

4Chan is an English language image board website, that was launched in October 2003. The message boards are mainly used for posting pictures of Manga and Anime art. 4Chan users have been named for popularizing many Internet terms, for example “Rickroll” where one would title a YouTube video with a misleading title which would then lead the viewer to Rick Astley’s, “Never Gonna Give You Up”. 4Chan has recieved lots of media attention since its launch, mainly because of its exclusive crowd and site structure.