startups

For over a decade, broad and comprehensive social networks like Facebook and its previously popular predecessor, MySpace, have been the predominant social networks.

In the last few years, startups have been building niche social networks that offer unique features depending on users’ interests.

Google Plus, the ambitious company-wide social network launched late last month, was reportedly built in secret over an extended period of time by scores of engineers and social software designers brought into the company through a campaign of heavy hiring.

The scope of Plus's ambition is far from fully realized, though, and apparently the expansion of the team isn't complete yet either.

This morning a well-backed little startup called The Fridge announced that it has been acquired by Google and will close its group sharing app up to work on something similar at Plus.

TechCrunch: A decade ago, the open-source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python) stack began to transform web startup economics...the same thing is now happening with Hadoop and Big Data.