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WEB
SERVICES
There are many online services available these days.
Such services / products include
FaceBook, MySpace and
Twitter which allow for Social Networking between
users
In addition to these there are many other Social Networking
sites available, including some exclusive sites.
Video sharing sites include the highly popular
YouTube as well as DailyMotion,
MetaCafe, MyVideo,
Tudou, BlipTV,
Veoh and YahooVideo.
Flickr is also a popular image sharing site
amongst others available.
There are also various image sharing sites such as
Flickr and sites for accessing images such as
Getty Images.
One service that has stood the test of time, although the
dominant providers may have changed over the years, are Search
Engines.
Search engines 'crawl' pages on the web and allow for users to
enter search phrases which return pages that match.
Such products/services are operated by the leading provider
Google as well as Yahoo and the
emerging Bing (by Microsoft).
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EMAIL
ACCESS
It's interesting to note that an increasing number of users
seem to be using mobile phones to access their EMail.
This is probably due to the increase in the acceptance of
smart phones (such as the iPhone) and the idea that people like to
be more portable.
EMail Products:
There are many EMail products available with
the most common used on client computers being
Outlook.
Other webmail (where EMail is stored and accessed mainly via a
web browser) products such as HotMail,
YahooMail and GMail are also very
popular methods for sending and receiving EMail.
How it works:
Electronic Mail allows users to communicate by sending mail items
electronically. Obviously such items are electronic, but this
doesn't mean that users can just send typed messages.
Images, including scanned copies of paper items, and a variety
of other items can also be sent, including pictures and video.
The additional items (such as videos) however need not be sent
directly as these can be quite large in size. An
alternative to this is to upload such items to the internet
(e.g: video to a video sharing site such as YouTube), and
EMail a link (reference) to the video. Such items can be
uploaded as private if you don't want to share with everyone.
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WEB
BROWSING
Web browsing may seem the same today, but it has changed over
the years. Browsers have recently allowed to "AddOns" that
can further enhance their functionality.
Major Browsers have also increased their security capabilities
as new threats emerge.
Web Browsing
Products: The most commonly
used web browser is Internet Explorer. IE is
available from Microsoft and is generally part of the Microsoft
Windows operating system.
Other more common browsers are FireFox, and in
recent years Google has released Chrome which is
growing in usage.
Safari is another web browser by Apple and is
available for both the Mac and the PC platforms.
How they work: The
web browser is the main method to access the internet.
Once a computer platform (such as a PC) and a connection
is established (such as via a modem to an ISP (Internet
Service Provider)), access to web sites is generally via
browsers.
The browsers access pages on a website, from which files
are downloaded to your local computer.
These files are then read and displayed, as per the
contents/instructions within the file, via the web browser in a
format that is readable to users.
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