A girl in Hamburg-Bramfeld, Germany invited her friends to her sixteenth birthday party by posting an event page in Facebook. But, she forget to make it accessible only to her friends.

The invitation was available for everybody to register. It soon went viral and more than 15,000 people confirmed to be present in the birthday party in their home.

When Thessa’s parents found out about it, they were worried and soon canceled the party in a haste, and they also informed the police about the incident. They even hired a private security service to control the crowd.

Despite the cancelation of the birthday party, some 1,500 guests showed up on Friday, June 3, 2011 in Thessa’s home and.  About 100 police officers were also present to control the crowd. Some guests had also brought presents and homemade cakes. Thessa however had fled her home for her safety.

The huge crowd in front of Thessa’s house asked Thessa to be present in the party. They chanted birthday wishes. The police had reported that eleven people were detained temporarily. One of  the police officers was injured and the firefighters had to extinguish two small fires.

Thessa later told that she quietly celebrated her birthday with her grandparents. (Photo source – AP)

Happy fifth birthday Twitter!

Five years ago, today was the day the first tweet was sent. when @jack, @ev, @Biz and a small team started it they didn’t know it will get this big and grow to a team of more than 400 full time workers.

but how will it survive?

@Biz wrote in the official Twitter blog:

Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days—by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets. While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day.

Twitter and Facebook are considered to be the vehicle of current day social networking. Although some, after watching is birthday video, suspect Twitter might be off-track when communication between general public. The video focuses on portraying Twitter as a platform of following celebrities rather than being a social network. Watch the video and decide if it is more about who you follow than what you share!

It has been twelve years since Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the domain Google.com, the search synonym of today. In that 12 years, Google has transformed itself into a multi-billion dollar company based in Mountain View, Calif. It’s 12th birthday is being celebrated with a American painter Wayne Thiebaud design – a big, digitized birthday cake logo.

The cake doodle confirms that Google celebrates its birthday on September 27, 2010. Whois lookup however, shows that Google was first registered on 15 sep, 1997.

   Updated Date: 15-sep-2010
   Creation Date: 15-sep-1997
   Expiration Date: 14-sep-2011

On it’s birthday, let’s look at some of the milestones in its history:

• In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords.
• In 2001, Google launched Image Search.
• In 2002, it released Google Labs and Google News.
• In 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger (in February)
• In 2005, Google Maps (in February) and Google Talk (in August). Other features released were- Google Reader, Google Analytics, and Gmail for mobile.
• In 2006, the verb, "to google", was officially added to Webster and Oxford Dictionary (in July), Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion (in October)
• 2007, Gmail released for public.
• 2008, Android mobile operating system,
• In 2009 and 2010 – Google Voice, Google Buzz were the buzz words.

That was a short and incomplete history of Google. A full and official history can be accessed here.

Happy Birthday Google !

Started in May of 2005, with an objective to offer users with an option to upload easily and share videos with each other, YouTube has largely been successful in the said objective.

In the last 5 years, the site has grown to become the most visited video site in the world, with over two billion views daily.  In every single minute, people upload more than 24 hours of video footage. YouTube history is well presented in the following video:

YouTube is localized in 22 countries in 24 different languages. It receives 70 percent of all its video uploads from outside the United States these days. The most popular video on YouTube is Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, with over 200 million views – posted below: