WAYN (website)
WAYN (an acronym for Where Are You Now?) is a social networking website with a goal to unite travellers from around the world. WAYN has top 1500[1] in Alexa Internet traffic ranking and was launched in May 2003 after two of its founders came up with the idea to connect people based on their location while having a few beers in their local pub. It grew from 45,000 to 4.1 million members in one year (to April 2006) and now has over 13 million members.[2][self-published source?] Like some other social networking sites, WAYN enables its users to create a profile and upload photos. Users can search for other users and link them to their profiles as friends. Registered users send and receive messages using email, discussion forums, eCards, SMS, and WAYN instant messaging.
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[edit] History
WAYN was founded in 2002 in London by Jérome Touze (Co-CEO), Wayne Ward (Co-CEO) and Mike Lines (CTO). WAYN initially grew through word-of-mouth and reached almost 50,000 members by the end of 2004. Following its relaunch in May 2005 it grew exponentially, reaching over 2.5M members by the end of 2005. On 21 June 2007 the site claimed "over 8m members".[2]
WAYN is also one of the very few sites which didn't lose the impact of new subscriptions after introducing free full membership service in September 2004, making it one of the few premium social networking communities that managed to become profitable.[2][self-published source?]
[edit] Popularity
In the UK, WAYN has over 10,000 members [2][self-published source?]. It is also strong in the Ukraine, Canada, Austria, Greece and other countries in Western Europe and Zimbabwe.[2][self-published source?]
WAYN claims to have 14.5 million members[2][self-published source?]. It was voted most popular community in the 2007 and 2008 Website of the Year awards, [3] beating Facebook into second place
It has also the infamous nickname of "Scam site" because, when users cancel their account, it automatically sends invitation e-mails to all its contact list. As of today, 5 scammed-users groups are moving legal cases and class actions against WAYN.com
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "Alexa Traffic Ranking for wayn.com". Alexa Internet. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.wayn.com. Retrieved 2011-07-15.
- ^ a b c d e f "WAYN AboutUs Page". WAYN.com. http://www.wayn.com/aboutus. Retrieved 2007-06-21., "WAYN Press Page". WAYN.com. http://www.wayn.com/press.
- ^ "Website of the Year 2007". MetrixLab. http://www.websiteoftheyear.co.uk.
