Gree (social network)
Japanese social networking service
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
GREE is a Japanese social networking service founded by Yoshikazu Tanaka and operated by GREE Holdings, Inc. While GREE was initially available only to PC users, the service was later extended to feature phone users. GREE for feature phones includes regular social networking functions, social games, flash-based games, blogs, fortune telling, news and so forth.
 | |
| Owner | GREE Holdings, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Created by | Yoshikazu Tanaka |
| URL | gree |
| Launched | February 2004 |
The source of earnings is mainly composed of advertisement sales and paid services sales.
History
Content
GREE focuses primarily on mobile games and over ninety percent of its users access the site via their mobile phones. The company makes money by selling virtual goods to users such as clothes for their in-game avatars.[1]
Social networking features of GREE include the user profile, diary, communities, photo sharing and photo emailing. It serves as a platform for promoting communication and mutual understanding among its members.
Etymology
The service name GREE comes from a hypothesis, Six Degrees of Separation postulated by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967. Six degrees of separation is a hypothesis that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth. If a chain of a friend of a friend statements are made, any two people in the world can be connected in six steps or fewer. The name symbolizes GREE’s hope to create and provide any new possibilities of the Internet. [2]