Most Beautiful Hospitals

Hospital architecture and designs have transformed over time, from the once sterile white walls and stark decor to vibrant colors and eye-catching materials on the interior and exterior. The elements in today’s best designs have been proven to improve patient care.

Depending on the type of building, tying in elements of style and flair may be harder than expected. Hospitals are one type of building where functionality and design must go hand-in-hand. In developing this list of The 25 Most Beautiful Hospitals in the World, interior and exterior features and their health-promoting qualities were considered. Designs including warm woods and nature-inspired elements, soft color schemes, and exterior facades designed with regards to their natural settings placed these facilities on the list.

The most beautiful hospitals span the globe, including facilities in the United States, Austria, Thailand, Panama, Switzerland, China, and others – evidence that health-focused design has no boundaries. So, Here is the collection of 25 most beautiful hospitals in the world. Take a look...

25. Forest Park Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA

Designed by: Ascension Group

Recently expanded, the Forest Park Medical Center in Dallas offers many upgraded, state-of-the-art amenities and a beautiful design. In addition to the added 14 operating rooms, 48 private patient beds and 12 ICU beds, the expansion also includes a Class A, 6-story, 130,000-square-foot medical office building. The interior includes spaces with auditorium-style seating, modern lounge areas, floor to ceiling glass walls, and cool tones to give the building a modern feel. Patient rooms are warm and comfortable, utilizing elements like hardwood floors, large windows, and sleek finishes to make a patient’s stay more like a luxury retreat than a recovery period. The modern design flows out to the exterior, where there are areas for drive-thru banking, restaurants, pharmacy and other retail opportunities to make this more than just a hospital.

24. Sumner Regional Medical Center, Gallatin, TN, USA

Designed by: Gresham Smith & Partners

This 155-bed hospital is attractive to the eye on the inside and on the outside. The interior is finished with comfortable leather lounging chairs, marble accents, and entertainment-style televisions to allow patients and their visitors to feel at home. With careful consideration to the use of glass walls, the hospital also keeps a warm and inviting environment by their balance between natural and artificial light. On the exterior, a high glass tower takes center stage and is surrounded by a mix of glass and other warm materials. Lush landscaping completes the design, and is tended to by a in-house landscaping and maintenance staff.

23. Rudolfinerhaus – Vienna, Austria

This hospital is set in a quiet residential neighborhood, and its architectural design fits in perfectly with the surrounding buildings and homes. The exterior landscape complements the design, with lush and tended-to greens and shrubbery that invite patients and guests to spend free time outdoors. With the feel of a luxury hotel on the interior, patients can experience a peaceful and relaxing recovery time, and often remark that they feel more like a “guest” than a patient. Rudolfinerhaus has over 100 stylishly furnished private and semi-private rooms, with a total of 156 beds in 7 care units.

22. Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital – Roanoke, VA, USA

A mix of new and old architecture comes together at this hospital so that visitors will not notice a stark change in design, only a uniform and flowing expansion that unifies functionality and operations. The interior features many of the amenities of similar hospitals, like semi-private and private rooms, housekeeping, and more, but the real attraction to CRMH comes with its exterior design. One side of the hospital uses brick and concrete to frame the windows of patient rooms while a new, modern expansion utilizes walls of glass as the main design element on its curved facade.

21. Hospital Punta Pacifica – Panama City, Panama

Designed by: EDOTEC S.A.

Affiliated with Johns Hopkins Medicine International, this hospital has been recognized as one of Central and South America’s most advanced medical centers and is a top destination for Medical Tourism. Facilities include 51 modern and private rooms, 11 suites and 1 presidential suite, all specially designed to promote and enhance rapid recovery. The setting of the hospital adds to its appeal, as it sits along the Pacific Ocean in one of Panama City’s most prestigious neighborhoods. Light and dark contrasting materials allow the eye to be pulled in to its horizontal exterior design, where glass and concrete come together to create beauty near the sea.

20. Medical University of South Carolina Ashley River Tower – Charleston, SC, USA

Designed by: NBBJ and LS3P Associates

This hospital’s beautiful setting along the Charleston Peninsula alone gives it a place on this list, but it also has great amenities and a hotel-like interior design. The entrance, lined with lush landscaping and bluestone tiles, allows patients and their families to drive right up to the doors, then leave their car for the valet service to park. Inside, a 6,000 ft. conservatory with glass walls, skylights, and indoor plants welcomes patients and visitors while serving as the connector between the two main wings of the building. For patients, privacy is assured with their 156 single person rooms, complete with a full bath and pull-out couch for family and visitors.

19. Prince of Wales Private Hospital – Sydney, Australia

Designed by: Design, Inc.

Located in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, this hospital has both private and shared facilities, including 168 overnight beds with modern amenities. Attractive designs utilizing structural steel framing and glass along with unique architectural details on the exterior compliment the modern facilities on the interior. Newly renovated operating rooms also lend to the modern and sleek design of the interior, as well as improve its functionality and equipment quality.

18. Providence Alaska Medical Center – Anchorage, AK, USA

Designed by: Aesthetics, Inc.

Described by visitors and patients as “functional and stunning”, this high-tech medical center has a lot to offer medically and aesthetically in addition its beautiful setting. The campus is undergoing a $150 million renovation and expansion to its NICU, Prenatal, and Mother Baby Units, slated for completion in 2014. Aside from semi-private and private patient rooms, this hospital also features a family resource library and a nearby guest house for families and those undergoing outpatient procedures.

17. Klinik Hirslanden – Zurich, Switzerland

The Klinik Hirslanden has a sleek, modern design on the interior and exterior, and houses 259 single and double rooms. Besides amenities like cable television, internet, adjustable beds, full baths, and a housekeeping service that tends to the fresh flowers in each room 3 times a week. With a program called Hirsland Privé, the hospital provides a Guest-Relations service which offers patients the services of an attendant to care to their personal concerns. Hirslanden also invests heavily in the latest medical technologies and established Switzerland’s first CyberKnife radiosurgery unit.

16. Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula – Monterey, CA, USA

Designed by: Edward Durrel Stone

Situated on the California coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean on environmentally protected land, this hospital’s description alone is enough to invite any potential patient into the facility. The redesign of the building in the early part of the millennium was intended to adhere to the design intentions from the original architect, Edward Durell Stone, with low, striking roof lines and natural lighting throughout each public space.

15. Legacy Salmon Creek Hospital – Vancouver, WA, USA

Designed by: Walker Macy

From the outside, this six-story hospital lights up the sky with its elevated glass walkways and pulls in the eye with curved facades and a mix of materials, like stone, glass, brick, and metal that carry through to the inside. Outdoor courtyard spaces and terraces help visitors and staff find peace outside of the walls of the hospital, while natural light and warm hues are used inside to help extend that outdoor feeling to the inside. Two large, L-shaped patient towers are situated to optimize the views of neighboring Mt. Hood and the surrounding natural habitat.

14. Clemenceau Medical Center – Beirut, Lebanon

Designed by: Khatib & Alami – Consolidated Engineering Company

CMC, affiliated with Johns Hopkins Medicine International, boasts a “5-star hotel ambiance” with conveniences like televisions and Internet access for its patients. A modern glass and concrete exterior is complimented with spacious interior rooms that allow for a “cozy” feeling. The interior design also allows them to use innovative medical equipment like completely film-less digital imaging centers and real-time video conferencing equipment to connect with other physicians and specialists inside or outside of CMC.

13. Dixie Regional Medical Center – St. George, UT, USA

Designed by: Anshen + Allen Architects

Located in a desert setting near Zion National Park in Utah, the architects and designers of this hospital had to take a lot into consideration to avoid heat gain, like building orientation and sun-shading. The designers took their inspiration from the land in the surrounding Zion canyons, and utilized skylights to bring the natural light deep into the building. The interior features all single rooms and has a central concourse that connects all of the different buildings in the complex, offering separate entrances for major services such as surgery, cardiology, and imaging. From the inside, patients and visitors can view to the surrounding desert, Xeriscape gardens full of indigenous plants, and water features all around the facility.

12. Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women & Babies – Orlando, FL, USA

Designed by: Jonathan Bailey Associates

This hospital was designed with beauty and function in mind for the interior and the exterior. From the extensive use of glass to illuminate the interiors with natural light, the vertical structures to improve patient-staff proximity and observation, and a glass globe entry way, this hospital uses its unique design as a main component of the healing and recovery process. The interior is filled with calming colors and tones and patient rooms were designed for ultimate privacy.

11. St. Luke’s Medical Center - Global City, Philippines

SLMC has received international accreditation and is recognized as one of the best hospitals in Asia and the entire world. As such, it regularly receives patients from around Asia, Micronesia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. This hospital holds 650 patient beds, with almost half of those available as fully-furnished, private suites with televisions and other modern conveniences to make every visit as comfortable as possible.

10. Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh – Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Designed by: Astorino

Innovative and welcoming, this hospital successfully merges technological advancements with soothing and comforting design for its visitors. Full integration of technologies like EHR and CPOE, the pediatric hospital is one of the leading in the country and has designed its campus with a family-friendly feel, complete with playful interiors, private rooms, a family resource center with a four-story atrium and dining area, a Healing Garden library, musical therapy room, and a business center for families and parents.

9. The London Clinic – London, England, United Kingdom

Designed by: Floyd Slaski

This facility was designed with patients’ comfort in mind and includes soothing interior colors and the use of natural light (even in lower-level patient rooms through the use of a light atrium) with modern amenities like flat screen televisions in each patient room. In addition to the design and furnishings, The London Clinic also commissioned an integrated arts program to be a part of their design for comfort and well-being.

8. St. Rose Dominican Hospitals, Siena Campus – Las Vegas, NV, USA

Designed by: HKS, Inc.

This Spanish missions-style building is not only appealing to the eye from the exterior, but from the interior as well. From the inside, patients and their families have great views of downtown Las Vegas and nearby desert landscape. The interior has incredible features that help visitors feel more welcomed, like the 100-foot bell tower and entry rotunda, including encouraging and biblical quotations that are reflected throughout the entire facility, and a ¾-acre indoor garden where visitors can take gardening classes and enjoy the beauty of desert plant life.

7. Bumrungrad International Hospital - Bangkok, Thailand

Design ed by: Design Worldwide Partnership (DWP)

This hospital is one of the most popular medical tourism destinations in the world, and treats over 400,000 foreign patients each year from various countries like Sweden, the United States, China, and Afghanistan. The designs of the patient rooms use soothing colors and warm furnishings, like natural woods and plush fabrics. With air-conditioned walkways connecting several towers that make up the main structure, the hospital also includes two levels of restaurants and shopping areas.

6. UPMC Hamot Women’s Hospital – Erie, PA, USA

Designed by: Rectenwald Architects, Inc.

This newly constructed facility offers patients and visitors a grand 2-story entryway, 40-foot water wall, and picturesque views of nearby Presque Isle Bay and the neighboring downtown area. The interior evokes a feeling of calm and relaxation for patients and mothers-to-be with warm earth tones and comfortable furnishings. From spa-like delivery rooms to indoor “outdoor” rooms that cater to newborns and families housed in the NICU, designers use calming affects and finishes to bring comfort to all who are visiting.

5. The City Hospital – Dubai, UAE

Designed by: Ellerbe Becket, an AECOM Company

This hospital can sometimes make patients feel like they’re in a 5-star luxury hotel instead of a care facility. It offers patients and their families access to a heated indoor swimming pool, spa, sauna, Jacuzzi and gym, along with the VIP floor that has a separate entrance, elevators and valet service, with 12 suites that are designed and furnished to provide the highest levels of comfort.

4. Florida Hospital Waterman – Tavares, FL, USA

Designed by: Jonathan Bailey Associates

This hospital was designed with patients, staff, and the environment in mind. In addition to multiple staff rooms to eliminate noise and “stuffy” areas, the hospital was also designed around the natural habitat of endangered birds that call the area home. This included non-reflective exterior glass, investigations in flight patterns, and altering helicopter routes around the birds’ natural flight paths. On the exterior, an eye-catching hovering roof connects the modern addition to the hospital with one of its original buildings, while the interior boasts a hotel-like ambiance with a concierge at the entrance and soft, comforting furniture throughout.

3. Matilda International Hospital – Hong Kong, China

This modern hospital in Hong Kong is beautifully situated on the historic Victoria Peak, known informally as “The Peak”, overlooking the South China Sea on Hong Kong Island. On the inside, its “operating theater” uses innovative designs with glass paneled walls and LED lighting along with ceiling pendants to maximize the flexibility of the room.

2. Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital – Bloomfield, MI, USA

Designed by: Albert Kahn & Assoc.

Not only does this 160-acre hospital campus have aesthetically pleasing buildings on the exterior as well as a shopping mall-like interior, but it is also LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Certified for its use of natural light for heating and cooling, rainwater collection and filtration system, recycling programs, and more. With wide use of interior landscaping and design, visitors and patients almost never feel like they’re in a hospital.

1. Sharp Memorial Hospital – San Diego, CA, USA

Designed by: NBBJ

Often compared to a high-end department store or hotel, this hospital’s design is a sharp contrast to the sterile white walls and big bulky equipment that often comes to mind when we think of large medical facilities. Equipped with a separate set of elevators for patients or medical staff and the public, as well as a rooftop garden, all private rooms with pull-out couches for guests, and museum-quality paintings adorning the walls, patients and their families may be tempted to stay longer just for the fun of it.

The fact about cats

People Who Changed The Internet

The world has become tightly connected since the internet. The web itself has replaced the practice of reading newspaper. Most of us now communicate through e-mails instead of paper and pen. We now watch networks or movies online, it has even become a wide business venture, so much so we can now make purchase and pay our bills through the internet. The web has also transformed friendships through various social media. It also provides us the possibility to reconnect with people from our childhood and it can be a life changing event.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn -Father of the Internet.

The Father of Internet Vint Cerf, together with Bob Kahn created the TCP/IP suite of communication protocols. a language used by computers to talk to each other in a network. Vint Cerf once said that the internet is just a mirror of the population and spam is a side effect of a free service.

 

Tim Berners-Lee -Inventor of WWW.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He wrote the first web client and server and designed a way to create links, or hypertext, amid different pieces of online information. He now maintains standards for the web and continues to refine its design as a director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

 

Ray Tomlinson - Father of Email.

Programmer Ray Tomlinson, the Father of Email made it possible to exchange messages between machines in diverse locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans. He came up with the “@” symbol format for e-mail addresses. Today, more than a billion people around the world type @ sign every day.

 

Michael Hart -The birth of eBooks.

Michael Hart started the birth of eBooks and breaks down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy. He created the Project Gutenberg and was considered world’s first electronic library that changed the way we read. The collection includes public domain works and copyrighted works with express permission.

 

Gary Thuerk -The first Email spam.

Spamming is an old marketing technique. Gary Thuerk, sent his first mass e-mailing to customers over the Arpanet for Digital’s new T-series of VAX systems. What he didn’t realize at the time was that he had sent the world’s first spam.

 

Scott Fahlman -The first emoticon.

Scott Fahlman is credited with originating the first ASCII-based smiley emoticon, which he thought would help to distinguish between posts that should be taken humorously and those of a more serious nature. Now, everybody uses them in messenger programs, chat rooms, and e-mail.

 

Marc Andreessen -Netscape Navigator

Marc Andreessen revolutionized Internet navigation. He came up with first widely used Web browser called Mosaic which was later commercialised as the Netscape Navigator. Marc Andreessen is also co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter.

 

Jarkko Oikarinen -Internet Relay Chat, IRC.

Jarkko Oikarinen developed the first real-time online chat tool in Finland known as Internet Relay Chat. IRC’s fame took off in 1991. When Iraq invaded Kuwait and radio and TV signals were shut down, thanks to IRC though up-to-date information was able to be distribute.

 

Robert Tappan Morris -First Worm Virus.

The concept of a worm virus is unique compare to the conventional hacking. Instead of getting into a network themselves, they send a small program they have coded to do the job. From this concept, Robert Tappan Morris created the Morris Worm. It’s one of the very first worm viruses to be sent out over the internet that inadvertently caused many thousands of dollars worth of damage and “loss of productivity” when it was released in the late 80s.

 

David Bohnett -Geocities.

David Bohnett founded GeoCities in 1994, together with John Rezner. It grew to become the largest community on the Internet. He pioneered and championed the concept of providing free home pages to everyone on the web. The company shut down the service on October 27, 2009.

 

Ward Cunningham -The first Wiki.

American programmer Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki as a way to let people collaborate, create and edit online pages together. Cunningham named the wiki after the Hawaiian word for “quick.”

 

Sabeer Bhatia -Hotmail.

Sabeer Bhatia founded Hotmail in which the uppercase letters spelling out HTML-the language used to write the base of a webpage. He got in the news when he sold the free e-mailing service , Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million. He was awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Draper Fisher Jurvertson in 1998 and was noted by TIME as one of the “People to Watch” in international business in 2002. His most exciting acquisition of 2009 was Jaxtyr which he believes is set to overtake Skype in terms of free global calling.

 

Matt Drudge -The Drudge Report. 

Matt Drudge started the news aggregation website The Drudge Report. It gained popularity when he was the first outlet to break the news that later became the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

 

Larry Page and Sergey Brin -Google. 

Larry Page and Sergey Brin changed the way we search and use the Internet. They worked as a seamless team at the top of the search giant. Their company grew rapidly every year since it began. Page and Brin started with their own funds, but the site quickly outgrew their own existing resources. They later obtain private investments through Stanford. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and their company Google, continue to favor engineering over business.

 

Bill Gates -Microsoft. 

Bill Gates founded the software company called “Micro-Soft”. a combination of “microcomputer software.” Later on, Bill Gates developed a new GUI (Graphical User Interface) for a disk operating system. He called this new style Windows. He has all but accomplished his famous mission statement, to put “a computer on every desk and in every home”. at least in developed countries.

 

Steve Jobs -Apple. 

Steve Jobs innovative idea of a personal computer led him into revolutionizing the computer hardware and software industry. The Apple founder changed the way we work, play and communicate. He made simple and uncluttered web design stylish. The story of Apple and Steve Jobs is about determination, creative genius, pursuit of innovation with passion and purpose.

 

David Filo and Jerry Yang -Yahoo. 

David Filo and Jerry Yang started Yahoo! as a pastime and evolved into a universal brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information and purchase things. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”

 

Brad Fitzpatrick -LiveJournal. 

Brad Fitzpatrick created LiveJournal, one of the earliest blogging platforms. He is seen on the Internet under the nickname bradfitz. He is also the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached, used on LiveJournal, Facebook and YouTube. LiveJournal continues today as an online community where people can share updates on their lives via diaries and blogs. Members connect by creating a “friends list” that links to their pals’ recent entries.

 

Shawn Fanning -Napster. 

Shawn Fanning developed Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing program designed to let music fans find and trade music. Users put whatever files they were willing to share with others into special directories on their hard drives. The service had more than 25 million users at its peak in 2001, and was shut down after a series of high-profile lawsuits, not before helping to spark the digital music revolution now dominated by Apple. Napster has since been rebranded and acquired by Roxio.

 

Peter Thiel -Paypal.

Peter Thiel is one of many Web luminaries associated with PayPal. PayPal had enabled people to transfer money to each other instantly. PayPal began giving a small group of developers access to its code, allowing them to work with its super-sophisticated transaction framework. Peter Thiel cofounded PayPal at age 31 and sold it to eBay four years later for $1.5 billion.

 

Pierre Morad Omidyar -Ebay. 

Pierre Omidyar set up an online marketplace that brought buyers and sellers together as never before, and pioneered the concept of quantifying the trustworthiness of an anonymous user. In building his auction empire, Omidyar counted on the power of the individual. Omidyar’s greatest strength is his insight into human nature. He understood that people would buy just about anything. one man’s junk is, in fact, another’s treasure.

 

Jimmy Wales -Wikipedia. 

Jimmy Wales founded the world’s largest encyclopaedia which carries articles that can easily be edited by anyone who can access the website. It was launched in 2001 and is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet.

 

Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. -Flickr. 

Photosharing website has become a part of everyday online life for millions of people. Stewart Butterfield, who with his wife Caterina Fake created Flickr that was born out of an online multi-player game that seemed to sum up everything the Web 2.0 people were trying to do. Flickr came along with an idea that you no longer had an album. Instead, you had a photo stream. Yahoo later on acquired Flickr in 2005.

 

Jonathan Abrams -Friendster. 

Jonathan Abrams built Friendster, together with Cris Emmanuel, offering many tools to help members find dates. He took the idea from Match.com. It’s the first social network to hit the big time and go mainstream. Members create profiles listing favorite movies and books (and dating status) and link up to friends, who linked to their friends, and so on.

 

Niklas Zennstrom -Skype. 

Niklas Zennstrom co-founded the fastest growing communications trend in history called Skype. It offered consumers worldwide a free software for making superior-quality calls using their computer and expanded its offering for Linux, MAC & PC and mobile/ handheld devices.

 

Bram Cohen -Bit Torrent. 

If Napster started the first generation of file sharing , Bram Cohen changed the face of file sharing by developing BitTorrent which has a massive following of users almost instantly. It uses the Golden Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are allowed to download. BitTorrent breaks up files into many little portions, and as soon as a user has a piece, they instantly start uploading that part to other users. So almost everybody who is sharing a given file is simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same file.

 

Reid Hoffman -LinkedIn.

Reid Hoffman, a former executive vice president at PayPal, created LinkedIn as a professional social network allowing registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. Members can search for jobs, trade resumes, find new hires and keep up with the competition.

 

Matt Mullenweg -WordPress.

Matt Mullenweg founded the world’s most used open source blogging and the greatest boon to freedom of expression known as WordPress. Some of the most popular websites run on WordPress are Techcrunch, Huffingtonpost, Mashable and more.

 

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim - Youtube. 

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim met as early employees at PayPal. They later started the internet’s most popular video-sharing site YouTube which is broadcasting more than 100 million short videos daily on myriad subjects. When creating YouTube, the three divided work based on skills: Chad Hurley designed the site’s interface and logo. Steve Chen and Jawed Karim divide technical duties making the site work. They later split management tasks, based on strengths and interests: Chad Hurley became CEO; Steve Chen, Chief Technology Officer. A year and a half later, Google acquired YouTube for a deal worth $1.65 billion in stock.

 

Craig Newmark -Craigslist. 

Craig Newmark started a site that dramatically altered the classified advertising universe called Craiglist. It was an object of fear for newspapers who felt threatened by the free-for-all classified advertising site. It began as an e-mail list for Newmark’s friends in the Bay Area. Since then, it has grown into an online database for classified ads for those seeking everything from housing to romance.

 

Julian Assange -WikiLeaks. 

Julian Assange founded a website dedicated to publishing classified documents stolen from around the world. He designed an advanced software for the Wikileaks shielding the identities of the thieves who steal these documents by completely erasing their identities before spreading the stolen documents to servers ‘all over the world’. As a result, no one can trace who’s given him what or when. The site depicts itself as the “uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis” and has developed to be regarded as the most extensive and safest stage for whistleblowers to leak to.

 

Dick Costolo -FeedBurner. 

People generally check their preferred sites every now and then to see if there’s anything new. FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo created a news aggregator that automatically downloads an update that is visible in the places that interest you. An RSS feed, short for Really Simple Syndication, delivers those latest bits of media from their creator’s website to your computer. FeedBurner was later acquired by Google in 2007. Currently, Dick Costolo is Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer making twitter the next generation RSS.

 

Mark Zuckerberg -Facebook. 

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook to help students in universities keep in touch with friends. The “status update” started its rebirth in Facebook, where user after user tell their extended network of trusted friends what they’re doing. They also show off photos, upload videos, chat, make friends, meet old ones, join causes, groups, have fun and throw virtual sheep at one another. The site, which is believed to have 500 million registered users worldwide, has only four remaining countries left to conquer: Russia, Japan, China and Korea, according to Zuckerberg. Facebook is now twice as huge as Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace.

 

Jack Dorsey -Twitter. 

Jack Dorsey created Twitter to allow friends and family know what he was doing. The world’s fastest-growing communications medium let users broadcast their thoughts in 140 characters or less and repost someone else’s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers by Retweeting. No one thought people would want to follow strangers, or that celebrities would use Twitter to tell fans of their activities, or that businesses would use Twitter to announce discounts or launch new products.

Jeff Bezos -Amazon. 

Jeff Bezos founded the world’s biggest online store known as Amazon, which was originally named Cadabra Inc. He made online shopping faster and more personal than a trip to the local store. The company now introduced Kindle allowing readers to download books and other written materials and read them on this handheld device.

 

Joshua Schachter -Delicious. 

Del.icio.us is a more sophisticated multiuser version of Muxway, wherein his first implementation of tags. Joshua Schachter began del.icio.us as a way for people to store and share their favorite Web-browsing bookmarks online. Instead of organizing them himself, or even creating a standard taxonomy of categories, Schachter used something called user tagging-people simply labeled the bookmarks by any name they wanted, and eventually the group as a whole effectively voted on them by either adopting those tags themselves or rejecting them. And now del.icio.us has been gobbled up by Yahoo, which hopes to extend the tagging principle to all sorts of its services.

Christopher Poole -4chan message board. 

Christopher Poole, known online as “Moot,” started a message board called 4chan where people are free to be wrong. Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously. Moot believes in the value of multiple identities, including anonymity, in contrast to the merge of online and real-world identities occurring on Facebook and many other social networking sites.