IRC-Galleria (Finnish for "IRC gallery") is a
social networking website in
Finland
Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bot ...
. It was founded in December 2000 by Tomi Lintelä as a photo gallery for the Finnish users of
Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat an ...
(IRC). As of April 2009, IRC-Galleria had over 500,000 registered users and 9 million images.
IRC-Galleria users are required to be 13 years of age or older. The site’s primary language is
Finnish. A majority of users are aged between 13 and 22, with the mean age being about 20 years.
IRC-Galleria has also operated in some other European countries such as Russia, Estonia and Germany.
History
In 2007, video game company
Sulake
Sulake Oy () is a Finnish video game company primary known for the creation and development of ''Habbo'' and ''Hotel Hideaway'' games.
History
In its early days, Sulake developed and experimented with an open source Java based GNU called ...
bought the website. The price of 12.5 million euros was paid in future stocks, but in the end Sulake never went public.
In fall 2008, the Helsinki police started a program in which a police officer created an account in IRC-Galleria to openly communicate with the youth. The following year, two more police officers joined the program. By December 2009, the officers had received about 50,000 comments and questions, including crime tips and reports of bullying in schools.
In 2014, IRC-Galleria was purchased by Herdifier Oy, a company owned by some of the creators and early workers of the website. At the time, the website was reportedly visited by 30% of Finnish young adults, and had about 100,000 weekly visitors.
The service is financed with advertising,
SMS
Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...
-based services, T-shirts and optional VIP packages.
Technology
IRC-Galleria is a photo gallery and users are required to have at least one accepted image. The maximum number of visible images per user is limited to 60 for regular users an 10,000 for VIP users. A user's default image must contain the user's face.
Communication in IRC-Galleria is based on short messages, ''comments'', each of which is associated with either a picture or a community. Each user can be a member of 100 communities. Some of the communities are representations of actual IRC channels, and joining them requires IRC-based identification. Comments are only visible to those who are logged in.
See also
*
List of social networking websites
A social networking service is an online platform that people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.
This is a li ...
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Irc-Galleria
Finnish social networking websites
Image-sharing websites