GREE is a Japanese
social networking service
A social networking service (SNS), or social networking site, is a type of online social media platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interest ...
founded by Yoshikazu Tanaka and operated by
GREE Holdings, Inc.
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
Virtual goods are non-physical objects and money purchased for use in online communities or online games. Digital goods, on the other hand, may be a broader category including digital books, music, and movies. Virtual goods are intangible by def ...
to users such as clothes for their in-game
avatar
Avatar (, ; ) is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means . It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearance" is sometimes u ...
s.
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.
While GREE was initially available only to PC users, the service was later extended to
feature phone
Feature may refer to:
Computing
* Feature recognition, could be a hole, pocket, or notch
* Feature (computer vision), could be an edge, corner or blob
* Feature (machine learning), in statistics: individual measurable properties of the phenome ...
users. GREE for feature phones includes regular social networking functions, social games, flash-based games, blogs, fortune telling, news and so forth. In 2010, GREE, Inc. started GREE for
iPhone
The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...
and
Android to meet demand. GREE, Inc. provides a variety of social game applications for feature phones and smartphones, with enhanced communication among users. The source of earnings is mainly composed of advertisement sales and paid services sales.
Etymology
The service name GREE comes from a hypothesis, Six Degrees of Separation postulated by social psychologist
Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist known for his controversial Milgram experiment, experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale University, Yale.Blass, T ...
in 1967.
Six degrees of separation
Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is al ...
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
In sociology, a friend of a friend is a human contact that exists because of a mutual friend. Person C is a friend of a friend of person A when there is a person B that is a friend of both A and C. Thus the human relation "friend of a friend" is ...
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.
See also
*''
Ensemble Girls!''
References
{{Reflist
External links
Official GREE website
Japanese social networking websites
Mobile social software
Internet properties established in 2004
2004 establishments in Japan