GREE (derived from an abbreviation of the "
Six degrees of separation" concept) is a Japanese
social networking service
A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, ac ...
founded by Yoshikazu Tanaka and operated by
GREE, 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 defin ...
to users such as clothes for their in-game
avatar
Avatar (, ; ), is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means "descent". It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, goddess or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appear ...
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
A feature phone (also spelled featurephone) is a type or class of mobile phone that retains the form factor of earlier generations of mobile telephones, typically with press-button based inputs and a small non-touch display. They tend to use an ...
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 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, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.Blass, T. (2004). ''The Man Who Shock ...
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
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" ...
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