WAYN

WAYN, an acronym for Where Are You Now? is a social networking website with a goal to unite travellers from around the world. WAYN has top 1000  in Alexa Internet traffic ranking and was launched in May 2003 after two of its founders came up with the idea to connect people based on their location while having a few beers in their local pub. It grew from 45,000 to 4.1 million members in one year (to April 2006) and now has over 13 million members self-published source?.

Features

As with many other social networking sites, WAYN enables its users to create a profile and upload photos. Users can then search for others, and link them to their profiles as friends. If you register it is possible to send and receive messages using email, discussion forums, eCards, SMS and WAYN instant messaging (web client, no downloads

Popularity

Though not as popular as MySpace in the United States, WAYN.com has grown into a global brand. While WAYN.com is not aimed at a particular age group, it is an over-18s only site, and is most popular with the 18 to 25s and 35 to 45+ self-published source?.

WAYN is very popular in the UK where it has over 2 million members self-published source?. It is also strong in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries in Western Europe, including the Netherlands.self-published source? In all, WAYN has members from 220 different countries creating a strong global network and has been featured across the national press in Great Britain as one of the Internet Phenomenons of the year.

WAYN now has over 14.5 million members self-published source? and is growing by up to 20,000 members daily. It was voted most popular community in the 2007 and 2008 Website of the Year awards.

Criticism

Password Security

If a user forgets their password on WAYN and requests to retrieve it, their existing password will be emailed to them. This has two security implications; firstly this means that if the user retrieves their password it is stored in the user's email records, and if their email account is compromised in any way, an attacker can find their password. Even if a user changes their WAYN password after retrieval, most people re-use passwords, so having any password listed in their email log is a security risk. Secondly, the fact that they send a user their clear-text password implies that the password storage system used may not be secure. The industry standard security practice is to use one-way hashing algorithms with a salt string so that no one (including the company or their engineers) can easily read the password. The fact that they send a user an email with the password means that it is stored in a form that can be decrypted easily, or worse they may not be encrypted at all. If this data get's into the wrong hands there is a strong risk of accounts being compromised due to the fact that people re-use passwords for multiple sites.

History

WAYN was founded in 2002 in London by Jérome Touze (Co-CEO), Peter Ward (Co-CEO) and Mike Lines (CTO). It was presented to the public in May 2003 having secured financial backing from Stephen Pankhurst, the founder of the well known UK school reunion site Friends Reunited, which recently sold to ITV for £120M (plus £55M earn-out).

WAYN initially grew through word-of-mouth and reached almost 50,000 members by the end of 2004. Following its relaunch in May 2005 it grew exponentially, reaching over 2.5M members by the end of 2005. On 21 June 2007 the site claimed "over 8m members"

WAYN is also one of the very few sites which didn't lose the impact of new subscriptions after introducing fees for taking advantage of the full membership service September 2004, making it one of the few premium social networking communities that managed to become profitable.self-published source?

WAYN secured $11m Series A funding from ECP (Esprit Capital Partners) last November (2006) and secured Brent Hoberman, ex CEO and Founder of Lastminute.com - Esprit Capital Partners, a firm formed from the recent merger of Cazenove Private Equity and Prelude Ventures, has put up most of the investment funding for WAYN. Others investing with Hoberman include the founders of some of Britain’s most successful online businesses: David Soskin and Hugo Burge of Cheapflights and HOWZAT media LLP; Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillips of Active Hotels (which was sold in 2004), and Constant Tedder of Jagex, an online games company. Unusually for a venture-capital investment, Esprit has allowed Ward and his co-founders, Jerome Touze and Mike Lines, to cash in some of their shares.