Nexopia

Type Private
Founded Edmonton, Alberta,
February 2003
Headquarters Edmonton, Alberta
Key people Timo Ewalds (Founder),
Boris Wertz (CEO)
Website nexopia.com
Type of site Social Networking, Forums
Registration Required
Available in English
Launched February 2003
Current status Active

Nexopia.com is a popular Canadian social networking website based in downtown Edmonton which was created by Timo Ewalds. It is designed as a general interactive site for people aged 14 and up. Users are able to create and design their own profiles, friends list, blogs, galleries, articles, and forums. Interaction is accomplished through an internal personal messaging system, and public user comments on profiles, blogs or through threads and posts on the forums.

History
Nexopia evolved from the small community site called Enternexus.com, a website built by Timo Ewalds. An initial beta site limited to 70 members led to the current website. Initial growth was as follows, 4 days to hit 100 users, and 22 months to hit 225 000 users. A short period of time existed where the website was growing by 10% per day (3500 new users per day) For the month of January 2005, bandwidth was estimated at 8-10 terabytes.

The website initially had problems using Paypal as a payment method for their premium service (Plus) due to their demographic and issues with stolen credit cards. In recent years however it has had great success with Interac Online, a service that allows account holders at participating banks to make payments online through Online banking.

The website has also been the target of hackers and has been targeted by Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks at least twice.

Update
Nexopia launched an update to it's user profile pages, the largest revision since the site's launch in 2003. The redesign includes a streamlined layout, Ajax controls for messages, galleries, and profile editing, new profile skinning options, and image resizing. The update to the website has caused much controversy among users due to recent issues. Such as slow load times, profile pictures being deleted or not uploading, private messages not being sent, forms not working correctly, and people angry simply because the site design was different. Nexopia staff had recently set up a poll asking what users disliked most about the new Nexopia site design. After finding that the majority of users disliked the new profile picture slider the most, Nexopia staff decided to provide the option to switch between the classic profile picture viewer and the new improved profile picture slider.

Members
Over 95% of its users are Canadian and the site has become quite popular in western Canada, with over 1.3 million member accounts and over 500,000 active users and a hit count of over 32 billion. During peak hours the site sometimes reaches over 30,000 users and several thousand guests online.

No nudity, racism, violence or gore are allowed in any of the forums or profiles, although photos of drugs are accepted only to a certain degree, and that degree is only a small amount of marijuana and the use of pipes and bongs. Any other controlled substance i.e. heroin, cocaine, or any other classified "hard drug" is not allowed. Alcohol is also accepted. All profile pictures are checked by specially appointed "pic mods" before being allowed up on a user's page. Photos put on a user's profile are not checked, but there is a "report abuse" button where another user can report anything that is not to Nexopia code of conduct. Nexopia also takes a hard stance against piracy, presumably in fear of litigation. Over the last few years Nexopia has come under fire from various hard line parent groups who blamed many of their children's problems on the website and sought for it to be shut down. This has resulted in a policy change and forced Nexopia to be more strict about what users post on the website.

In March 2007, four students from Sherwood Park, Alberta were expelled from school and twenty given suspensions in a case of cyberbullying. Students from the Elk Island school district used Nexopia to create profiles of their teachers in which classmates posted defamatory, derogatory, and libellous information on the teachers' pages.