Habbo, formerly Habbo Hotel, is a social networking website owned and operated by Sulake Corporation. Aimed at teenagers, Habbo features chat rooms rendered by isometric projection in the form of virtual hotel rooms. User pages on the website are linked to these rooms and allow users to share content and create groups with discussion forums. Each user, called a Habbo, has a customizable avatar to represent him or herself. The service gains revenue from credits bought with real-life currency. Credits are used to buy products such as virtual furniture for the virtual hotel rooms and stickers for user pages.

The service began in 2000 and has expanded to include 32 online communities (or "hotels"). As of June 2008 over 100 million avatars have been registered, there are an average 8 million unique visitors monthly, and 75,000 avatars are being created every day.

History

Habbo's original concept came from Mobiles Disco, a 1999 project by Sampo Karjalainen and Aapo Kyrölä for the band Mobiles. The idea was successful, and so Karjalainen and Kyrölä created Hotel Goldfish. That name was scrapped and replaced with Habbo Hotel, which was launched in August 2000 to Finland.

In January 2001, a beta version Habbo Hotel was launched in the United Kingdom as its popularity started to increase amongst the English speaking countries; a central office was also established in London, UK. From 2001, up until 2004, Habbo United Kingdom was effectively the international English service for Habbo and was soon followed in August 2001 by its other European neighbour, Habbo Switzerland. It has since been expanded to over 31 countries in five continents, and has been invested in by venture capitalists.

During 2001, many new services and updates were applied to Habbo, e.g. Secure-Trading, Guest Rooms and the Habbo Catalogue. Sometime after, on 17 December 2002, Habbo released its premium subscription service under the name of 'Habbo Club', often abbreviated 'HC',. At a cost of 25 Habbo Credits per month, subscribers were given monthly gifts and had access to more furniture, room layouts, tools and a broader selection of avatar clothing and hair styles.

Since then, many new services have been implemented e.g. Homes, Groups, Help Tool and more gaming. On the contrary, services such as SMS Text Messaging have since been removed.

During the years, Habbo has changed its web design and appearance drastically, the latest change occurred in November 2007.

In May 2006, the service, along with its domain names, were renamed to Habbo. In August 2007, Habbo's Chinese community closed down temporarily, the first time a Habbo website has closed. The challenging Chinese market and high operational costs led to the decision of closing the service. Customers in China were redirected to other Habbo communities.