The history of social networking

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The history of social networking

Nowadays, one can no longer imagine how to catch up with friends and contacts without social networking. Social networking helps us become closer to our friends, even when they are a thousand miles away. Social networking now is a billion dollar industry, but we can barely remember when it didn't exist.

Today, social networking is an essential part of life for people from around the world. Social networking is a form of social media used for interactive educational, informational or entertaining purposes. Social media comes in many forms, but all of them are related: blogs, forums, podcasts, photo sharing, social bookmarking, widgets, and video, just to name a few. Today, social networking websites allow users to make profiles, upload photos and videos, and interact with friends and family. Social networking is a tool to join groups, learn about latest news and events, play games, chat and share music and video. The top social networking sites of today are: MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

People have always wanted to communicate with other people. People used to just visit the people they wanted to see. The longer the distance, the harder it is to communicate. Throughout history, people came up with various ways of communicating: through post, pigeons, telegraph, light signals and telephone. Getting responses a few hundred years ago meant waiting for months or years. Thankfully humans never stopped looking for a faster method of communication.

Social networking was born one day in 1971, when the first email was sent. The two computers were sitting right next to each other. The message said “qwertyuiop'. In 1994, the first social networking site was created, Geocities. Geocities allowed the users to create and customize their own web sites, grouping them into different “cities” based on the site content. The following year, TheGlobe.com was launched to public, giving users the ability to interact with people who have the same hobbies and interests, and to publish their own content.

A few years later, AOL Instant Messenger and SixDegrees.com were launched. Instant messaging was born, giving users the freedom to chat with friends, and create a profile. AOL was probably the true precursor to today's social networking sites. The member profiles allowed its users to write a biography and share details about themselves. The profiles were searchable, so people could look your profile up. It was the most innovative feature at that time.

Then the other social networking sites were created, such as Classmates, Friendzy, Hi-5, just to name a few. Many were dating sites, while some were more niche driven. For example, Classmates allowed users to reconnect with old classmates, pals, bullies and crushes. It was a hit immediately, and today Classmates still has some 40,000,000 registered users.

SixDegrees.com is one of the earliest social networking sites, but it did not gain the same success. The idea is based on the theory that people are separated by no more than six degrees from one another. It also allowed users to create profiles, make groups, search friends. However, they encouraged members to invite more people to the site and had too many membership drives. Many people complained that the membership invitations were spam, filling up their websites with junk. It was sold in 2001 for $125 million but completely shut down the year after.

The first modern social networking site that we define today is Friendster. It also uses the degree of separation concept similar to SixDegrees. Friendster was basically a dating site that wasn't all about dating. In the first 3 months, Friendster was able to amass 3,000,000 users. This constitutes 1 in 126 world web users.

Soon MySpace was launched after only 10 days of coding. It became more popular than Friendster at once. MySpace gave users more freedom than Friendster when it came to customization; with music, videos and a hipper online environment. It garnered 90 million registered users, and even if it is no longer the top networking site in the world, it is still a favourite in the USA. The glory days of Friendster have passed, and its popularity is now surpassed by MySpace and Facebook. Today most of Friendster's traffic comes from Asia.

Facebook came into the social networking scene a little bit later. It was launched in 2004, and the primary intent was to connect US college students. Facebook first began with Mark Zuckerberg's alma mater Harvard. At first it was exclusive, and you could only join in if you had been invited by a member of Facebook. The “exclusive” feature proved to be a success, and in its first month, over half of the 19,500 Harvard students signed up. Two years later, the campus-only networking site became open to the public. In 2008, Facebook surpassed MySpace and Friendster as the leading social networking site. It now has over 150 million members around the globe.

Today's social networking sites are like yesterday's front page headlines. Most of us now get news and information through the internet - especially the younger generation. Social networking has become very mobile, from our PCs to our smart phones. It has become more “intrusive” and many people suggest that social networking is something that we will get tired of, but the scope and environment of social networking is highly unpredictable.

References

social network messaging interactive

1. Liu H. Unraveling the taste fabric of social networks / H. Liu, P. Maes, G. Davenport. - International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, 2(1), 2006. - P. 42-71.

2. Paolillo J.C. Social network analysis on the semantic web: Techniques and challenges for visualizing FOAF / J.C. Paolio, E. Wright. - Visualizing the Semantic Web, 2005. - P. 229-242.

3. Haythornthwaite C. Social networks and Internet connectivity effects / C. Haythornthwaite. - Information, Communication, & Society, 8 (2), 2005. - P. 125-147.

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