Being connected to the world has never been so easy before, thanks to social media, they made it possible to connect to people far away with just a click of button.From sending an “QWERTYUIOP” e-mail to the adjacent computer to a powerful marketing tool, what we see today is the result of many evolutions in Social network sites (SNSs).
Here are a few notable events in history which has changed the way how people use internet:
- The web’s first social networking site GEOCITIES was founded in 1994.The concept was for user to create their own website categorized by one of ‘SIX CITIES’ known for certain characteristics.
- In the year 1995 THEGLOBE.COM gave users the freedom to personalize their online experiences by publishing their own content and interacting with others with similar interests.
- In the year 1997 AOL’s Instant Messenger was launched, popularizing instant messaging. In the same year SIXDEGREES.COM was launched allowing profile creation and listing friends.
- In the year 2002 FRIENDSTER was launched, pioneering the online connections of real-world friends. Its user base tuned up to 3 Million users in the first three months, about 1in every 126 internet users at that time, and was the most successful of any to the social networking platforms made before.
- As Friendster’s popularity surged, the site encountered technical and social difficulties. Friendster’s servers and databases were ill-equipped to handle its rapid growth, and the site faltered regularly, frustrating users who replaced email with Friendster. Because organic growth had been critical to creating a coherent community, the onslaught of new users who learned about the site from media coverage upset the cultural balance. Furthermore, exponential growth meant a collapse in social contexts: Users had to face their bosses and former classmates alongside their close friends. To complicate matters, Friendster began restricting the activities of its most passionate users.
- The initial design of Friendster restricted users from viewing profiles of people who were more than four degrees away (friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends). In order to view additional profiles, users began adding acquaintances and interesting-looking strangers to expand their reach. Some began massively collecting Friends, an activity that was implicitly encouraged through a “most popular” feature. The ultimate collectors were fake profiles representing iconic fictional characters: celebrities, concepts, and other such entities. These “Fakesters” outraged the company, who banished fake profiles and eliminated the “most popular” feature. While few people actually created Fakesters, many more enjoyed surfing Fakesters for entertainment or using functional Fakesters to find people they knew.
- The next wave of Social networking sites began when RYZE.COM was launched, to help people leverage their business networks. In particular, the people behind Ryze, LinkedIn, and Friendster were tightly entwined personally and professionally. They believed that they could support each other without competing. In the end, Ryze never acquired mass popularity, LinkedIn became a powerful business service, and Friendster became the most significant, if only as “one of the biggest disappointments in Internet history”
- The following year saw the launch of MYSPACE and it was conceived as a FRIENDSTER CLONE, the first version of MYSPACE was hastily coded in 10 days.
- In the year 2004 FACEBOOK was launched, originally as a way of connecting US college students, first launched at Harvard College, and more than half of the 19,500 students signed up within the first month. To join, a user had to have a harvard.edu email address.
- A few months later Facebook began supporting other schools, those users were also required to have university email addresses associated with those institutions, a requirement that kept the site relatively closed and contributed to users’ perceptions of the site as an intimate, private community.
- Beginning in September 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students, professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone. The change to open signup did not mean that new users could easily access users in closed networks—gaining access to corporate networks still required the appropriate .com address, while gaining access to high school networks required administrator approval. (As of this writing, only membership in regional networks requires no permission.) Unlike other networking sites, Facebook users were unable to make their full profiles public to all users. Another feature that differentiated Facebook is the ability for outside developers to build “Applications” which allowed users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, such as compare movie preferences and chart travel histories.
- Twitter was launched in the year 2006, as a micro blogging platform that enabled its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". It was said to be "the SMS of the Internet."
2008 saw the rise of FACEBOOK and it overtook MYSPCAE as leading social networking site in monthly unique visitors. In today’s market FACEBOOK is the leader of Social Netwoking with more than 850 Million users.
There are many new networking sites coming up and the most talked about nowadays in PINTEREST.COM, though it was launched it 2010 it recently came into limelight, now it is being widely used for Content Marketing.
