Introduction
Social Networking, the global phenomenon that made the internet the place where everyone tells their friends and even people they don’t know, what are they doing every minute of their life. Yes it can be bad, but there are also positives in it. They are a great way to promote events, shops, bands, competitions etc…
Social Networking, the global phenomenon that made the internet the place where everyone tells their friends and even people they don’t know, what are they doing every minute of their life. Yes it can be bad, but there are also positives in it. They are a great way to promote events, shops, bands, competitions etc…
The amount of people using social networking sites are increasing by the second, also the networking sites used are increasing and the popular ones reach a peak before they begin to die slowly when people move to the “next big thing”.
Social networks existed ever since the internet was available to the general public, and has greatly evolved throughout the ages. This week we’ll see the past, the present and the future of social networking.
The Beginning
The first ever forms of Social Networks where called Bulletin Board System (BBS in short). These online “meeting places” allowed users to communicate with a central system where they could post messages to other users, or in some cases download files and games (which would take ages with the internet connections in those times). These primitive systems were often run by hobbyists using their modem, but these systems would only allow 1 person at a time to connect to it meaning usually you’ll have a time limit of how long you can access it per day.
After the BBS, in 1994 GeoCities was launched (first named Beverly Hills Internet). At first the users of this site would select a “city” or “neighborhood” in which to place their web pages. In 1995 the company running the website decided to give users the ability to develop free homepages within those “cities” or “neighborhoods”. The cities and neighborhoods were used to give the user a sequentially assigned “street address” to be used to make the URL unique. In 1999 GeoCities had an online shop called GeoCities Marketplace which sold GeoCities-branded merchandise. Users would cash in “GeoPoints” in the store.
Another social network called theGlobe.com, which gone public in 1998(although created in 1995) gave users the freedom to personalize their online experiences by publishing their own content and interacting with others with similar interests
Sixdegrees.com was another social network site, having the capability of having users create their own profile and listing friends.
Sharing of online content and media was first made possible with the social network called Friendster, which was launched in 2002.
Recent Social Network methods
Modern networking sites such as Myspace, hi5, Linked-in (used more for business), and Facebook where all launched between 2003 and 2004. A slightly more recent social network called Twitter was launched in 2006. Also another aspect of social networking is in online games such as Second life and World of Warcraft, which users take control of an avatar to explore the application’s world while communicating with others.
Today, Facebook has around an astonishing 630million users. Twitter has around 200million and myspace ha fallen behind at 63million.
The Future
An interesting new social network which is now in its beta testing phase is Google+. Its main features include the ability to add people in circles to filter contacts into groups for sharing items to specific groups of people only, and hangouts which are video chats that for now can hold up to 10 people simultaneously. For now new users can only enter the network with an invite from somebody who’s already in it. But this hasn’t stopped 10 million people to sign up to it in the first 2 weeks. Google+ is planned to go public to everyone on the 30th of July 2011.
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