The iXiBlog: Social Networking

Every alternate Monday, an iXiGem is supposed to take an iXiJAM session. I took one yesterday on "The Advent of Social Networking". The session inspired me to organize a timeline comprising of some of the popular social networking sites. Here's an excerpt...

define: Social Networking - An ecosystem where people can create profiles (adhering to privacy policies), maintain a list of friends, find people with matching tastes & interests. Lets track back how it all begin.

1978: CBBS (Computerised Bulletin Board System) - by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess (members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists Exchange) allowing the group to exchange information with one another.

1994: theGlobe.com - founded by students of Cornell University. Allowed users to publish their own contents and interact with other with similar interests. Staged a record breaking IPO in 1998. Couldn’t survive the dot-com burst.

1995: BHI (later renamed to GeoCities) - Instead of scanning a giant board to find a topic, BHI users could choose specialized neighborhood. Acquired by Yahoo in 1999 just before dot-com bubble. Stopped operations on Oct 26, 2009.

1995: Classmates.com - Promptly filled the need to help people rekindle their youth by hooking up with people they grew up with. Registration was initially free followed by subscription format. Auto Billing, non-trivial process to cancel the billing, alleged mails (regarding people looking out for you), not able to share private email addresses lead to its decline.

1997: SixDegrees.com - Named after the six degrees of separation concept to allow users to maintain a network of friends, family members & acquaintances. Introduced new features (send messages, post bulletin board items) that formed the basis of today’s most popular social networking sites. Shut down operations in 2001.

2001: Ryze.com - First of the new-gen social networking sites, designed to link business professionals & entrepreneurs spanning over 200 countries. Allow both paid & unpaid membership formats.

2003: Friendster - Introduced the verb; make a friend. Apart from other basic services, the site was the first one to allow users to share online content (photos, videos), sending messages, coments. The site is also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and hobbies. With a membership base of more than 115 million registered users, the site’s major traffic (approx 90%) comes from Asia. Bad traffic handling & severing performance couldn’t afford the increasing traction early on when its CEO was more concerned abt future (plans of $30m buy out by Google, which couldn’t materialize).

2003: LinkedIn - Business-oriented social networking site mainly used for professional networking. Competes with ryze.com. Allow users to maintain a list of contact details they know & trust in business. Introduced the term: Connections. The “gated-access approach” is intended to build trust among the service’s users. More than 50 million registered users as of 2009 with major traction coming from US, Europe & India (catching up).

2003: MySpace (A Place for Friends) - Founded by eUniverse (now Intermix Media) employees. Major player in the market since 2006 with better performance than Friendster. Gave users full control over content; allowing musicians, celebrities, movies, TV Shows or anybody to create online identities. Revenue started coming from semi-obtrusive ads. In 2005, introduced MySpaceIM, MySpaceTV, MySpace Classified, MySpace Mobile to keep the fad going among youth.

2004: Orkut (Who do you know?) - Owned & Operated by Google. Named after its creator, Orkut Büyükkökten (a google employee). Classified user profile into ‘social’, ‘professional’ & ‘personal’ details. Other features include uploading photos (with caption), add videos (from YouTube, Google Video), scrapbook, integrated GTalk and themes. Earlier allowed anyone to visit anyone’s profile, unless a potential visitor is on your “Ignore List”, this feature has been changed now so that users can choose between showing their profile to all networks or specified ones. Gained more popularity in Brazil & India. Introduced Portuguese as second language.

2004: Facebook - Widely regarded as the service that saved social networking from becoming the next hip, young fad. With early inspiration coming from FaceMash, the service was launched as Thefacebook.com by Mark Zuckerberg. Membership was initially restricted to Harvard students, later expanding to cover almost all universities in US & Canada. Purchased domain facebook.com in 2005. Other early adapters include high school students, employees of several companies like Apple & Microsoft. Made opened to public in 2006. Light on customization & heavy on content, facebook is clean, has uniform pages and allow instant status updates. Other popular features include Wall, Pokes, Photos, News Feed, supporting flash-based/iframe-based applications.

2006: Twitter - Codenamed twttr, a micro-blogging service in social networking domain that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets (a text-based posts of up to 140 characters delivered to the user’s subscribers who are known as followers). Almost anything from news, spam, self-promotion to pointless babble could qualify as tweet content. Notable usage includes campaigning, education, emergencies, protests, politics, public relations etc.