Social mediaWay before it became the commercial mass information and entertainment vehicle it is today, long before it was accessible to the general public, and certainly many years before Al Gore claimed he “took the initiative in creating” it, the Internet – and its predecessors – were a focal point for social interactivity. Computer networking was initially envisioned in the heyday of The Rolling Stones as a military-centric command and control scheme. But as it expanded beyond just a few scientific locations, so too did the idea that connected computers might also make a great forum for discussing mutual topics of interest, and perhaps even meeting or renewing acquaintances with other humans. In the 1970s, that process began in earnest.
Flails and Afro’s may have reigned supreme in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but – as many will surely recall – computers were a far rarer commodity. The machines’ language was bewildering, and their potential seemingly limited. I mean, what can a type writer that makes questionable images and robotic noises actually be good for…… I was a toy for the closet geek. Yet it also was during this time, and with these so called antisocial geeks at the helm, that the notion of social networking would take its first steps towards becoming the omnipresent cultural phenomenon we know and love in
It started with the BBS (Bulletin Board System), these online meeting places were effectively owner-produced hunks of code that allowed users to communicate with a central system where they could download files or games (many times including pirated software) and post messages to other users. Accessed over telephone lines via a modem, BBSes were often run by hobbyists who carefully nurtured the social aspects and interest-specific nature of their projects – which, more often than not in those early days of computers, was technology-related. Moreover, long distance calling rates usually applied for out-of-towners, so many Bulletin Boards were locals-only affairs that in turn spurred local in-person gatherings. Suddenly the antisocial had become social.
Though the technology of the time restricted the BBS flexibility of these systems, and the end-user’s experience, to text-only exchanges of data that crawled along at glacial speed, BBSes continued to gain popularity throughout the ‘80s and well into the ‘90s, when the Internet truly kicked into gear. Indeed, some services – such as Tom Jennings’ FidoNet – linked numerous BBSes together into worldwide computer networks that managed to survive the Internet revolution.
But there were also other avenues for social interaction long before the Internet exploded onto the mainstream consciousness. One such option was CompuServe, a service that began life in the 1970s as a business-oriented mainframe computer communication solution, but expanded into the public domain in the late 1980s.
CompuServe allowed members to share files and access news and events. But it also offered something few had ever enjoyed – true interaction. Not only could you send a message to your friend via an innovative technology dubbed “e-mail” (granted, the concept of e-mail wasn’t exactly newfangled at the time, though widespread public access to it was). You could also join any of CompuServe’s thousands of discussion forums to yap with thousands of other members on virtually any important subject of the day. Those forums proved extremely popular and paved the way for the modern iterations we know today.
But if there is a true forerunner to today’s social networking sites, it was likely spawned under the AOL (America Online) umbrella. In many ways, and for many people, AOL was the Internet before the Internet, and its member-created groups were arguably the service’s most intriguing, forward-thinking feature.
Yet there was no stopping the real Internet, and by the mid-1990s it was moving full bore. Yahoo had just set up shop, Amazon had just begun selling books, and the race to get a PC in every household was on. And, by 1995, the site that may have been the first to fulfill the modern definition of social networking was born.
Though differing from many current social networking sites in that it asks not “Who can I connect with?” but rather, “Who can I connect with that was once a schoolmate of mine?” Classmates.com proved almost immediately that the idea of a virtual reunion was a good one. Early users could not create profiles, but they could locate long-lost school chums, menacing school bullies and maybe even that prom date they just couldn’t forget. It was a hit almost immediately, and even today the service boasts some 57 million registered accounts. Also in this field was Friends Re-united which took off around this time.
In 2002, social networking hit really its stride with the launch of Friendster. Friendster used a degree of separation concept similar to that of the now-defunct SixDegrees.com, refined it into a routine dubbed the “Circle of Friends,” and encouraged the idea that a rich online community can exist only between people who truly have common bonds. And it ensured there were plenty of ways to discover those bonds.
An interface that shared many of the same traits one would find at an online dating site certainly didn’t seem to hurt. Friendster CEO Jonathan Abrams even once referred to his creation as a dating site that isn’t about dating. Within a year after its launch, Friendster boasted more than three million registered users and a ton of investment interest. Unfortunately, the service has since seen more than its fair share of technical difficulties, questionable management decisions, and a resulting drop in its North American fortunes. Although briefly enjoying success in Indonesia and in the Philippines, Friendster has since abandoned social networking and now exists solely as an online gaming site.
Introduced just a year later in 2003, LinkedIn took a decidedly more serious, sober approach to the social networking phenomenon. Rather than being a mere playground for former classmates, teenagers, and cyberspace Don Juans, LinkedIn was, and still is, a networking resource for business people who want to connect with other professionals. In fact, LinkedIn contacts are referred to as “connections.” Today, LinkedIn boasts more than 297 million members and is still going strong.
MySpace also launched in 2003. Though it no longer resides upon the social networking throne in many English-speaking countries – that honor now belongs to Facebook just about everywhere – MySpace was once the perennial favorite. It did so by tempting the key young adult demographic with music, music videos, and a funky, feature-filled environment. It looked and felt hipper than major competitor Friendster right from the start, and it conducted a campaign of sorts in the early days to show alienated Friendster users just what they were missing. Over the years however, the number of casual Myspace users declined, and today the site exists now as a social networking site targeted to bands and musicians.
As expected, the omnipresent Facebook now leads the global social networking pack. Founded, like many social networking sites, by university students who initially peddled their product to other university students, Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only exercise and continued a campus-oriented site for two full years before finally opening to the general public in 2006. Yet, even by that time, Facebook was considered big business. So much so that, by 2009, Silicon Valley bigwigs such as Paypal co-founder and billionaire Peter Thiel invested tens of millions of dollars just to see it flourish.
The secret of Facebook’s success — the site currently boasts more than 1.3 billion active users — is a subject of much debate. Some point to its ease of use, others to its multitude of easily-accessed features, and still others, to its notable name. A highly targeted advertising model certainly doesn’t hurt, either, nor did financial injections such as the £50 million from noted Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing in 2007. Regardless, there’s universal agreement on one thing: Facebook encourages both honesty and openness. It seems people really enjoy being themselves, and throwing that openness out there for all to see.
Facebook is king for a reason. It wasn’t just through luck that founder Mark Zuckerberg’s darling came to reign supreme over the social media kingdom. It was, in fact, a series of smart moves and innovative features that set the platform apart from the rest of the social media pack. First and foremost, the 2007 launch of the Facebook Platform was key to site’s success. The open API made it possible for third-party developers to create applications that work within Facebook itself. Almost immediately after being released, the platform gained a massive amount of attention. At one point in time, Facebook had hundreds of thousands of apps built on the platform, so many that Facebook launched the Facebook App Store to organize and display them all. Twitter, meanwhile, created its own API and enjoyed similar success as a result.
The other key to success was Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, which broke free from the bounds of the site and began appearing all over the Internet. Now you can ‘like’ or “tweet’ just about everything even when you’re not on Facebook or Twitter. Realizing the power of social networking, Google decided to launch their own social network (Google+) in 2007. It differed from Facebook and Twitter in that it wasn’t necessarily a full-featured networking site, but rather a social “layer” of the overall Google experience. Initially, Google generated a lot of buzz with the service’s Hangouts feature, which allowed users to enter live video chats with other online friends. At the time of launch, Facebook was scrambling to keep up by integrating a video chat feature of their own.
Within just four weeks, Google+ had garnered 25 million unique visitors, with as much as 540 million active monthly users as of June 2014. Regardless, the service definitely didn’t dethrone Zuckerberg’s behemoth, especially considering more than half of Google+ users have never even visited the service’s official site. It still arguably showed the world that there was still room for development and competition in the realm of social networking, though.