Social Networking-Making Connections on the Web

▪ 2008

      The world was its most wired ever in 2007, with approximately 1.25 billion people connected to the Internet (19% of the global population). Increasingly, these users eschewed the anonymity that had previously been typical of the online experience. Millions flocked to social networking sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, and Orkut. On these sites, members created and maintained personal profiles that could then be linked to the profiles of other members. The end result was a network of “friends” or “contacts” that shared similar interests, business goals, or academic courses. The most basic social networking software allowed friends to comment on one another's profiles, send private messages within the network, and traverse the extended web of friends that was visible in each member's profile. More advanced SNSs enabled members to enhance their profiles with audio and video clips, and some opened their software source code to allow third-party developers to create applications or widgets—small programs that ran within the member's profile page. These programs included games, quizzes, photo-manipulation tools, and news tickers. A popular application could draw thousands of members to a given profile, generating demand for the application developer's services and driving up the value of that profile within the community. At its best, a social networking site could function as a hive of creativity, with users and developers feeding on each other's desire to see and be seen. Critics, however, saw SNSs as crass popularity contests, in which “power users” pursued the lowest common denominator in a quest to gain the most friends. With hundreds of millions of unique visitors using dozens of SNSs worldwide, it was certainly possible to observe both extremes—often within the same group of “friends.”

      The earliest online social networks appeared almost as soon as the technology could support them. E-mail and chat programs debuted in the early 1970s, but persistent communities did not surface until the creation of USENET in 1979. USENET began as a messaging system between Duke University and the University of North Carolina, but it rapidly expanded to other universities and government agencies. USENET allowed users to post and receive messages within subject areas called newsgroups. Initially, there was no standard convention for the naming of newsgroups. This led to confusion as the number of newsgroups grew throughout the 1980s. In 1987 several USENET developers implemented a change that normalized groups into broad hierarchies such as news, talk, miscellaneous, and alternative (the last was created for newsgroups that dealt with taboo or niche topics, and it remains the most populous category on USENET). USENET and other discussion forums, such as privately hosted bulletin boards, enabled individuals to interact in an online social network, but each was essentially a closed system. With the release of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993, those systems were joined with an easy-to-use graphical interface. The architecture of the World Wide Web made it possible to navigate from one site to another with a click, and faster Internet connections allowed for more multimedia content than could be found in the text-heavy newsgroups.

      The first companies to create social networks based on Web technology were Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com. Classmates.com, founded in 1995, used an aggressive pop-up advertising campaign to draw Web surfers to its site. It based its social network on the existing connection between members of high-school and college graduating classes, armed service branches, and workplaces. SixDegrees.com was the first true SNS. It launched in 1997 with most of the features that would come to characterize a social networking site; members could create profiles for themselves, maintain lists of friends, and contact one another through the site's private messaging system. SixDegrees.com claimed to have attracted more than three million users by 2000, but it failed to translate those numbers into revenue and collapsed with countless other dot-coms when the “bubble” burst that year.

      Others were quick to see the potential for such a site, and Friendster launched in 2002 with the initial goal of competing with popular subscription-fee-based dating services such as Match.com. It deviated from this mission fairly early on, and it soon became a meeting place for post-“bubble” Internet tastemakers. The site's servers proved incapable of handling the resulting spike in traffic, however, and members were faced with frequent shutdowns. Members were further alienated when the site actively began to close down so-called “fakesters” or “pretendsters.” While many of these were little more than practical jokes (profiles for Jesus Christ or the Star Wars character Chewbacca), some, such as universities or cities, were helpful identifiers within a friends list. Once again, there was a void in the social networking Web, and MySpace was quick to fill it.

      Whereas Friendster, as part of its mission as a dating site, initially appealed to an older crowd, MySpace actively sought a younger demographic from its inception in 2003. It quickly became a venue for rock bands to connect with fans and to debut new material. Unlike Friendster, MySpace had the infrastructure to support its explosive growth, and members joined by the millions. MySpace was purchased by News Corp. in 2005, and the site's higher profile caused it to draw scrutiny from legal authorities who were concerned about improper interactions between adults and the site's massive population of minors.

      The spectre of online predators did little to diminish MySpace's membership (which reached 70 million monthly active users in 2007), but it did open the door for other SNSs to seize some of its momentum. Facebook took the Classmates.com formula and turned it on its head, with a network that was initially open only to students at universities and high schools. Since its 2004 launch by founder Mark Zuckerberg (Zuckerberg, Mark ) at Harvard University, Facebook has served as an academically oriented alternative to MySpace, claiming 20 million unique monthly visitors. LinkedIn, furthermore, has drawn nearly 15 million professionals to its business-networking site. While MySpace and Facebook competed for members in North America, Bebo was a popular site in the United Kingdom, Orkut dominated in Brazil and India, Friendster recaptured some of its former glory among users in Southeast Asia, and China's QQ grew from an instant messaging service to become a major force in the SNS realm. Perhaps most adventurous was Ning, which launched the final version of its site in 2007. Ning users created their own social networks from the ground up, using software that required very little programming expertise. Upgrades, such as personalized domain names and revenue-generating banner advertisements, could be purchased on an à la carte basis, and the network software supported a host of third-party applications. These personal SNSs were then displayed in a browsable master index, much like the friends in a standard SNS profile—in essence, a social networking site for social networking sites.

Michael Ray

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