A brief history of social networks

Today, we fully naturalized the concept of social networks and rarely ask ourselves what are we doing when we participate actively in a. It is also strange when we think, even though Internet is the youngest media, social networks have revolutionized the way we think in less than a decade. The title of this post refers not only to its size but also the fact that social networking is not a particularly long history, but with the rate at which they have moved parts of this game, it is certainly historical events.

To get out from under the definitions boring at first, a social network is a structure that is formed by certain social actors, and the bonds that form between them. This means that social networks were not invented at the same time as Facebook, and in fact are a key feature of life in society. When we go to a digital environment, the definition changes slightly: these sites or platforms that we help build a community of friends and acquaintances agree with some variables. Social networks have some characteristics that make some sites that we think are social networks really are not. For example, at first Twitter could not be considered strictly as a social network.

What are the main features shared by all social networks, even the primitive?

• Building a profile that can be shared with other users
• Display (depending on the privacy of users) of the connections they share with other members of the community
• Creating content related to the profile itself
• Search for users based on shared contacts, shared interests, etc..
• Control the privacy settings

These things we take for granted in modern networks, however, are features that were added to over time. Some worked, some not. But the real "birth" of social networks as we know now can be traced to when the connections we have with others became visible. So we said that Twitter was not considered a social network, since we could see which users had in common with others.

SixDegrees.com

Although other initiatives had been a sort of timid approach to the issue of social networks, just to SixDegrees can speak of a prototype network with some of the features that characterize the current. In the early 90s began to thin social media technology and thanks to these advances began to emerge as SixDegrees sites.

Founded in 1997, SixDegrees was built around the concept of six degrees of separation that became popular decades ago. The main features allow SixDegrees add friends, who "listaban" within the site if they were contacts, and could be invited if they do not belong to SixDegrees. In addition, users could make calls bulletins publications similar to those later popularize on MySpace. These messages could be read by people who were contacts in a first, second and third grade. The most important thing was that users could see what kind of connection or "separation" had with other users within the same network, essential.

The site was online until 2001, and today are attempting a kind of revival for users who were already members when it closed. Are accessible only by invitation of a member prior, which is a kind of fashion today.

Friendster

A year before the start of MySpace, the programmer Jonathan Abrams launched Friendster, another social networking iconic of this first stage. Friendster is recognized as the first social network to reach more than one million members. Many of its features ended up inspiring some of the most important networks like MySpace and Facebook, but that's another story.

Building on the popularity of Napster name, which in 2002 was at its peak and was synonymous with controversy, the words mixed Abrams friends and Napster to name your site. The main features repeating some of the successes of SixDegrees, primarily the ability to see the connections we have with others. In fact, Friendster was the ultimate social network until two years later, was superseded by the popularity of MySpace.

The Friendster knew how to respond to a need that could not find answer anywhere else on the web. While there were some minimum social networks built around concepts such as appointments or pets, users looking for something more general. Three months after its launch, Friendster reached the 3 million users, and acquired great popularity in the press.

The creativity of Friendster is patented, in fact, Facebook uses almost twenty patents of the company that include methods for sharing information on a social network relationships, compatibility scores of friends to make suggestions, methods of handling contacts and more. Without the existence of Friendster, the social networks as we know them today would not be a reality.

MySpace

Today we often refer to MySpace in a mocking, following the ups and downs of the company that used to be regarding the issue of social networks. With the change of logo, attempts to revive the community and the efforts of MySpace were considered almost as a slap of drowning in a world ruled by Facebook. But when the Facebook name was not known in the world, MySpace was king.

At its peak, in 2005, visits to MySpace could even surpass those of Yahoo and Google. A surprising number, but the company failed to manage. Founded in 2003 by employees of Friendster who decided to replicate the most popular aspects of this network in two years, MySpace has become the virtual meeting point of millions of people. Not only that, but it was also the way that many bands had of promotion-even at one point MySpace launched its own label.

Since the advent of Facebook, MySpace users began to migrate and the company had no way to stop them. They simply could not be on top of the technology needed to support their users. The only remaining actively on MySpace were musicians who were on the platform a great way to promote himself. In 2008, Facebook finally overtook MySpace in visits, and the rest was history.

What did they do wrong? On the one hand we have the ads: after a million dollar contract with Google, the number of ads on MySpace, which was plentiful, doubled, causing the platform being increasingly slow. Moreover, while Facebook allowed third-party application development while MySpace did all their own development. Mark Zuckerberg's network allowed others to help you grow, while MySpace suffered for his self-imposed isolation.

The ¿failures?

So far we have talked about social networks that were popular at the time but who for various reasons, ended up staying in the past. But what about the newest social networking, but failed to get a place in the winner's podium? Many of them tried to immerse yourself in a place that basically is pretty full.

One such case is Diaspora . The proposal of this new social network is very interesting, and we have spent a couple of lines in the past, but nevertheless, after the initial excitement, it just stopped talking about Diaspora. The distinguishing characteristics of this network include its nonprofit status and user-owned. However, after much fanfare Diaspora has only about 375 thousand users.

In 2011, Diaspora was nominated for Mashable Awards as one of the best social networks of the year. We will not deny that it is a creative proposal, however, have failed to engage users in the same way that Pinterest, for example. We have to wait to run a little more time and to say whether it has actually failed.

Moreover, one of the failures louder this time has been Google Buzz . Trying to incorporate social features to Google was not as successful as previously thought. What happened? Google's view that with the incredible amount of users who have their products would be very simple to add functionality so that users have no need to abandon GMail. But, on the contrary, all they did was create a monster upset that a few months was disabled.

Last year, Google came to try their luck with Plus and, so far, things seem to be working well. But despite having a significant base of users, and an astronomical growth, the problems of living in Google + retention: users create an account, try it and soon not know what to do. Unlike Facebook, where we can find a wide range of activities, Google + falls short when it comes to applications.

This is, of course, a very brief history and a glimpse of how they were the beginnings of social networks. If you really indagáramos detective with a nose, we could have a novel in hand.