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How many hours have you frittered away in the last week, scrolling through your social feeds for the tiny dopamine high you get whenever someone gives you a like or a retweet? Honestly, I can't say I blame you. Social networking's underlying concept of create something, Show it to people and get excited when they like it is an extension of basic human nature that you see in everything from job interviews to those little mini valentines that nobody gave you back in the first grade.
So it was only a matter of time before some enterprising folks would find a way to use the internet, which was already being hailed as this great new tool to connect people from all over the world, to examine patterns in online relationships and later to quantify them, satisfying our natural love of using numbers to rank what's most important. Of course, before social networking became mainstream, people were already sharing content online through fora, chat rooms, and tripod pages. But what was the first site that used the modern paradigm of creating profiles and sharing different kinds of information with a subset of that site's users that you were...
connected with somehow. A number of sites could try to claim that title, but a strong candidate was Six Degrees, which entered the scene in 1997. It featured plenty of elements that are now staples of social media, such as friends lists and instant messaging, but unfortunately, they closed their digital doors in 2001 because, and this is basically the quintessential example of something being too far ahead of its time, There just weren't enough people on the internet back then to keep the site afloat. It wouldn't be until five years after Six Degrees was born that the first social networking service would hit a million users. Friendster, launched in 2002, quickly became widely popular by showing users not only how they were connected to others, but with a slicker presentation, similar to online dating sites of the time.
And, of course, they... also benefited from the shrinking stigma around meeting people online due to the internet's explosive growth. But, while Friendster quickly boasted a user base of over 3 million people, tough competition was on the horizon.
If you're around the same age that I am, you probably fondly remember, or at least remember, MySpace. MySpace took a great deal of inspiration from Friendster, but... Because the folks behind MySpace already ran a company called eUniverse, which operated multiple websites for things like gaming and dating, MySpace had the advantage of being able to get the word out through eUniverse's existing user base. This helped them to rapidly become more popular than Friendster. In fact, Friendster's founder claimed that MySpace employees made posts on Friendster forums asking visitors to come join MySpace instead.
MySpace was also able to develop new features for their site faster than Friendster, meaning, for a while, the internet was awash in profile pages featuring strange backgrounds and weird sparkly GIFs. And real life was awash in novelty t-shirts directing onlookers to said pages. Of course, MySpace's dominance was also short-lived thanks to a famous Harvard dropout.
No, not that one. That one. Mark Zuckerberg developed Facebook as a sophomore in 2004, originally intending it to be a campus-wide student directory, apparently because he was simply unhappy that it was freaking 2004 and the university still hadn't created one. After over a thousand Harvard students registered for the site the first day, Facebook started expanding to other schools, requiring a university or college email address in order to sign up. By the fall of 2005, most universities in the U.S. had access to the site, its explosive growth fueled by the ease with which students could see who else they were connected to through classmates that they already knew.
This early version of Facebook lacked modern features, acting as a digital replacement for university directories with much more emphasis on showing background information through user profiles. And the only way that visitors had of submitting anything to another user's page was by changing the wall, a block of text that any user's friends could edit at will. Early on, Facebook didn't have the same pull with advertisers as MySpace, but... That all changed once Facebook opened itself up to the masses in 2006. And for better or for worse, Facebook quickly dwarfed MySpace. The most prominent reason for this being that the two sites diverged in terms of their functionality.
Facebook's model was focused much more heavily on user-generated content and ways to make the networking part of social networking easier with pages, groups, and content sharing. MySpace, meanwhile, was... widely considered to have spread itself too thin with extraneous features like karaoke that didn't work very well, and a design that was quickly becoming clunky, slow, and outdated. MySpace also served their users with tons of ads and became susceptible to spam and malware, where Facebook was regarded as much better maintained with a cleaner design, which had a very obvious influence on other social networks like VK in Russia and RenRen in China.
So in 2009, MySpace laid off 600 workers and after a couple of sales, it is still around but as a music-centric platform that's no longer trying to compete as a big-time do-it-all social media service. Meanwhile, while Facebook and MySpace were grappling for social networking dominance, Twitter chirped onto the scene in late 2006. And although the social media space was already becoming crowded, Twitter stood out because it wasn't a copycat site. Instead of focusing on user profiles and a huge suite of social networking features, it was based on a much simpler idea. 140 character, non-editable, microblogging posts or tweets that could be used to reach everyone on the site instantly.
This simplicity made it popular with convention goers at the 2007 edition of South by Southwest, leading to some serious publicity and an explosion in usage, going from 20,000 tweets per day before the convention to 50 million in 2010. And of course, the introduction of the now ubiquitous and oft misused hashtag in 2007, which Twitter turned into hyperlinks in 2009, and then started using to determine what topics were trending in 2010. And it was this addition of trending to Twitter, and then later Facebook, that represented, well, the next big trend among the major social networking sites, with many netizens turning at this point to trending topics and their customizable feeds instead of traditional media to get their breaking news. This drew in the extra advertising dollars that have allowed services like Facebook and Twitter to expand into areas like live broadcasting and embedding richer forms of media directly into their posts. The fact that the way that we interact with each other on social media sites has become mainstream means that we've actually even seen these social features of one kind or another, implemented on other sites. Like how LinkedIn, a business networking site that's actually been around since 2002, now looks decidedly Facebook-like.
Trending and community functions have shown up on YouTube, hashtags are on Instagram, which is now a Facebook subsidiary, and Reddit has a vote-based system, which is roughly analogous to likes on other platforms. So I guess that pretty much wraps it up. Hopefully you've enjoyed this look at social networking enough to leave us a like and...
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