10 years back, when I made a new friend, we used to share our house addresses, telephone numbers and write them in a pocket diary to preserve the details. If I were to make a friend today, I would just have to add him on Facebook. Yes, this is the age of the social network which has had an explosive growth in the past decade and has garnered quite a few eyeballs.
It is interesting to learn as to how social networks developed. Towards the close of the 20th century saw the rise of many dating sites where users made profiles with photos and other information to contact other users. Meanwhile during this time existed various primitive social networking sites like Classmates.com (which had users belonging to common colleges) and also Six Degrees which closed down in a year. Some sites like Live journal took a different approach and built network around constantly-updated blogs.
Social networking took a leap with the launch of Friendster, which went on to add 90 million subscribers as of now. It helped people discover their friends, friends of friends, and so on. Within a year saw the launch of hi5, LinkedIn and MySpace. Hi5 is slightly different from Friendster, in the sense that a user’s network consisted of friends, friends of friends and so on. LinkedIn, though a social network was created for business people. Currently it is growing at a rapid pace and is a place for business people to interact and get to know each other. MySpace, launched in 2003 had a decent growth and it went on to become the most popular social network in the world. The specialty about MySpace was that users can customize their profiles.
The year 2004 saw the launch of Orkut and Facebook. Orkut was Google’s social network and it grew rapidly in Brazil, India. But it was later plagued with viruses and now the number of active users has gone down. Facebook, which was initially a social network for Harvard Students, became open to public slowly in 1-2 years of its launch. Currently it is the world’s most successful social networking site.
At present, Google is trying to stage a comeback with the launch of its new social network called Google+ . The launch of Google+ raised quite few eyebrows and it attracted many users to register for it. And with its launch, Facebook tweaked its functionality and has made changes which somewhat reflect the features of Google+. The war of the two giants has begun. But who will win this? Only time will tell.
Sources :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/10/the-history-and-evolution-of-social-media/
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