Social Network

Primary Contributor: Michael Ray

social network, in computers, an online community of individuals who exchange messages, share information, and, in some cases, cooperate on joint activities.

The online experience

Eschewing the anonymity that had previously been typical of the online experience, millions of people have flocked to social networking sites where members create and maintain personal profiles that they link with those of other members. The resulting network of “friends” or “contacts” who have similar interests, business goals, or academic courses has replaced for many people, especially youth, older concepts of community. The most basic social networking software allows friends to comment on one another’s profiles, send private messages within the network, and traverse the extended web of friends visible in each member’s profile. More advanced networking sites enable members to enhance their profiles with audio and video clips, and some open their software source code to allow third-party developers to create applications or widgetssmall programs that run within the member’s profile page. These programs include games, quizzes, photo-manipulation tools, and news tickers. A popular application sometimes draws 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 functions as a hive of creativity, with users and developers feeding on each others’ desire to see and be seen. Critics, however, see these sites as crass popularity contests, in which “power users” pursue the lowest common denominator in a quest to gain the most friends. With hundreds of millions of unique visitors using dozens of such sites worldwide, it is certainly possible to observe both extremes often within the same group of “friends.”

From USENET to 21st-century social networks

USENET

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 American 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 board systems (BBSs), enabled individuals to interact in an online social network, but each was essentially a closed system. With the release in 1993 of the Mosaic Web browser (see Netscape Communications Corp.), 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.

Early pioneers

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 social networking site. It was launched in 1997 with most of the features that would come to characterize such sites: 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 for shares of e-commerce companies listed on NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange.

21st-century social networks

Others were quick to see the potential for such a site, and Friendster was 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
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. In 2005 MySpace was purchased by News Corporation Ltd. (the media-holding company founded by the Australian entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch), 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 active monthly users in 2007), but it did open the door for other social networking sites 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 founders Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes at Harvard University, Facebook has served as an academically oriented alternative to MySpace, claiming millions of unique monthly visitors. LinkedIn, furthermore, draws millions of professionals to its business-networking site. While MySpace and Facebook compete for members in North America, Bebo is a popular site in the United Kingdom, Orkut dominates in Brazil and India, Friendster has recaptured some of its former glory among users in Southeast Asia, and China’s QQ has grown from an instant-messaging service to become a major force in the social networking realm. Perhaps most adventurous has been Ning, which launched the final version of its site in 2007. Ning users create their own social networks from the ground up, using software that requires very little programming expertise. Upgrades, such as personalized domain names and revenue-generating banner advertisements, are purchased on an à la carte basis, and the network software supports a host of third-party applications. These personal networking sites are then displayed in a browsable master index, much like the friends in a standard network profile in essence, a social networking site for social networking sites.