The History of Social Networking

Social networking is described as being a means of communication connecting one individual to another through the internet. In these terms the first sign of social networking would stem back to the first email ever sent. The first email ever sent was back in 1971 by a computer programmer named Ray Tomlinson (Tomlinson, 1971). It was from one computer to another; these computers were sat next to each other and were only connected through the ARPANET. The email contained the message QWERTYUIOP (top row of letters on a QWERTY keyboard). It was back at this time that the ‘@’ sign was also introduced, as a means to describe the recipient of the email being on a remote machine.

1971 laid the foundations for the social networking era, in just over 40 years the world has gone from a single email to just under 2 billion people being online, that’s a world penetration of 28% (Usage Stats, (2010) and out of these 2 billion users, 67% of them spend their time on social network sites (Neilson, 2009).

1978 was the next formidable step; BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) exchanged data over phone lines with other users (Kumar, S.P, 2011). This meant that people could exchange information over a greater distance and would not have to have their computers sat next to each other. 1978 also saw the first copies of early web browsers being distributed through Usenet; this was an early online bulletin board.

In 1994 one of the world’s first social networking sites was founded, it was known as Geocities, it allowed the user to create their own websites. This was followed shortly by ‘TheGlobe.com’ which allowed the user to do a similar thing as Geocities as it gave users the freedom to personalize their online experiences by publishing their own content and interacting with others with similar interests (Miller & Vandome, 2009), like Facebook and Twitter do today.

The first recognisable social networking site was launched in 1997; this was known as SixDegrees.com (Boyd, DM, 2007). The site allowed users to create profiles, list their friends and from 1998 surf the friends list. (Boyd,DM,2007). Now although each of these features existed in some form before SixDegrees, this site was the first to combine them into one social networking experience.
Six Degrees promoted its self as a communication tool, used by the individual to help them connect with and send messages to each other. SixDegrees attracted millions of users from all over the globe, but in despite of this it failed to become a sustainable business and in 2000 was shut down. Many believe that the collapse of SixDegrees was due to the product being ahead of its time and although the internet’s popularity was on the increase most people did not have extended networks nor had friends online to interact with.

Between the years of 1997 and 2001 many companies developed SNSs (See Figure 1, 2010). Blackplanet and AsianAvenue allowed users to create personal, professional and dating profiles (Ellison NB,2007). Likewise Swedish SNS LunarStorm refashioned itself in 2000 and contained features such as friends’ lists, guestbook’s and diary pages.

2001 and onwards saw a huge rise in the amount of social networking sites being hosted. Ryze.com was developed in 2001 and its purpose was to help people raise the stature of their business networks. From these early social networking sites people saw the potential in them, whether their goal is advertising or socialising SNS developers were inspired and this led to the never ending list of social networking sites we have today

Figure 1: Launch Dates of SNSs, 2010: