A Brief History Of Social Networking

By Author: Rebecca Hamm
Total Articles: 5
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It wasn't that long ago that no one knew what a 'social network' was, and that people were quite dubious about being 'invited' to join today's raining champion 'Facebook'.

However social networking sites have actually been around for quite a long time, more than ten years, though most people will have used them less proactively back then.

Some of the earliest examples of popular social networking sites were 'Friends Reunited' and 'Face Party' which were both driven by a strong premise. With 'Friends Reunited' the object was to provide a website where old friends from school, work or college could rediscover each other and get back in touch. This would then be interesting from a voyeuristic point of view, or lead to a rekindling of friendships or even romances. Others would organise reunions or gatherings.

Meanwhile Face Party was more about meeting new people, and particularly for young people to meet each other for dates. This group would also extend into the real world to organise events and parties which allowed it to claim it was the 'biggest party on Earth'. For a time this reigned supreme as a place ...
... for young people to chat and date, and was an idea that was spawned from the conventional fee-based dating websites that came before it - in many ways forerunners to the social networking scene.

Meanwhile another giant loomed into the foreground known as MySpace which was in some ways a successor to Face Party, but offered a different range of advantages, allowing people to fully customise their page to include music, images and videos; a feature often abused by members whose pages would cause your computer to crash as it tried to load them. For those that used it as intended however, MySpace would become a great place to network with like minded people and particularly for music artists to spread their work and find record labels and fans by putting their music on their pages. This was one of the earliest examples of a social networking site actually changing the way business and society in general operated.

In many ways people were split between two camps for a while, with MySpace being for the slightly older demographic more interested in business and creative opportunities than dates while Face Party catered to the younger audience. However soon Face Party would be pushed out of the way by another social networking site aimed at this group called 'Bebo' which fast became a new favourite as a kind of 'half-way house' between Face Party and MySpace.

It wasn't until a few years ago though that Facebook really came on the scene, initially beating MySpace into submission as the dominant social networking site for the older generations, but eventually conquering all demographics by offering a far more professional, practical and extensive system for staying up to date with the people in your life. Rather than rekindling old friendships, finding new romances, or looking for business opportunities, Facebook was about sharing your daily activities with those you currently knew and the idea spread fast until it became a pop culture phenomenon such that everyone could be found on Facebook.

Today that site has been streamlined further with the minimalist 'Twitter' which relies on simple sentence-long updates about your day which gets shared with your 'followers' on Twitter. Whether it is poised to knock Facebook off of its pedestal or whether it can share the limelight remains to be seen.

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