Lori Fowler

Social Media

Introduction to Computer Literacy

February 8, 2013

What are Social Network sites? Social Network Sites are web based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi public profile within a bounded system. “People articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. “(Social network sites).

Social Network sites are becoming increasingly more popular as time goes by. Everyday more and more people are searching out social networking sites, either just to correspond with long lost friends, family or they are searching for the love of their lives on a dating site. There are so many different sites that have come and one from the beginning of the boom. There are the sites that people can keep in touch with your friends and family or sites to meet new people to find love or just friendship. Anyone can find anything that they are looking for.

There are sites that cater to certain audiences and attract people based on race, religion or culture. There are just so many different ones out there that you can choose from. Dating websites, political sites, Social Networking sites have become the new thing in this generation. There are young people, teenagers, older people that go on these sites. It’s not just one generation of people it is all people in today’s world. .

In this day and age there are so many different sites that we can choose from. In this paper we will discuss some of the sites that are at the top of the game. I will try and explain some of them and what they do. They are all pretty much the same thing but some are more popular than the others. I will tell about how they came about. I will tell you roughly how many users that they have. It is hard to really tell why they are bigger than the others. People like different things and so everyone has different views on why they think one is better than the other ones. Each one of these sites is unique in their own ways and offer different things.

“The social web started back in 2009. The first steps were the Bulletin Board System. The bulletin board system was an online meeting place. It was independently produced hunks of code that allowed users to communicate with a central system” (The history of social networking). The bulletin board system was accessed over a telephone line via a modem. This made it very hard to communicate because it was very slow moving. Most of these boards were for locals only because of it being done over the telephone any long distances charges would apply and that could get expensive. The boards were mostly run by lobbyist and most of the boards were about their causes that they were into at that time.

AOL was the true precursor to today’s social networking sites. AOL America was the beginning of the internet before the internet was “By the mid 1990’s the internet was moving full force” (the history of social networking). By 1995 yahoo had set up camp and Amazon was also created. Classmates.com came about and proved to be a hit with reunions. This was I believe the start of social networking. People on the lookout for ways to find long lost classmates and reconnect with those from high school. Classmates.com was a way that people were able to do that. Today classmates have over 540 million users. This success showed that the social networking would become a great thing for someone to get into and the start of today’s sites.

Sixdegrees.com was one of the first sites and was started in 1997. It was one of the first sites to allow users to create profiles and invite others to join. People could create a profile add friends and start groups. You were able to go look at other people’s profiles. If you invited others to join and they did not join then those people would end up getting unwanted advertisements harassing them to join the site. People did not like the unwanted spam so this is what eventually led to the downfall of this site. People do not want to be hounded into joining any site. There were many complaints that were filed about this type of practices.

In 2002 social networking hit its stride. Friendster hit the waves. “Circles of friends” is the motto for Friendster. The CEO of Friendster said that it was a dating site that does not focus on dating. Being online a year and they had more than three million registered users. Friendster is still very active today mostly in Asia and the Philippines. Today Friendster is mostly a social gaming site. That is based in Malaysia. Friendster was relaunched as a gaming site in 2011.

In 2003 LinkedIn was launched and was a more serious site. It was focused not on the young and those that wanted to connect with friends and family. It was launched and focused on the business people. The professionals that are out in the work force. It was used to connect professional business people with other professionals. It is used to connect with other business people and their connections. If you have a person of interest in a certain type of business you will be able to find that person here. LinkedIn today has more than 175 million members.

MY Space is one of the big social networking sites. It was very popular when it came out. It was launched in 2003. It is no longer the top of the social networking site but at one time it was. I think that today it is still top with a lot of young people. It focused on music, music videos and a lot of bands would use MySpace to connect with fans. This is how they became so popular and grew so fast. MySpace did not launch with bands in mind but they are a lot of who first started making profiles and then their fans would make profiles and here is how MySpace grew to be an s big as they are. A lot of bands as well as promoters would use this site to promote concerts free tickets concerts… All this is one of the reasons that this site did so well.

The top of the social networking sites will be the one and only face book Face book is at the top of the game. Face book was founded in by college students. When it was first launched it was launched for college students only. It was for University students only. It was a Harvard only site and was for their use only; it would eventually go public in 2006. This year face book has reached over 800 million users. Face book is known as the King of social networking.”Face book s master plan, articulated by founder Mark Zuckerberg was that once you have met or known you would be able to leverage that information across the web”)The future of social web).

These are a few of the main social networking sites. There are many more that I could talk about but these to me are the main ones that have made a big influence on our society. Today there are so many people that are doing the social networking thing. The social networking has become a part of most people’s lives and I believe that more will come about in our near future. Life as we once knew it where we called people and talked to them on the phone is long gone and we no longer do that. People today are turning to the internet for all correspondence.

Social Networking is here and will be our future as well. No one calls people now days. It’s all about the internet and keeping up with people via social networking.

References:

Social Network Sites: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

The Future of Social Web: http://readwrite.com/2011/09/30/the_future_of_the_social_web