The unofficial version:
A long, long time ago, in a cyber galaxy far away, there were:
The Well (1985) and Geocities (1994)
And the Force was with them, enabling them to connect people from across the world through chat rooms and allowing you to create your very own webpage for that school project your elementary school teacher assigned you to do.
Slowly and gradually, the Social Networking Sites began to rise. It started with Friendster, followed by Myspace and then Bebo. By 2005 however, Myspace had eclipsed the other two SNSs, rising to become the Evil Empire of Myspace.
In a distance,on the same continent of USA, not too far away from the Empire’s headquarters of Beverly Hills, in one of the best Jedi Academies in the USA, a young Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was working on an invention which would soon challenge the pre-dominance of the Evil Empire. Known as Facebook, this social networking site was initially shared amongst the members of the Harvard Jedi Academy. However, it’s call for freedom proved to be extremely popular and in 2006, starting with the top Ivy League Jedi Academies, the Force soon spread to the rest of the world.It has since become the largest and fastest growing site in the world, not limited by particular geographical followings (Social graph-iti, 2008). Even the Evil Empire of Myspace was no match for Facebook…
In a near distance, another development was shaping up…
A Bird called Twit was struck with the Force! Ever since then, it hasn’t stopped Twittering, infecting many of those who have heard it ‘Tweet’ with a disease called ‘Twitter’.
Alright, that was just my crazy imagination, nothing of that sort occurred…for the real, boring history stuff, read the following:
Remember The WELL (1985) and Geocities (1994)??? These were the ancient online communities from which earliest networking sites originated from. They connected people via chat rooms and personal homepages.
These eventually gave rise to the SNSs (which rose in popularity between 2002 and 2004) and blogs (which rose in popularity in 1999). First, there was Friendster, then, Myspace, and finally Bebo. By 2005, Myspace, emergent as the biggest of them all, was reportedly getting more views than Google. 2004 saw the emergence of Facebook, a competitor, also growing rapidly in size (Steve, 2005).
Facebook founder Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
In 2006, Facebook opened up to the non US college community, and together with allowing externally-developed add-on applications, and some applications enabled the graphing of a user’s own social network – thus linking social networks and social networking, became the largest and fastest growing site in the world, not limited by particular geographical followings (Social graph-iti, 2008). Twitter, founded in 2006, has has recently (2009) eclipsed many other social network services and although lacking in some of what were considered the essential aspects of a SNS, has allowed add-on services to connect and supply these services via its public API. (Arrington, 2008)
References:
“Social graph-iti”: Facebook’s social network graphing: article from The Economist’s website. Retrieved on January 19, 2008.
Steve Rosenbush (2005). News Corp.’s Place in MySpace, BusinessWeek, July 19, 2005. (MySpace Page Views figures)
