Jan 5, 2010
Social networking is one of the latest trends over internet. Although it seems to be the most modern trend, its history goes back to 1985 when THE WELL was initiated. THE WELL is one of the oldest online communities which is known for its online forums. During the 1990’s technology was at a boom and sites like tripod.com and geocities .com started getting popular. These sites would let individuals create their homepage which was generally a personal profile. This was also the starting of the blogging culture within internet.
In 1997, SixDegrees.com was launched where you could create user profiles and send messages directly to friends. SixDegrees.com allowed you to search for people with similar interests and add them to your friends list. In spite of having all these features, SixDegrees.com was shut down as it could not gather profits, maybe because the site was ahead of its time. During 2002 and 2004 there were three such sites namely Friendster, Myspace and Linked in that emerged and changed the way people worked on internet. It started with Friendster in 2002 which Google tried to acquire in 2003, then Myspace which had more page views that Google at one time and then Linkedin. In 2004, Facebook started emerging and in just a few years Facebook became one of the fastest and the largest growing sites not limiting to geographical locations. Facebook opened gateways by allowing externally developed add on applications which allowed people to integrate their applications within the site. Facebook is not only used by individuals but also used by several businesses to promote their services and products as well.
After 2005, Social Networking began flourishing as a business component and many businesses started using sites like Facebook, Bebo and Myspace as a tool to promote their businesses. In 2006 came Twitter which although has comparatively lesser features became one of the most popular sites in 2008-09 because of the ease of use it allows.
Social networks are becoming increasingly popular amongst students, teachers, businessmen, non profit organizations, celebrities and others to interact with each other. It is easy to create profiles and get connected to people with your interests. Sites like Facebook , Myspace and Orkut have started using Collabarative techniques to give users a better experience while sites like Twitter are winning on the ease of use syndrome. With all this in action, there are more developments that are being done in order to make it easier for people to get connected.
Centex Technologies plans Social Networking campaigns for clients to market their products on major social networks.