Social networking sites are slowly taking over the world! OK, so maybe it’s not necessary to be quite so dramatic, but it’s definitely worth realising just how influential web creations such as facebook and myspace are in this day and age.
Ask any teenager, around the world how they communicate with friends who they no longer live nearby… you might think they would say the telephone, howvever, I believe you’d be mistaken. The internet is the fastest, cheapest and easiest way for, not only today’s teens, but people of all generations, to communicate with eachother. My boyfriend’s gran has facebook for crying out loud!
The development of the social networking site is an interesting process, and this timeline depicts some of the most influential events in the history of social networking:
2002- Friendster is launched by coputer programmers, Jonathan Abrams and Cris Emmanuel. Over 90% of Friendster’s traffic comes from Asia (Wikipedia.com)
2003- August: Myspace.com is launched following the basic idea of friendster’s social networking template. It was set up by eUniverse employees, using their 20 million existing users to get myspace up and running.
2004- Mark Zukerberg launched “Thefacebook”, from his university dorm, originally located at thefacebook.com.
Myspace makes the transition from a virtual storage site (at YourZ.com) to a social networking site in its own name.
2005- January: Bebo (an acronym for “Blog early, blog often“) is founded by Michael and Xochi Birch. July: Bebo undergoes a major relaunch. According to ecosultancy.com, in August 2009, Bebo had around 8 million users in the UK alone.
September: Facebook.com was launched as a high school version.
2006- September: Facebook was opened to anyone over the age of 13 who had a valid email address. The social networking site now has around 350 million users worldwide, and around 20 million in the UK (from ecosultancy.com, 2009).
Twitter is launched. The ‘microblogging’ service allows users to ‘tweet’ 140 words for friends and subscribers to their profile to read.
2008- March: Bebo is bought by AOL for £417m.
December: Myspace.com had around 125 million users (according to techcrunch.com, 2009)
2010- February: Google launches Google Buzz in a bid to topple Facebook and Twitter. Only time will tell how successful their plan is.
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