The document discusses the history and rise of social networking sites from SixDegrees.com in 1997 to the current dominance of Facebook. It notes that early social networking sites in the late 1990s allowed users to create profiles and connect with friends. By the 2000s, sites like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook launched and gained popularity among different age groups. The document attributes Facebook's success to its large user base growth rate, with over 100 million users in 2009 and increasing popularity among older age groups. In conclusion, it states that while technology may not replace face-to-face communication, it can help expand social connections over distance.
2. Social Web Definition: Social Web How did it all start? History of SNS’s Why connect? Facebook Rules! In The End
3. Social Web “It’s not an audience, it’s a community” The Social Web is currently used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the World Wide Web. Such people are brought together through a variety of shared interests. There are different ways in which people want to socialize on the Web today. The first kind of socializing is typified by "people focus" websites such as Bebo, Facebook, and MySpace. Such sites promote the person as focus of social interaction.
4. Social Web Early in the 1990’s when the Web opened up the possibilities of a new and exciting world to the masses we saw the beginning of a sci-fi adventure, too difficult to ever last. Never would we have though that it wasn’t sci-fi at all and that today is what most of us consider normal and some of us would not dare to “live” without. The first recognizable social network site launched in 1997. SixDegrees.com allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and, beginning in 1998, surf the Friends lists. From 1997 to 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various combinations of profiles and publicly articulated Friends. AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGente allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profiles—users could identify Friends on their personal profiles without seeking approval for those connections (O. Wasow, personal communication, August 16, 2007).
5. Social Web From 2003 onward, many new SNSs were launched. MySpace got its start in 2003 to compete with sites like Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue. Then around 2004, teenagers began joining MySpace en masse. Now make some room, a new boy is in town. In 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students, professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone. It is a citizen driven craze, and it is all around us. It is in the “blogs, open-source software’s, peer- to- peer file sharing, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, BlogSpot, podcasts and even eBay— that you find all of these Internet institutions built by diverse communities of people, not by cubicle cities full of Web designers and program-mers”. (Beekman & Beekman, 2008, p. 320)
6. Social Web From Six Degrees.com to Facebook Timeline of the launch dates of many major social networking sites and dates when community sites re-launched with new features.
9. Social Web Facebook Rules and here is why… Its base grew from 42 million to 103 million in 2009. That’s a 144.9% growth rate! The 35+ demographic now represents more than 30% of the entire user base. The 55+ audience grew a whopping 922.7% in 2009. Atlanta had the highest growth rate in 2009 at 267.6% What began as a college project turned into the most successful SNS’s in history.
10. Social Web In The End: Information technology may never replace face-to-face communication, but it can shrink the distance by expanding the windows of communication to enable more social information to pass through” (Hoschka, 1998) Oh and also………..
12. Social Web References: Cremonini, L. A tag cloud. December 25, 2006. Figure 1, Table of Contents, http://typeandgripefactory.com/print_jobs/?C=N;O=D Figure 2, New Wisdom of the Web, http://blog.core-ed.net/derek/2006/04 Beekman, & Beekman. (2008). Tomorrow's Technology and You. Prentice Hall. Figure 3, Chafkin, M. (2007, June). How to kill a great idea! Inc. Magazine. Retrieved August 27, 2007 from http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070601/features-how-to-kill-a-great-idea.html Figure 4, Unknown, http://hullstudent.com/files/minisites/2288/People.jpg Figure 5, Peninsula City Church, www.pencc.org/451249.ihtml Hoschka, P. (1998). Linking people through virtual environments. The Social Web Research Program. Figure 6, Time Person of the Year: You, http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20061225,00.html