1. Timeline: a history of top social networking sites

2. Since their introduction, social networking sites (SNS) have attracted millions of users, whereby many people integrate these sites into their daily practices. Here is a timeline to show the progress of the social networking world.

3. 1985 – The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link was pretty much the first online community. It featured prominently in the media of the time (probably due to editorial choice and the fact that journalists got free accounts, rather than societal relevance) and used a combination of private and public conferences. The WELL is still running.

4. 1994 – Geocities started chat rooms and web hosting. Originally, Geocities users would select a virtual city at which to park their website based on their website’s theme – Nashville was for country music, for example, and Eureka was for businesses and home offices.

5. 1995: Classmates.com is a social media website created by Randy Conrad. The website helps members find, connect and keep in touch with friends and acquaintances from school life. Classmates has more than 40 million active members in the US and Canada. In early 2008, Nielson online ranked Classmates as number 3 in unique monthly visitors among social networking sites.

6. 1997: Sixdegrees.comwas named after the six degrees of separation concept and allowed users to list friends, family members and acquaintances and see their connection with any other user on the site. It was one of the first manifestations of a social networking websites in the format now seen today. Sixdegrees closed in 2007. At its height, the website had about a million users.

7. 1999:Cyworld.comis a South Korean social networking service. Users can have “apartment like” spaces which makes for a sim-world like experience. The ‘cy’ in Cyworld could stand for Cyber, however, it also plays on the Korean word for relationship. A 2005 survey showed that 25% of South Korea were users.

8. 2002: Friendster.comhas over 115 million registered users and over 61 million unique visitors per global month. Over 90% of friendster’s traffic comes from Asia. The website is also used for dating, discovering new events, bands and hobbies. It was the “granddaddy” of the social network and followed the same format as Facebook.

9. 2003: Myspace.comlaunched after eUniverse employees with Friendster saw its potential and mimicked the more popular features of the social networking site. Myspace became the most popular social networking site in US 2006. The 100th million account was created on August 9 2006. Myspace did what Friendster was doing, except it did it a bit better and it propagated the sharing of music on its pages. The comment section became the must-have part of any social networkers page and gave rise to the comment culture we see now.

10. 2003- LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. it is mainly used for professional networking. Linkedin has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million globally. In June 2011, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors spanning more than 196 countries and territories worldwide, up 63 percent from a year earlier and surpassing MySpace.

11. 2004: Facebook.com is the most popular social networking site boasting 350 million users. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg who studied at Harvard University. The websites membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges. One of the few websites to have a movie based on it, Facebook is one of the most significant technological inventions this century.

12. 2005 : Bebo.com is an acronym for “blog early, blog often”. It is similar to other networking sites; the site must include two specific modules, a comment section and a list of users’ friends. The site claims 40 million users.

13. 2006 –Twitter.com launches as the first proper microblogging site, using a very different relationship model to connect people. Rather than having “friends” like on Myspace and Facebook, Twitter users follow and have followers. It’s a different way of communication which some love and others despise, but Twitter’s use by celebrities and politicians has changed the way the media report on current affairs and is widely popular with about 5 million users.

14. 2009 – Google Wave is launched, with limited success. 2010 – Google Buzz is launched, to lukewarm reception. 2011 –Google+ is launched and looks like it’s going to do a great deal better than its predecessors. With Google’s internet hegemony and ownership of other services (Youtube, Blogger etc) it’s not surprising that Google+ is tipped to become the “next big thing”

15. Thank You