Social network | Definition, Examples, & Facts

Eschewing the anonymity that had previously been typical of the online experience, billions of people have flocked to social networking sites where members create and maintain personal profiles that they link with those of other members. The resulting network of “friends” or “contacts” who have similar interests, business goals, or academic courses has replaced for many people, especially youth, older concepts of community. The most basic social networks allow friends to comment on one another’s profiles, send private messages within the network, and traverse the extended web of friends visible in each member’s profile. More advanced networks enable members to enhance their profiles with audio and video clips, and some open their software source code to allow third-party developers to create applications or widgets —small programs that run within the member’s profile page. These programs include games, quizzes, photo-manipulation tools, and news tickers. At its best, a social networking site functions as a hive of creativity, with users and developers feeding on each others’ desire to see and be seen. Critics, however, see these sites as crass popularity contests, in which “power users” pursue the lowest common denominator in a quest to gain the most friends. With billions of unique visitors using many such sites worldwide, it is certainly possible to observe both extremes—often within the same group of “friends.”

From

USENET to 21st-century social networks

USENET

The earliest online social networks appeared almost as soon as the technology could support them. E-mail and chat programs debuted in the early 1970s, but persistent communities did not surface until the creation of USENET in 1979. USENET began as a messaging system between Duke University and the University of North Carolina, but it rapidly expanded to other American universities and government agencies. USENET allowed users to post and receive messages within subject areas called newsgroups. Initially, there was no standard convention for the naming of newsgroups. This led to confusion as the number of newsgroups grew throughout the 1980s. In 1987 USENET groups were reorganized into broad hierarchies such as news, talk, misc (for miscellaneous), and alt (for alternative; the last was created for newsgroups that dealt with taboo or niche topics, and it was the most populous category on USENET). USENET and other discussion forums, such as privately hosted bulletin board systems (BBSs), enabled individuals to interact in an online social network, but each was essentially a closed system. With the release in 1993 of the Mosaic Web browser, those systems were joined with an easy-to-use graphical interface. The architecture of the World Wide Web made it possible to navigate from one site to another with a click, and faster Internet connections allowed for more multimedia content than could be found in the text-heavy newsgroups.

Early pioneers

The first companies to create social networks based on Web technology were Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com. Classmates.com, founded in 1995, used an aggressive pop-up advertising campaign to draw Web surfers to its site. It based its social network on the existing connection between members of high school and college graduating classes, armed service branches, and workplaces. SixDegrees.com was the first true social networking site. It was launched in 1997 with most of the features that would come to characterize such sites: members could create profiles for themselves, maintain lists of friends, and contact one another through the site’s private messaging system. SixDegrees.com claimed to have attracted more than three million users by 2000, but it failed to translate those numbers into revenue and collapsed with countless other dot-coms when the “bubble” burst that year for shares of e-commerce companies.

21st-century social networks

Others were quick to see the potential for such a site, and Friendster was launched in 2002 with the initial goal of competing with popular subscription-fee-based dating services such as Match.com. It deviated from this mission fairly early on, and it soon became a meeting place for post-“bubble” Internet tastemakers. The site’s servers proved incapable of handling the resulting spike in traffic, however, and members were faced with frequent shutdowns. Members were further alienated when the site actively began to close down so-called “fakesters” or “pretendsters.” While many of these were little more than practical jokes (profiles for Jesus Christ or the Star Wars character Chewbacca), some, such as universities or cities, were helpful identifiers within a friends list. Once again, there was a void in the social networking Web, and MySpace was quick to fill it.

Whereas Friendster, as part of its mission as a dating site, initially appealed to an older crowd, MySpace actively sought a younger demographic from its inception in 2003. It quickly became a venue for rock bands to connect with fans and to debut new material. Unlike Friendster, MySpace had the infrastructure to support its explosive growth, and members joined by the millions. In 2005 MySpace was purchased by News Corporation Ltd. (the media-holding company founded by the Australian entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch), and the site’s higher profile caused it to draw scrutiny from legal authorities who were concerned about improper interactions between adults and the site’s massive population of minors.

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The spectre of online predators did little to diminish MySpace’s membership (which reached 70 million active monthly users in 2007), but it did open the door for other social networking sites to seize some of its momentum. Facebook took the Classmates.com formula and turned it on its head, with a network that was initially open only to students at universities. After its 2004 launch by founders Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes at Harvard University, Facebook at first was an academically oriented alternative to MySpace, but in 2006 it opened the service to anyone over 13 and surpassed MySpace as the most popular social network in 2008.

In the early 2020s, Facebook was the most popular social network in the world with three billion users. Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, also owned the popular photo- and video-sharing network Instagram and the instant-messaging services WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Other widely used social networks included YouTube for sharing videos, Snapchat for temporary sharing of videos and images, and Telegram for instant messaging. China was home to several of the world’s most popular social networks, such as the instant messaging services Weixin (WeChat outside China) and Tencent QQ, and the short-video-sharing service Douyin (TikTok outside China).

Michael Ray