The Evolution of Social Networking3

Ten years ago the internet was just starting to get its game on attracting people and businesses alike. The one thing I recall the most, from that time period, was the mass emphasis on internet anonymity. Parents, teachers, and sponsored commercials all warned of the dangers of using your real name or information online. For years it was common practice to sign up on every new website with a fake name, fake address, and if possible an email account that was only used to sign up for things.

Flash forward ten years and almost everyone has left a traceable mark on the internet. Social networking sites are being shared by every one of all ages and backgrounds. The handling of personal information is more serious than ever but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone from putting it online.

What went wrong? How did everything get turned upside down in just one decade?

I believe the start was a combination of online shopping and chat room. When buying or paying for anything online the purchaser needed to be forward and truthful with all of their information. They were forced to put in real names, addresses, and even credit card numbers. After a few years of trusting these sights they started easing up on other sights. Working at it from the other side were the chat rooms and early blogs. People were making friends in chat rooms and using early blog services like Live Journal and Dead Journal. Personal information started coming out slowly as the users comfort levels with the internet increased. While this might have started to drive away some of the internet information phobia, it was not enough to stop it.

In 2003 Myspace.com enters the scene and started social networking on a global level. Myspace did something that no other social network had yet to do; it attracted the Millenials (or Generation Y 1980-2000). This generation saw the potential of the personal profiles and interlinked friends system. Myspace was like taking all of the other small social networks and interaction we would get from chat rooms and put it into one nice package. Every profile was like a personal website that allowed the user to customize it and make it truly their space.

Facebook came into the scene a year later in 2004. Facebook attracted college students as it was, at first, exclusive to them. With the growing popularity of the social networking, and a new found public distaste for Myspace, Facebook seemed the perfect option for all when it opened up to all users in 2006. That same year Twitter came into existence but I will get to that in a moment.

I was honestly surprised when Facebook took the lead in the social network race. A culture that was so opposed to putting its personal information on the web was starting use a site that had a consistent news feed of your personal activities. Then we saw Myspace add its news feed feature in an attempt to keep up with Facebook. Then Facebook took away their profile interests section and replaced them with categorized “Like” sections.

Now we are at today and at the point of this blog, sorry for the extended history lesson. Today Facebook and Twitter are the major players in the social networking field and Myspace is getting smaller daily. Our society, in just over ten years, has changed from a society afraid to put real information online to a society that runs on an updated friends news feed. Forums, groups, profiles, and photos no longer make the social network. Now we want to know what are friends are doing when they do it. The news feed is like a constant chat room between you and your friends and is unique to each individual person (unless for some reason 2 people have the exact same friends).

Social networking now consists of three stages: blogging, vlogging, and news feeds (chatting). A world that just a decade ago was afraid to put any personal information online is now streaming it for all to see. Social networks of all kinds are being updated with more and more personal information on a daily basis. The evolutionary track seems to move away from the individuals profile, something now being kept by blogs, and into a social collective. Wide scale conversation between complete strangers is completely possible now on sites like Twitter. It seems as if social networking evolved the personal aspect only to draw users in and now is devolving.

It is devolving back to its original roots. It is now more common to use multiple social networks at the same time then just a single one. Chat rooms have been replaced by Twitter (and any other consistent new stream). Blogs and vlogs are replacing the profiles sections of social networks. At the same time all of these are being linked by apps to interact with each other. Social networking is becoming simpler and more spread out but at the same time it is becoming larger. With each application that links separate social network sites, we are creating a larger super network.

I will stop there and let you think about that for a moment before I go to Matrix on you.