history

This page considers the history of social network services, including uptake by consumers, responses by regulators and the evolution of different business models.

It covers -

• introduction
• precursors
• the profile era
• equaintance
• friends and fakes
• normalisation
• a SNS bubble?

    introduction

As noted in a preceding page of this profile, there has been no overarching social history of SNS or comprehensive study of SNS as a business and media phenomenon, including marketing, investment by venture funders and colonisation by major media or IT groups.

The absence of such studies reflects the newness of the SNS industry and boundary squabbles by some scholars, particularly those seeking to establish the legitimacy of new disciplines such as 'cyberstudies' and have accordingly concentrated on particular aspects or elided continuities with past business/communication practice.

The following paragraphs offer a broad outline of the evolution of SNS, with a more detailed examination of particular types of social network services being provided in the following pages.

    precursors

A number of precursors of SNS are evident in the offline worlds, depending on your definition of social network service.

Contrary to some of the more dogmatic claims in cybersociology journals and postdoctoral bids, networking has often involved print media. In the UK, US and elsewhere there is thus at least 220 years of history of people producing and using print directories to identify each other, to establish connections and to source products or services. One example is Samuel Derrick's Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, a directory of 'adult services' published from 1757 to 1795 and discussed in Hallie Rubenhold's The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris' List (Stroud: Tempus 2005).

Other trade directories formed the model for contemporary white and yellow pages phone directories. Business profile services and 'credit books' such as those compiled by Tappan (a predecessor of Dun & Bradstreet) complemented membership lists shared by fraternal organisations such as the Freemasons, Oddfellows, Elks and Knights of the Southern Cross.

Networking has also involved mediation by third parties, including 'introduction', 'escort' or 'matchmaking' services - explored in more detail elsewhere on this site - and electronic interaction through mechanisms such as Usenet, which predate the web and enabled exchanges that are similar to those found in current SNS fora such as eGullet and Whirlpool.

    the profile era

SixDegrees.com (now defunct; archived here) is usually claimed as the prototype social network site. It was established in 1997, with users being able to create profiles, make recommendations, list their SixDegrees 'friends' and search lists of those Friends. It indicated that

Our free networking services let you find the people you want to know through the people you already know.

Its development reflected existing services, which typically offered one or more feature but had not bundled those facilities in a user-friendly way. GeoCities for example offered a profile cum home page service reminiscent of that offered in AOL's 'walled garden' community, with participants being able to choose location in particular community segments. US nostalgia site classmates.com allowed participants to 'affiliate' with a junior educational institution and then identify with other participants who shared that affiliation but did not feature a facility for directly identifying 'friends', for unilaterally linking to friends or for displaying personal profiles.

Other messaging services, such as ICQ, OneList, AIM and eVite, enabled contact between participants but similarly did not offer a profile or a friends-display facility (ie one participant could not see and sort all the third party friends of his/her friends) and did not enable unilateral linking. Unsurprisingly, profiles were available on major dating sites and many community services, which in practice drove the development of SNS by adding functionalities.

In 1999 for example early blogging service LiveJournal offered scope for identifying friends on user pages, eg so that those people could track and gain access to restricted posts. 'Relationship' services such as MiGente, AsianAvenue and BlackPlanet increasingly allowed users to create professional and personal profiles that could be searched by particular attributes such as gender, particularly seearched within a specific segment of the service. Swedish web community LunarStorm added 'guestbooks', friends lists and blogging options in 2000. South Korean virtual world site Cyworld added profile, person search and messaging functionalities in 2001

SixDegrees attracted media attention and a substantial number of participants but much use appears to be evanescent, with contemporary comments that not much happened once people had experienced the supposed six clicks of separation between themselves, the US president, Kevin Bacon and a Trobriand Islander. SixDegrees closed in 2000 after the dot-com crash of that year.







   next page  (business)