When did social networks, such asFacebook, VKontakte andTwitter, our world is divided into online and offline. With their help, we can communicate with each other, even on different continents, listen to music, read books, look at photographs and much more. Social networks have made our life much easier and tightly tied to ourselves. Read more about their appearance and development in our article.
The emergence of social networks
Social network is social structure, consisting of a group of nodes, which are social objects (people or organizations), and the connections between them (social relationships). 
With the advent of the Internet (1969), the scientific concept of James Barnes began to gain popularity. This led to the development of social networks on the world wide web.
The first social networks on the Internet
The emergence of modern blogs, social networks and the Internet was foreseen by the Russian writer and philosopher Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky back in 1835. At this time, he finished writing his utopian novel "4338". The world described by the author is in some way reminiscent of the 21st century: "... magnetic telegraphs are arranged between familiar houses, through which people living at a distant distance talk to each other." Odoevsky also talks about the “home newspapers” published “in many homes, especially between those who have great acquaintances; they are replacing ordinary correspondence ... The duty to publish such a magazine once a week or daily rests in every house on the dining butler. This is done very simply: every time, having received an order from the owners, he writes down everything that was said to him, then he shoots the required number of copies in a camera obscura and sends them to his acquaintances. This newspaper usually contains a notice about the health or illness of the owners and other home news. "
It is worth noting that Vladimir Fedorovich is not far from reality. However, of course, he could not have known about social networks, blogs and the Internet.
17 years later, in 1988, the Finnish scientist Jarko Oikarinen invented the "IRC" protocol - Internet relayed chat - and software to implement it. It is now possible to communicate with each other in real time.
Then the American Randy Conrads created Classmates.com - the first social network in the modern sense. In it, registered users get access to the catalog of graduates of various educational institutions... Thus, anyone can find classmates or classmates. It is worth noting that Classmates.com immediately became very popular. By the way, its popularity is not falling even today - more than 50 million people use the social network. Interestingly, Odnoklassniki is the Russian equivalent of Classmates.com. Currently, they have over 290 million registered users.
History of the most popular social networks
In this part of the article, we will tell you, dear readers, about the history of the most popular social networks in Russia and the world - Facebook, VKontakte, Twitter and Instagram.
Facebook Inc. was founded on February 4, 2004 by four students who studied at Harvard University: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. At the same time, a website of the same name appeared. It was originally only available to Harvard students. A little later, registration was opened for Boston universities, and then for all Americans with email address in the .edu domain. Since September 2006, Facebook has become available to all Internet users over the age of 16. Today it is one of the five most visited websites in the world. Unsurprisingly, the network has a monthly audience of 1.968 billion people.
On October 10, 2006, an analogue of Facebook appears in Russia - the social network VKontakte. Its creator is Pavel Durov. The site is available in many languages, but its main audience is Russian-speaking users.
It should be noted that initially the resource was intended for students and graduates of Russian universities, after a while, it began to position itself as a "modern, fast and aesthetic way of communicating in the network." According to SimilarWeb for December 2017, VKontakte ranks 11th in the ranking of the most popular websites in the world. By the way, more than 410 million users are registered in this social network today.
“They uploaded and shared pictures like crazy,” Systrom notes. In this regard, he, together with a colleague, decides to get rid of all functions, leaving only the calculation of the photo.
The move worked, and Burbn, or rather, Instagram has already gained unprecedented popularity.
Today, the app is ranked 17th on the SimilarWeb list and has over 200 million active subscribers who have uploaded over 16 billion different images and videos.
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The whole principle of work is based on convenient communication (communication) with users. It can take place in the following ways:
- Groups and communities- they gather groups of people similar in some basic interest. For example, a community of fans of a musical group. There people will be able to follow the news of this group, discuss it, share their opinions, offer their own cover versions of songs, and so on.
- Personal correspondence
- Microblogging and walls- here you can post your own posts. For example, news, and so on. Your followers and friends will be able to track them, like them, and so on.
- Comments (1)
If this is a regular user, then as a rule, he creates a profile page and customizes it. Then he looks for his friends, communicates with them, follows their news.
This user on his page can upload various information (photos, videos, texts, and so on). Moreover, his friends will always be aware of the news. That is, if your friend posts a video about his vacation, then you will find out about it.
You can also join various communities of interest and communicate there with like-minded people.
As a rule, separate groups and communities are created for this. In them, companies provide users with their offers. For example, discounts, contests, expert content, and so on.
Social networks have become so convenient to communicate that businesses have begun to use them additionally as a platform for working with clients. For example, answer user questions. Give some recommendations to your target audience, and so on.
History of social networks
The first social network
The first social network actually came into being in 1999. It was Live Journal ( livejournal). And at first it looked more like a blog platform than a network. It was invented in the USA. But then the Russian company Klimenko ( Presidential Adviser on Internet Issues) bought this project.
Later, this platform began to add elements of communication. If earlier it was only possible to publish a text there, then useful opportunities appeared. For example, following another person, comments, and so on.
With all these features, Live Journal has become a social network.
In general, speaking about the history of the emergence of social networks, many projects have appeared recently. Most of them, however, have not received much user acceptance. Therefore, here we will consider only the most popular sites.
After Live Journal became popular Twitter network... It has become a good replacement for live journal. After all, there were great posts in LJ then.
But the problem is that only a small percentage of people can write such large poems. As a result, people cannot interact with themselves through their content. They can only interact in the comments.
Twitter, on the other hand, made it possible for all people to write small notes of 140 characters in order to outline their thoughts in general terms. This feature has made Twitter a popular replacement for LiveJournal.
Also, do not forget that most people are lazy creatures. Not everyone likes to read huge posts. As a rule, most people prefer to read small notes.
Twitter itself appeared in 2006 and began to rapidly gain momentum.
After Twitter, Facebook came to replace it, as there was an opportunity to create direct and more understandable communication. In addition to the fact that you can post content, you can also quickly interact with people there. For example, chat with them.
At that time, Twitter did not have such an opportunity in private messages. Therefore, due to this, the FB very quickly unwound.
Initially, since 2004, Facebook was only available to students from various universities. But since 2006, this network has become available all over the world. In 2008, it became the most popular social network.
After Facebook, Instagram came along in 2011. He became famous for his content in the photo format.
But then I just wanted to view the pictures. The textual accompaniment was no longer important. People just wanted to flip through the photos. Instagram gave them this opportunity.
Then Instagram came to replace Snapchat... It used up-to-date photo content, which becomes unavailable after 24 hours. By the way, this later became available on Instagram.
But why did it become so popular then? And it became popular because people only needed relevant content in real time.
For example, to write a news, a journalist will take time to prepare the material. Arrive at the scene, find out everything, and so on.
But with the emergence of a chance to publish relevant content, we have the opportunity to post material on the go and in real time.
For example, if a car lights up on my street now, then I can immediately shoot a video and post it on the Internet. As a result, users will be able to get up-to-date information as quickly as possible.
But besides the fact that it was possible to receive up-to-date information in Snapchat, there was no way to clearly edit it. It was possible to add some kind of filters. But it was impossible to change it toughly, like on Instagram, then it was impossible.
Social networks in Russia
However, after the addition of pirated music and videos, VK began to take off at an incredible speed. This gave a big leap in development. As a result, it has become much more popular in Russia than Facebook.
Instagram- this is the next leader who is also popular on the Russian Internet. Thanks to the ability to browse posts, this project began to gain popularity.
Facebook- this is the third most popular project in runet. However, for the whole world, it was a cool social network. With us, he moved to another plan after Vkontakte appeared.
Well, the last popular social project in Runet is classmates... In fact, they have nothing unique. It's just that the network itself, the network is developing through searching and communicating with classmates. It was created in 2006.
Here I have listed only the most popular social networks. Of course, there were many more. However, many of them have already been closed. And besides, you cannot consider all projects here. Yes, this is not what.
Why will social media be trending for a long time?
And despite the fact that you and I feel like we have been boiling in this topic for a long time, to the social. networks in the form as they are now, we came not so long ago.
The second point is that these projects are replacing more and more familiar services from life every year. Usually this:
- Calls, sms
- TV
- Online Stores
- Training and so on
The third point is that most large and small businesses are already using social media. It can be assumed that the business itself will force ordinary users to use these resources. For example, follow the news in the group.
That's all!
It is generally accepted that social networks first appeared in the 2000s, although this is not entirely true. Now 50% of the earth's population uses such sites as Facebook, Vkontakte, Twitter and their analogues. All of them were created after 2006, but there are other projects that appeared much earlier.
The first social networks were created back in 1995, although there is still debate about this. The fact is that in 1995 a prototype of social services was created. networks where it was possible to find people, but personal pages were not started there (a kind of database). The resource with the ability to open profiles was created in 1997.
Social networks from A to Z
Initially, the site Classmates.com appeared, which was the base with people who studied somewhere, graduated from something, passed the service, and so on. With the help of this resource it was really possible to find old acquaintances, but it was not very convenient. Now the resource has been completely redesigned and continues to exist for people from all over the world. It quickly made a functional that allows you to open accounts.
As for the project launched in 1997, it can rightfully be called a social network. User pages were already created here and there was functionality that we are used to using now. It was called Sixdegrees.com, and only existed until 2001. This is not surprising, at that time the mass distribution of the Internet did not yet exist, so only not many could spend a lot of time on the Internet. During its existence, it even sold for a lot of money, this is how it looked:
The design is outdated, but what would you expect from a 2000 site. At that time, there was still no technology to improve appearance resources, and the speed of the Internet left much to be desired.
The Sixdegrees website was based on the theory of "Six Handshakes", as described in more detail in the article about. Since the inception of this resource, hundreds of analogues have been launched, but none of them became world famous. Only in 2004, the next social project appeared, which everyone is using now.
The first popular social network
This is Facebook, launched back in 2004. Social networks, which have earned popularity all over the world, are opened by this very resource. However, for the first two years it was corporate and only in 2006 (in September), everyone got the opportunity to register on it, provided that he was over 16 years old and was Email.
It is from 2006 that the emergence of the world of social networks is considered to be, since it was from it that the active popularization of such popular projects as MySpace and LinkedIn began. In the same year, an analogue of Facebook "Vkontakte" appeared, which now deserves the title of the most popular site in Russia and Ukraine.
This list can be continued indefinitely, other analogs soon appeared - Odnoklassniki, Moi Mir, Google + (which was created and redesigned several times) and so on. The era of social networks is now at its peak, but experts are confident that in the future it will become even more developed.
You now know about the first social networks that appeared on the Internet and you can use them not only for entertainment. Use and benefit from visiting your favorite resources. Believe me, this is much better than thoughtlessly flipping through other people's pages, updating the feed and exchanging empty messages.
Before delving into the history of social networking, we first find out where the concept of "social networking" came from. And so, the word "social" comes from the word "Society", which means a structured society, that is, the union of social objects, which are groups of people and people themselves. From this it follows that social networks make it possible to build relationships between these objects on the Internet.
The history of social networks dates back to the seventies of the twentieth century. And in the first ways social. communication on the Internet have become: network conferences that allow you to save the history of communication; e-mail enabling computer networks exchange text information and communication - online, that is, people could communicate in real time. Recall that thanks to the creation of the IRC protocol in the late eighties of the last century, it provided people with the opportunity to exchange information freely. It was the IRC protocol that laid the foundation for the modern concept of "Chat".
Thus, we can safely say that the history of social networks took its beginning. Then came new stage in the development and emergence of new technologies, principles of social. communication on the Internet. And all this has led to the emergence of blogs, guest books and forums.
And so, a real revolutionary breakthrough was made by the American project "Classmates.com", subsequently, the famous and well-known Odnoklassniki portal became a Runet analogue. And this event happened in 1995. From that moment on, the history of social. networks overcame a new milestone and moved to a new quality level.
In 2003 there was a real boom, and all thanks to the emergence of such popular projects among Internet users “Facebook.com and MySpace.com”. From that moment on, social networks have become an integral attribute of the life of every person, one way or another connected with the World Wide Web.
Absolutely all users, except for simple communication with interesting people, were able to exchange various media information with each other, and these are photo files, video files, audio files. In addition to everything just said, for the use of social. networks for the promotion of goods, services, Internet resources - new horizons have opened.
And now some statistics, currently leading social. Western Internet networks were popular and remain as follows: the well-known Facebook portal (more than seven hundred and fifty million users visit it per day), followed by the Twitter portal (to the portal search engines are very supportive, this made it unusually popular among webmasters), and in third place is the international service My Space, which is well-known among musicians and other representatives of art.
What can be said about the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, here, probably, every second user will say that the VKontakte portal dominates, then Odnoklassniki, which lost a little of their popularity with the appearance of the first portal. Well, the third position is taken by the well-known "My World", created on the basis of the portal Mail.ru.
Not everyone knows that the concept of "social network" appeared back in 1954 and, of course, had nothing to do with the Internet, and they began to study this phenomenon back in the 30s of the last century. The concept was introduced by sociologist James Barnes: "social network" is a social structure consisting of a group of nodes that are social objects (people or organizations), and the connections between them (social relationships) (more on Wikipedia). In simpler terms, this is a certain group of familiar people, where the person himself is the center, and his friends are branches. There are two-way or one-way connections between all members of the network. For example, it may be a group of fellow students, in which a certain Jack is the center, and Bill and Catherine are his acquaintances (branches).
Gradually, the scientific concept gained popularity, first in the developed capitalist countries, then in Eastern Europe. As society developed, we came to the information age, in which we created a lot of types of communication, which led to a leap in the development of social networks, and now this scientific concept is used everywhere. I will consider exclusively the development of social networks on the Internet.
A landmark event was the invention of the Internet, which went public in 1991, thanks to the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee.
In 1995, Randy Konrad created Classmates.com - the first social network in the modern sense. The concept turned out to be in great demand, and this year the rapid development of social networks on the Internet begins. Today this network is still one of the most popular in the world and has more than 50 million users.
In 2004, Facebook appears, which for several years becomes the most popular social network in the world. It uses the same communication mechanism, on a slightly different plane, which leads to a revolution in this area. The number of active users in mid-2011 is over 700 million.
In September 2005, Tim O'Reilly made an ideological revolution by introducing the concept of "Web 2.0" in his article "Tim O'Reilly - What Is Web 2.0", which describes the Internet today. Social networks are one of the central parts of the new concept.
In 2008, the Groupon project appeared - a service of collective discounts, which, on the one hand, is based on the principle of social networks (call your friends and get a general discount), and on the other hand, it uses social connections very superficially (only for purchases). The service connects communication and business, which can be confidently called a new level of development of social networks on the Internet, which combines online and offline worlds.
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