Social Network History – So Much So Fast

Almost immediately after man first appeared on earth, he began to band together with others for the security and fruits of teamwork that this bonding offered. In this crude and unplanned form social networking began. As civilization developed, families bonded together into tribes for the same purpose and then into villages, cities and countries – each stage was a development of the social network. But within these evolving social networks there soon emerged smaller groups of fraternities and unions which were made of people with more specific common objectives.

Even until the late 20th century, these social networks were limited by the need to be in physical proximity to each other – a need that disappeared when the internet arrived. Modern networking, as we know it, began in the early part of the 1980s with the creation of Bulletin Board Services (BBS). The BBS was an amateur operation run by people who wanted to promote their own agendas and controlled what was placed on the boards. The bulletin boards were, by modern standards, very basic – only text could be up loaded – and very slow because communication was limited to modems and dial up connections.

Around the time of the BBS, a service called CompuServe also came into being; but it was aimed at business users who could share files and access news on it. CompuServe had one great innovation – it allowed users to send electronic messages to one another – the beginnings of easily accessed email. These facilities meant that the demand for CompuServe grew and it soon became part of the public domain – accessible to anyone with a modem. CompuServe was followed by America Online, or AOL as we know it today, which took the next step of offering members the facilities to create their own communities as well as member profiles that were searchable.

Yahoo was soon to follow with a host of networking facilities but the first modern social networking site was Classmates.com – a service that continues to today. Classmates.com allowed for not just communities, but for locating long lost school friends and establishing online contact with them. This concept was picked up by others and soon demographic dedicated sites offering networking opportunities to specific population groups came into being – 1997’s AsianAvenues.com, a site dedicated to promoting networking among people of Asian origin being just one of them. From here it was only a matter of time before the concept grew into large completely open social networking sites that allowed millions of members to search, find and link up with both old friends and business associates as well as new ones that could be met online. Today Twitter allows for instantaneous real time networking and its growth potential seems endless; but it is just the latest stage in the ongoing story of social networking.