How social networks appeared. Who are these people or what did you know about the creators of social networks? Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg
With the advent of the Internet, many aspects of our life have gradually migrated to the virtual world. And communication was no exception, rather the opposite. The human need for high-speed communication (information transfer) became the basis for the appearance of the Internet itself. While the older generation still remembers well about live forms of communication, the younger generation increasingly prefers virtual communications. Sometimes it comes to the point that even neighbors communicate with each other via the Internet.
The emergence of social networks was a consequence of the development and spread of the Internet. Today, many people start their morning not only with a cup of coffee, but also with viewing their page on a particular social network. According to statistics, about 50% of the population of our planet regularly visit their page on any social network, and some even visit several at once. The data on youth speaks best about their popularity: 96% of young people communicate in social networks. networks. And they really addictive, it's not for nothing that the Internet was nicknamed the World Wide Web. After all, if some insect gets into the spider's web, then it remains there forever.
In principle, we can say that the birth of social networks began almost simultaneously with the emergence of the Internet back in 1969. Throughout the evolution of social networks, two main directions of development can be distinguished: purely professional communities and non-specialized networks. Derived from professional communities are networks that unite people with the same interests or hobbies.
So, when did the first social network appear and what was it like? - different sources put forward different opinions regarding the emergence of the first full-fledged social network. In principle, Classmates.com, created by Randy Conrads in 1995, can be considered the first social networking resource. Classmates translates to classmates. The site provided users with the opportunity to reconnect with former classmates, classmates, co-workers, friends. Today this network has over 50 million users in the US and Canada. In addition, its services are available to residents of Sweden, Germany, Austria and France. But for quite a long time this social portal did not support the functions of creating personal profiles and adding friends. That is, the user could only be connected to his educational institution and provide him with a list of those who studied at this institution.
That is why some researchers believe that the first full-fledged social network is not Classmates, but the SixDegrees.com project, which was launched in 1997. At that time, many web services (dating sites, for example) offered features such as creating a personal page or friends list (ICQ and AIM), but separately. SixDegrees.com was the first social networking service to combine these functions, and over time (in 1998) added new ones, such as searching friends pages. This project was the closest to modern social. networks, however, in 2001 the portal SixDegrees.com ceased to exist. The founder of the network, Andrew Weinreich, explained this by the fact that the service was simply ahead of its time. In 2000, less than half of US residents had access to the Internet. In other words, the registered users did not have enough friends and acquaintances with access to the Internet to make communication on this site even interesting.
Every day more than 60 million people from around the world visit one of the most popular social networks - VKontakte. Who created this project and how did it come about? Considering that the history of the creation of the service itself deserves attention, we invite you to go back a few years and see where it all began and what path preceded such an enchanting success. And the emergence of VKontakte is closely related to the name of one of the most prominent figures among the representatives of the new generation of entrepreneurs - Pavel Durov.
Despite the fact that the fame of Durov's main project brought him great fame, there is not so much information about the creator of the best social network on the Runet.
Childhood
The one who created the VKontakte network was born in Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg) on \u200b\u200bOctober 10, 1984, in the family of the famous Soviet philologist Valery Semyonovich Durov, the author of a large number of scientific works.
For several years, Durov Sr.with his family lived in where the head of the family worked. It was there that Pavel began to go to school. Upon returning to his native Petersburg, he continued his studies in a regular school, but not too long - too often he had to point out to the teachers their incompetence, with which the boy could not accept. However, an alternative was found quickly enough - a whole group was recruited into the experimental classes of the Academic Gymnasium, such as Durov Jr.
During his school years, Pavel sat at the first desk, often alone, received high scores and was considered a very erudite child, but the "stars" of the class - the winners of various Olympiads - overshadowed him. Nikolai, Durov's older brother, a talented scientist, also won competitions in computer science and mathematics.
University admission
Immediately after graduating from the gymnasium, Pavel Durov, following in his father's footsteps, enters the St. Petersburg State University, the Faculty of Philology, and graduates in 2006. In his student years, the one who created the VKontakte social network did not go with the flow like most students, but actively used the time for self-improvement and development.
First steps towards success
The key moment in the entrepreneur's biography was approaching - the emergence of VKontakte. You already know who created this one. However, few people know that even before her appearance, while studying at the university, Pavel worked on several predecessor projects. One of them was the durov.com site, which had no commercial benefit, but helped students who studied and lived in different parts of the northern capital to exchange views and ideas online.
However, soon Pavel let the work of durov.com take its course and turned his attention to a new project - the university forum spbgu.ru, starting to promote it. First of all, Durov broke the portal into faculty sites, then began to initiate verbal battles, registered under different nicknames and argued with himself, and in real life he organized beauty and design contests. Meanwhile, the attendance of the forum reached 3000 people per day, the resource began to enrich with new social functions. Users were able to blog, raise or lower each other's ratings. Pavel was especially careful about monetization, not allowing banners not related to education to appear on the site.
By the end of his studies, Durov was firmly convinced that he needed to deal with his own projects, and not translations from English, as indicated in the diploma. By the way, he never took the diploma himself, so as not to run into bureaucracy once again.
At the dawn of a new era
We continue to study the biography of the one who created the social. network "VKontakte". Against the background of his other ideas, Durov has long thought about implementing such a project, where all people could act under their real names. Just at this turning point, in his mailbox there was a letter from a person with whom Pavel had lost contact 7 years ago - Vyacheslav Mirilashvili. A student at the prestigious American Tufts University saw social media gaining popularity rapidly, and gave the idea to an old acquaintance.
Should they start a little later, the chances of success would be much lower. In the spring of 2006, the number of users in domestic social networks continued to grow, but even the audience of the leader, the Odnoklassniki website, barely reached 500,000.
Beginning of work
Vyacheslav did not have his own funds to launch the project. He had to borrow them from one of the companies of his father, Mikhail Mirilashvili, the owner of the St. Petersburg Conti casinos and the PetroMir shopping and entertainment complexes. Mirilashvili Sr. is one of the most famous businessmen in the northern capital of the 90s and is believed to be a good friend of President Vladimir Putin.
Friends founded a company in which Vyacheslav stayed, and his friends Pavel Durov and Lev Leviev became. Durov was not at all embarrassed by the fact that the project could be associated with a false name. But he retained for himself a package of voting shares sufficient to veto unwanted decisions.
On October 1, 2006, a key event took place - the company registered the vkontakte.ru domain. This day is considered the birthday of VKontakte. Who created this site, you now know. It's time to talk about the development of the project itself.
At first, the site was closed, and registration was possible only by invitation. Registration was allowed only for those who indicated their real name and surname. Students of the capital's universities vied with each other to persuade each other to register, and in just a few November days, the newly appeared social network attracted more than 2,000 users. And the main motive was participation in the competition, which, again, was invented by Pavel Durov - the one who created the VKontakte website. The one who was able to invite the largest number of friends was promised an original and expensive present at that time - a real iPod.
After 3 months, free registration was introduced, and the rapidly growing number of participants in the social network prompted the organizers to switch to more powerful servers and actively improve the system.
Further development of "VKontakte"
Now you know how the VKontakte social network appeared, who created it and continued to develop it. These days, the site is constantly changing and improving. It can be said without exaggeration that VKontakte has become a whole world for those who like to communicate, find new friends, listen to music, watch videos, play games, read news and interesting notes.
With the development of technology Web 2.0 social networks have found a tangible basis in the form of portals and web services. So, having found a complete stranger for yourself on one of these sites, you can see a chain of intermediate acquaintances through which you are connected with him.
The emergence of social networks was a consequence of the development and spread of the Internet itself. According to statistics, about 50% of the population of our planet are members of some social network, and some even several at once. The data on youth speaks best about their popularity: 96% of young people communicate on social networks.
In principle, the emergence of social networks began almost with the birth of the Internet itself in 1969 year. Social networks began their victorious march on the Internet in 1995 year from the American portal Classmates.com (Odnoklassniki.ru is its Russian counterpart). The project turned out to be very successful, which over the next few years provoked the emergence of more than a dozen similar services. But 2003-2004 is considered to be the official start of the social media boomwhen LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook were launched.
And if LinkedIn was created with the aim of establishing / maintaining business contacts, then the owners of MySpace and Facebook relied primarily on satisfying the human need for self-expression. Indeed, according to Maslow's pyramid, it is self-expression that is the highest human need, ahead of even recognition and communication. Social networks have become a kind of Internet haven where everyone can find a technical and social basis for creating their own virtual "I". At the same time, each user got the opportunity not only to communicate and create, but also to share the fruits of their creativity with the multimillion audience of a particular social network.
the first- these are social networks of the mid-90s, pioneers with the simplest functionality;
secondIs the creation of social networks with broader functionality for basic interaction (from 2000 to the present day), and the last
thirdsome are social networks that solve specific problems: employee search (business networks), games (gaming networks), information search (content networks), etc. According to this theory, we are now gradually moving from the second stage to the third.
Background
Classmates.com
so 
, various researchers suggest considering the very first
socially o-network resource network Classmates.com, created by Randy Conrads in 1995. The site provided users with the opportunity to reconnect with former classmates, classmates, colleagues,
friends. The network operates to this day and has more than 50 million users in the USA and Canada. In addition, its services are available to residents of Sweden, Germany, Austria and France. But for quite a long time this social portal did not support the functions of creating personal profiles and adding friends. That is, the user could only be connected to his educational institution and provide him with a list of students at this institution.
SixDegrees.com
based on the theory of six handshakes
Some researchers consider it the first full-fledged social network not Classmates, but the SixDegrees.com project, launched in 1997. At the time, many web services offered features such as
creating a personal page or a list of friends, but separately. SixDegrees.com was the first social networking service to combine these features, and over time (in 1998) added new ones such as friend search.
This project was closest to modern social networks, however, in 2001, the SixDegrees.com portal ceased to exist. The founder of the network, Andrew Weinreich, explained this by the fact that the service was simply ahead of its time. In 2000, less than half of US residents had access to the Internet. In other words, the registered users did not have enough friends and acquaintances with access to the Internet to make communication on this site even interesting.
First of all, attention should be paid to the mechanism of the formation of social ties and the type of information dissemination. There are three key points that directly affect the classification of the social world. So, for example, for the traditional first generation service of the “Web 2.0” era, they have the following features:
1 - Users find those people they know in real life and decide whether it is interesting to communicate with them or not.
2 - Users find the information they are interested in on their own.
3 - Information is distributed virally, as public messages. There is no choice of target audience for a specific information flow .
LiveJournal.comThe first blog hosting
In 1999, an American student programmer opened the service
Livejournal.com. A fairly detailed profile could be created there. Service soon
provided the ability to add contacts (friends). Livejournal became the first
massive hosting of blogs (electronic diaries) and the first Western social
a service that has become popular in Russia. By the number of Russian users are
in second place after American.
Swedish appeared in 2000 LunarStorm, in 2001 - Korean Cyworld.
Ryze.com
Business Network
Social networks of the second wave.
MySpace.com
Third generation networks
Faceebook
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg (a student from Harvard) launched the Facebook portal, which today is the largest social networkyu. But initially registration was only available to Harvard students. Gradually, students from other universities, and then schoolchildren, gained access to Facebook. By 2008, Facebook took the palm from MySpace and became the world's largest social network, the service of which is available in 40 languages. And its founder became the youngest billionaire that year.
FB is a model of an old social platform, which today can hardly cope with the task before it and does not at all correspond to the requirements of our time. This giant keeps afloat only due to its authority, which is facilitated by a number of very important factors.
Twitte
r
American programmer Jack Dorsey launched the Twitter project in 2006, which was the most dynamically developing among new social networking projects. The service is compared to a regular blog hosting, but the specifics of working with it, the form of the service, as well as the style of messages are somewhat different than in blogs. In 2008, during the Mumbai terrorist attack, Twitter provided evidence that the evolution of social media has led to new ways of learning about the media.
INkontakte is a leader in the CIS
Odnoklassniki.ru
Interactive websites (online services) on the Internet, created for communication and exchange of information by groups of users, united by one or another social feature (hobby, profession, territory of residence, rest or work).
The history of social networking dates back to 1997. And the first social network was SixDegrees.com. And the heyday of social networks began in 2003 - 3004, when such services as MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook appeared on the Internet and rapidly gained the number of users.
And in 1988, the Finnish student Yarko Oikarinen invented the IRC technology (English Internet Relay Chat), which allowed communication in real time.
The tipping point was the invention of the Internetwhich went public in 1991 thanks to 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.
The purpose of the social network was an attempt to prove the "theory of six handshakes" ("Six degrees separation" in English terminology). This theory is one of the main ones in the study of social ties, its essence lies in the fact that any 2 people on Earth are connected with each other by a chain of acquaintances of a maximum of 6 people. SixDegrees already offered such functions: creating your own page, a list of friends and finding friends on a social network.
The project began to gain popularity quickly. In 2000, it was sold for $ 125 million. However, in 2001, this social network ceased to exist.
On March 18, 1999, American software student Brad Fitzpatrick created the Livejournal.
This service later became a massive blog hosting and is very popular in the CIS countries. Livejournal provided for the first time the ability to create groups and communicate in them. Today we see it on all major social media platforms.
Ryze, created in 2001, became the first web resource focused on finding and maintaining business contacts.
It was this project that became the impetus for the creation of more famous projects such as Friendster and LinkedIn.
In 2002, Jonathan Abrams developed the Friendster dating site.
The uniqueness of this social network was that it did not follow the path of its predecessors without trying to make friends with two strangers. The main idea of \u200b\u200bthe site was to help people find new friends and acquaintances in their friends lists. This innovation allowed the site to collect 3 million users in the first 3 months of its existence. At the moment, more than 115 million people are registered on the resource around the world.
In the same year, in December, the social network LinkedIn was created.
The social network was launched in May 2003 by Reed Hoffman. The purpose of this social network was to find and establish business contacts. LinkedIn currently has over 200 million registered users, representing over 150 business industries in over 200 countries.
It provides the ability to create personal profiles, customize the appearance of your profiles, create communities of interest, post photos, videos and audios of famous artists.
Upon registration, everyone received their own blog. These advantages made MySpace the most popular social network in the world in 2006. Rock bands became the main users of MySpace. For many musicians, this site has become a real platform for self-presentation, as well as an opportunity to communicate with their idols, sometimes even be among their friends.
But at the moment, MySpace's rating is falling every day, yielding positions to the larger and more popular social networks. In terms of the popularity of sites in 2009, MySpace was in 5th place, and at the beginning of 2013 it had already dropped to 229th place.
In 2004, Ludicorp launched the Flickr project. The creators of this idea are Stuart Butterfield and Catherine Fake.
The goal of the project was to allow Game Neverending players to save their images during the game in order to upload them on the Internet in the future. The service immediately began to enjoy great popularity, and in 2005 Flickr was bought by Yahoо and became available to any Internet user.
In 2004, TheFacebook social network was founded by Mark Zuckerberg.
In 2005, the network became known as Facebook. The initial goal of the social network was to provide an opportunity for Harvard University students to communicate with each other, post photos, videos, change statuses online.
In 2008, the social network Facebook became the most popular social network in the whole world, and since that period it has never lost its leadership. Throughout its existence, Facebook has constantly added new features, including instant messaging, chat, many applications. There is also its own platform for developers. Facebook today is the 2nd most popular website in the world, behind the 1st position of the Google search engine.
In addition to simple communication with people of interest to them, all users got the opportunity to exchange various media information with each other - audio, video and photo files. In addition, new horizons have opened up for using social networks to promote Internet resources, goods and services.
The number of active users as of 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.
Jack Dorsey launched Twitter in 2006 and immediately became a rapidly growing new social networking project. What makes Twitter unique is the ability for users to send short text messages (up to 140 characters). Initially, the goal of the project was to provide an opportunity for a person to answer simple questions "What are you doing now?" "What are you doing now?" etc. The answer was immediately available to all people who subscribed to this user. This innovation allowed to quickly conquer the market and expand functionality.
So, since 2010, you can watch photos, videos on the site, and the functioning of the site has become faster and easier. At the moment, Twitter is one of the 10 most visited sites in the world, taking the honorable 8th place at the beginning of 2013.
The Odnoklassniki project was launched on March 4, 2006 by Albert Popkov. The main task of the social network was to find classmates, classmates, former graduates, friends, acquaintances, as well as relatives with whom contact was lost. In 2012, the site had over 150 million registered users and this number continues to increase every day.
The most famous and popular social network in the CIS "Vkontakte" was launched on October 10, 2006 and positioned itself as a social network for university graduates. Today, the daily website traffic is over 42 million users and is the most popular and most visited resource in the CIS market. In 2012, Vkontakte switched to a new domain VK.com. Today Vkontakte is the largest video and audio hosting on the Russian Internet.
Social networks are increasingly becoming an important communication channel for the business environment. Social networks allow solving a number of marketing tasks (in particular, conducting PR and advertising campaigns), monitoring and analyzing the activities of competitors, sharing experiences with colleagues, and being close and accessible to customers. In addition, social networks (especially industry-specific) can act as an effective tool for resolving personnel issues, and be a platform for meeting employers and potential employees.
It's good that now we have the Internet, with the help of which you can communicate with people and for this you no longer have to make personal appointments. The delights of the World Wide Web were appreciated by many, in particular, the benefits of social networks. Due to the appearance of these resources, now you can maintain your page for free, share photos, communicate and much more.
Many fans of surfing the Internet are interested in what was the first social network that launched this direction. In this regard, opinions differ and now we will present you with 4 controversial versions that are still being discussed. After reading them, you yourself will draw conclusions about who became the first in this niche.
When did the first social network appear?
Before introducing the first version, I would like to remind you that social networks are sites designed to build and organize social relationships. Simply put, these are resources for people to communicate within a specific group. From this we can conclude that the category of social sites includes many types of sites, including forums, blog platforms, and so on.
The first sites where people could register and communicate with other users appeared with the launch of the Internet. In 1969, it was already possible to start a page on the network and chat with another person without getting up from the computer. Naturally, the sites were very different from modern ones, so many argue whether this is related to social networks at all.
Most people claim that the first social network was created in 1995 - this is the second version. Then a project called Classmates appeared (translated as Odnoklassniki). Through it one could find classmates, classmates, co-workers and other old acquaintances.
Why is this version not the main one? The fact is that it was impossible to create profiles on this site, it was a large database where people could actually be found, but no more. The site works today, and the problem with the lack of profiles for registered users was quickly eliminated.
Full social network - SixDegrees (1997)
But this project can take first place among social networks, as it possessed all the basic functions of modern analogues. It could be used to create profiles, and its development was based on the theory of six handshakes. The resource quickly gained popularity and was even sold for a large sum.
However, it closed in 2001 and its founder stated that he entered the market too early. It is not clear why the project was closed; most likely, there was simply not enough money. Within a few years, this niche was occupied by other leaders. Only because of the quick closure and small existence, some do not accept this version.
Facebook is the most popular network
To date, many social networks have been created, it is already difficult to talk about who stole the idea and from whom. In 2004, Facebook appeared, which was a corporate network for students, but very quickly went beyond these boundaries. In 2006, its audience began to grow sharply as free registration opened.
Most modern users think that the first social network is Facebook. Not many people know such names of sites as Classmates, SixDegrees, LunarStorm, Cyworld, Ryze. All this and they were created much earlier than Facebook.