Social Websites When social media first appeared, people were civil for the most part. The reason for this was partly because those people who had computers in the early days were wowed by the fact they could actually converse with others and leave their messages to be read by others. These people were sort of pioneers. They appreciated the fact there was a new ability being offered and it was great. I remember those days and they were really not so long ago. The first modern social network is considered to be Six Degrees. Social networks were actually the result of scientists learning how to create networks between computers. Six Degrees was founded in 1996 and was launched in 1997 and sold in 2000. There were social media sites before that and one was CompuServe. This site was created in the 1960s and around that time email was created. You know what email is, it is a form of communication where Nigerian con men send you a message stating they need you to store millions of dollars for their prince and you will be paid a large fee. There really weren’t enough computers around before the 1980s to take advantage of social media and some of the ones people had were just too primitive to be of much use. It really wasn’t until almost the 1980s, before people could communicate online in any form. Some sites created a sort of world which you were in rather than being on an open net. One of these was AOL. AOL opened up for business in 1985. AOL stands for America Online. The creator of AOL, Steve Case, originally wanted to create an online bulletin board for Commodore 64 owners. The Commodore 64 was an incredibly popular computer at the time, because of its capabilities and its low price compared to the others for sale. The site was going to be called Quantum Computer Services. He changed the name of the site to AOL in 1991. Many people signed up, because while they could rummage around AOL and find a lot of things that interested them including email accounts, they could also gain access to the rest of the internet. In 1997 AOL bought CompuServe and a year later bought Netscape. It got so popular at one point the servers became overloaded which caused problems, but AOL continued to grow. As incredible as this sounds, when the year 2000 arrived they were worth 125 billion dollars. Amazingly AOL still has a site. It is amazing how many social networks were started by college kids who had an idea. Take Yahoo for example. I thought, who would ever name anything Yahoo? That just goes to show you how out of the loop I was. It was a hip name and I was too old at the time to realize it. In 1994 two guys who were electrical engineering grad students created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". It was basically an index of other websites. Its name was changed later to Yahoo. It started to make other acquisitions and the price of its stock skyrocketed. At one point a share was worth $118.75. It became a web portal in the 1990s. A web portal is a website which brings information from other sources and has email, forums and search engines among other things and Yahoo was good at it. Times change however and sometimes competition increases and companies are no longer as powerful as they once were. The founders of Yahoo left and today Marissa Mayer a former Google executive and Walmart corporate director is the CEO of Yahoo. We tend to think of search engine companies as places where information can be found, but sometimes they are so much more. One of the greatest examples of this is Google. Google was also established by students, although they were PhD undergrads. Google began ACas a research project. If you read the definition of what Google is you will probably see it is an internet related company specializing in services and products. That hardly describes what Google has become. It is a giant in the field of search engines, self-driving cars, maps and even hardware at times. It was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They still own 14 percent of the stock and control 56 percent of the voting through supervoting stock. I think most of us use the Google search engine as our primary search engine and many use the Google Chrome web browser. Many kids are using the Google Chrome operating system in schools and Google has taken a page from Apple and supplied schools with Google Chrome computers. Google has expanded so much since its roots, it is hard to know exactly what they own. We know they control YouTube, a video sharing website. They supply email, all sorts of tools for web advertising and one of the very best free pieces of free software, known as “Google Earth.” Some people believe Google is worth more than one trillion dollars and is the first company to reach this plateau, but it is hard to tell what their true value is. Another social media site is Linkedin. Linkedin was launched in 2003. As time went by the features on the site began to increase. The idea was for people in business to meet others. It introduced jobs and subscriptions allowing people to search for jobs which were listed by category. With business people online, it gave prospective employees a better chance of being considered. Job categories were introduced and you can now look for jobs in your field. Examples of this are Management, Sales, Engineering, Information Technology, Healthcare and Finance. This also gave employers access to professionals seeking employment. Today there are about 1,800,000 people on Linkedin and the site is meeting with success. When will the next big idea come along for a new type of social website? Some people are already saying there is no room left for a new social media site to gain any traction. I don’t know if this is true, but there are a lot of social media sites out there. If new ones come along it seems they will have to offer abilities the others don’t. Perhaps virtual reality or 3D. Whatever the case, if someone thinks they can put up a social website which is another Facebook or Twitter I think they might be barking up the wrong tree, but I have been wrong before. |
