History of Social Networking (bomb, general, Mexico, 90s)

[tvdxer]

What's YOUR history of social networking?

I'm 25, so I was born at the ideal time to witness the evolution of social networking.

Here's how it was for me as well as students at my school:

1995: First connected to CompuServe at age 8. Nobody my age there.

1996: First connected to the Internet at age 9, through AOL. One person my age there.

1996 - 1999: Internet grows rapidly around the area, at least for the middle class.

1999-2000: AOL Instant Messenger becomes very popular with my age peers (then mostly 12 and 13).

2000 - 2002: Era of the template-made "personal web page" (Expage was very popular). Students from all groups have them, as they are very easy to construct and require no knowledge of HTML, just typing in the content in boxes. Pages often consisted of a brief self-description, possibly a scanned picture or an e-mail chain survey, and almost invariably, a "shout outs" section. Viewers could interact with the author through a guest book, though the interactions were mostly one-way. This, in my mind, is the precursor to the modern "Wall". I find it hard to believe that the "personal web page" phenomenon is never brought up in discussions of the history of social networking.

2003 - 2005: Some students from my district create accounts on Xanga, which is a social networking website oriented around a journaling format (essentially blog entries). Pretty much all students in a neighboring high school have Xanga accounts.

2005 - 2006: We graduate in 2005. Upon creating a MySpace account in early 2006, I see about half of my class on there.

2006: I enter college in September; get a college e-mail account in July. The moment I got it I created a Facebook account, which then required an e-mail address at a qualifying college, high school, or corporation. I see about half of my high school class on there, as I took a year off between high school and college. Their accounts date back to around September - October 2005. Most of them also have a MySpace account.

Facebook expands to everybody above age 13 in September 2006, although initially the uptake is slow, and the site remains primarily collegiate. MySpace still dominates the non-college crowd.

Although both sites had rudimentary profile security features, they were rarely used. You could view almost any MySpace profile, which were often grotesquely complex. Almost all profiles had a "profile song" which immediately played upon loading the profile. Facebook was a cleaner site oriented around "networks"; you had access to the profiles within your network/s (for example, your college), but had to "friend" people if they happened to go to another school or otherwise be outside your network. All profiles were standardized.

2007: MySpace begins its tremendous, but initially slow, decline as the number of individuals not associated with a college flocking to Facebook increases, perhaps because of the inconsistency and slow loading time of MySpace profiles. Most migrants to Facebook leave their MySpace accounts open, but their profiles go unused and are not updated.

2008-2009: Twitter becomes popular among the savvy and sophisticated, but not many others.

2009-2010: The Facebook domino effect leads to many older adults creating accounts on the site. Mobile social networking becomes commonplace as smart phone penetration rapidly increases. Many in the lower and working classes and minority populations open Facebook accounts, perhaps because of its availability on cellular phones, which they seem more likely to own and use than computers.

Twitter becomes widespread in Mexico, where it is used as a means for normal people to warn others of safety and crime concerns. Most celebrities create Twitter accounts, which are used for communications to fans.

Several news sites add "Share on Facebook" links, which are used often.

2011: Pinterest becomes common.

[ilovemycomputer90]

I joined myspace at the end of my freshman year of high school (spring 2006) and practically spent the next two years on it 24/7. Around that time I also created an AIM account and used it to chat with friends throughout high school. Up until a year ago I still used it occasionally to keep in touch with a friend from high school, but then I deleted the program off my computer. I remember trying to stay logged in for days at a time, but getting annoyed when a lost connection or some other reason forced me to sign off - lol.

I joined facebook right at the beginning of senior year (September 2008) and I've been on it ever since. I deleted my myspace account about two years ago (maybe slightly more), though it was dormant for quite a while before that.

I was pretty active on myspace, but I'm basically just a lurker on facebook with a relatively empty profile. Nice to see what's going on with my former classmates and family though.

[NJGOAT]

I was born in 1980. I'm not 100% firm on the dates...

~1990: Started logging in via modem to BBS sites. My friends father down the street ran a BBS, so that is where I spent most of my time. Outside of posting on the forums there, games were also very popular like "Trade Wars 2000" (go ANSI graphics!). You had to earn credits for playing the games by posting content to the site. BBS's were also famous for their porn collections, lol. Average modem speed was 1,200-2,400bps.

~1994: Got AOL 2.0 which was still the "walled garden" version of AOL. There was plenty to do and the chat rooms were ever popular, though it was mainly "stranger" interaction as it was rare to communicate with your actual friends on AOL. If you wanted to have a non-public conversation you had to "go private" in a custom made chatroom that you had to be invited to enter. Most chats started out with the ubiquitous age/sex/location question. Average modem speed was 9,600-14,400bps.

~1995: Got AOL 2.5 which was the first version that allowed access to the internet. While it was novel that you could "surf the net" there wasn't a whole lot out there, or at least not much that wasn't just available on AOL and most people stuck with just hanging out on AOL.

~1996: AOL added the original version of instant messenger through a "Buddy List". This allowed people on AOL to talk to each other in pop-up windows. This quickly became the preferred method for talking to people that you knew. Inevitably if you went into a chat room and answered the age/sex/location question you would get bombarded with pop-up windows from pedophiles who wanted to "cyber". Picture sharing was rudimentary then as it was mainly scanned or uploaded photos that would be sent in e-mails. By now average modem speeds were around 28,800bps and 56,600 was just starting to become available.

~1997: My house being in the Comcast home market was one of the initial launch cities for Comcast Online, one of the first retail cable broadband options. Being an online gamer, this was huge as even with a 56,600 connection a lot of the games suffered from major lag. At the time Warcraft II was one of the most popular multi-player games, but playing over modem was 'wonky' at best and most who wanted to play had to know someone locally to have a 'LAN party'. Getting the cable broadband that was around 3mbps was a huge jump in speed and made all of the games that had a multiplayer ability playable. So, in with Comcast, out with AOL that was already on its deathbed. FWIW, I solidly count multi-player online gaming as "social networking".

~1998: Went to college and the most required program was AIM that allowed you to chat with anyone you wanted. The colleges intranet was also great as you had high speed internet and a huge network. Multi-player gaming was gaining in popularity and Starcraft was a popular title. Everyone took "intro to internet" classes that focused around basic HTML coding and had you develop your own webpage. These were basically as tvdxer desribed, but no one really cared about them beyond passing the class.

~2000: Napster was getting huge and everyone was downloading music left and right as well as changing their CD collections to MP3 format. At school everyone started putting up readable partitions on the network that contained their music collections. You could find just about anything you wanted and have it for free. Burning custom CD's was a normal thing. Again, this was "social networking" at least in my opinion as there was a strong social element to it with people sharing unique music or trying to get people to listen to something new.

Things stayed pretty much at this level for me until...

~2004: I was very into car racing and was a member of a local car club. We were making extensive use of forums for promoting the club and organizing events. This is the beginning of my return to forums, which basically felt like an updated version of the old BBS's I used to post on. My club eventually created it's own forum and webpage and that forum became an easy way to chat with my friends in a more private manner.

~2005: Started hearing my younger friends who were 19-22 talking about something called MySpace. When I first saw it, it reminded of those crappy webpages we had to build in college, mixed with a bit of the old posting systems on the BBS's. Of course, the cool part, at least to me, was the photo posting and the fact that it was so accessible and easy to use. I joined and immediately was finding friends from college and high school as well as current friends. The funnest part was being able to search out old friends and see what they were up to. The worst part was having people you would have much rather forgotten existed seek you out and pester you and want to be "your friend". Well check that, maybe the worst part was all of the "custom pages" with horrible graphics and backgrounds and pounding music you had to search for the button to turn off.

~2007: I completely abanonded MySpace and outside of some of the traditional forums that I posted on I was pretty much done with social networking. I simply prefer the anonymity of being able to post to a forum and discuss topics with broad ranges of people. When it comes to my actual friends, that is done with email, texts and *gasp* actual phone calls.

Overall, my view is that none of this is really new. Anything done on social networks has been going on since the 1980's/1990's in some capacity. What has changed is the number of people involved, the speed of the connection/accessibility and the way these 'tools' are organized. It is also incredibly fad driven and always has been. When AOL was at it's peak in the mid-90's it was viewed as some monolithic monster that would never go away. Of course, go away it did. Same thing with the use of AIM, MySpace and countless others. I honestly think Facebook will die sooner or later as will Twitter, just to be replaced with something newer, sleeker and hipper. Maybe I'll jump on the next bandwagon, lol.

[Debsi]

My first social networking was IRC (internet relay chat) back in the early 90's. Used dial-up modem at 2400 BAUD connection speed. At the beginning, there would only be about 100 people in the whole world on IRC at a time.

We got to meet students from all over the world, as when they would come to America as tourists they would stop in and see our family when they were in San Diego. Some of them stayed with us for a few days. That was back before you weren't supposed to trust anybody you talked to on the internuts..

[Dd714]

Oh I remember AOL in the 90s, that evil company. Back then internet usage was charged by hour, or like 10 hours per month and then an hourly fee after that, and everything was controlled by AOL - intrusive search engines, internet tools, etc. AOL software would come through the mail about every 2 weeks, inserts in magazines, handout everywher, and they seemed unstopable. Trying to cancel AOL accounts was almost impossible.

The decline of AOL and the increase in competition is the best thing to happen to the internet in history.

[WyoNewk]

1992: Joined General Electric Network for Information Exchange (GEnie). Met my late wife. (Married 1993)
1994: Joined AOL for 6 months.
1995: Got Netscape and joined the WWW.
1996: Built my first web page.
1997: Met my current wife online. (Married 2002)
2008: Joined City-Data.
2010: Joined Facebook.

[sskkc]

OP is wrong... I started a FB account in late 2005 - and I didn't have a college, high school or corporate email address. Used my hotmail address for it.