The History

First recognizable social network site launched in 1997, SixDegrees.com allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and, beginning in 1998, surf the Friends lists. Each of these features existed in some form before SixDegrees. Profiles existed on most major dating sites and many community sites. Classmates.com which is launched in 1995 allowed people to affiliate with their high school or college mate and surf the network for others who were also affiliated, but users could not create profiles or list friends until years later. SixDegrees was the first to combine these features.

SixDegrees promoted itself as a tool to help people connect with and send messages to others. While SixDegrees attracted millions of users, it failed to become a sustainable business and, in 2000, the service closed. Looking back, its founder believes that SixDegrees was simply ahead of its time. He thinks while people were already flocking to the Internet, most did not have extended networks of friends who were online. Early adopters complained that there was little to do after accepting Friend requests, and most users at that time were not interested in meeting strangers.

From 1997 to 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various combinations of profiles and publicly articulated friends. The site like AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGente allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profiles where users could identify friends on their personal profiles without seeking approval for those connections. Likewise, shortly after its launch in 1999, LiveJournal listed one-directional connections on user pages. LiveJournal's creator suspects that he fashioned these friends after instant messaging buddy lists. On LiveJournal, people mark others as Friends to follow their journals and manage privacy settings. The Korean virtual worlds site Cyworld was started in 1999 and added social networking site features in 2001, independent of these other sites. Likewise, when the Swedish web community LunarStorm refashioned itself as an social networking site in 2000, it contained friends lists, guestbooks, and diary pages.

The next wave of social networking sites began when Ryze.com was launched in 2001 to help people leverage their business networks. Ryze's founder reports that he first introduced the site to his friends—primarily members of the San Francisco business and technology community, including the entrepreneurs and investors behind many future social networking sites. In particular, the people behind Ryze, Tribe.net, LinkedIn, and Friendster were tightly entwined personally and professionally. They believed that they could support each other without competing. In the end, Ryze never acquired mass popularity, Tribe.net grew to attract a passionate niche user base, LinkedIn became a powerful business service, and Friendster became the most significant in that era. As the social media and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing began implementing SNS features and becoming SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr (photo sharing), Last.FM (music listening habits), and YouTube (video sharing).

Timeline of the launch dates of many major SNSs and dates when community sites re-launched with SNS features

They are some social networking sites that successfully create a phenomenon. Three of them are Friendster, Myspace and Facebook.

Friendster -- launched in 2002 as a social complement to Ryze. It was designed to compete with Match.com, a profitable online dating site. While most dating sites focused on introducing people to strangers with similar interests, Friendster was designed to help friends-of-friends meet, based on the assumption that friends-of-friends would make better romantic partners than would strangers. As Friendster's popularity surged, the site encountered technical and social difficulties. Because organic growth had been critical to creating a coherent community, the onslaught of new users who learned about the site from media coverage upset the cultural balance. Users had to face their bosses and former classmates alongside their close friends. To complicate matters, Friendster began restricting the activities of its most passionate users.The initial design of Friendster restricted users from viewing profiles of people who were more than four degrees away (friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends). In order to view additional profiles, users began adding acquaintances and interesting-looking strangers to expand their reach and began massively collecting friends. This features helps Fakester (people who create fake profile on Friendster) to mushroom and make other people loose interest of this site. However, at the same time that it was fading in the U.S., its popularity skyrocketed in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

MySpace -- begun in 2003 to compete with sites like Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue. According to co-founder Tom Anderson ; the founders wanted to attract estranged Friendster users. After rumors emerged that Friendster would adopt a fee-based system, users posted Friendster messages encouraging people to join alternate social networking sites, including Tribe.net and MySpace. Because of this, MySpace was able to grow rapidly by capitalizing on Friendster's alienation of its early adopters. One particularly notable group that encouraged others to switch were indie-rock bands who were expelled from Friendster for failing to comply with profile regulations. Bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth, but the symbiotic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former Friendster users. Futhermore, MySpace differentiated itself by regularly adding features based on user demand and allowing users to personalize their pages. Teenagers began joining MySpace in 2004. Unlike older users, most teens were never on Friendster joined because they wanted to connect with their favorite bands or were introduced to the site through older family members. Then, in July 2005, News Corporation purchased MySpace for $580 million attracting massive media attention. Afterwards, safety issues plagued MySpace. The site was implicated in a series of sexual interactions between adults and minors, prompting legal action. A moral panic concerning sexual predators quickly spread although research suggests that the concerns were exaggerated.

Facebook -- began in early 2004 as a Harvard-only social networking site. To join, a user had to have a harvard.edu email address. As Facebook began supporting other schools, those users were also required to have university email addresses associated with those institutions, a requirement that kept the site relatively closed and contributed to users' perceptions of the site as an intimate, private community. Beginning in September 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students, professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone. The change to open signup did not mean that new users could easily access users in closed networks because gaining access to corporate networks still required the appropriate .com address, while gaining access to high school networks required administrator approval. The difference feature of Facebook is the ability for outside developers to build "Applications" which allow users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, such as compare movie preferences and chart travel histories.