Serendipity35

 

Mark Zuckerberg was testifying recently in a landmark antitrust trial brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Meta. The FTC alleges that Meta, through its acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, has unfairly maintained a monopoly in the social networking market. The government claims these purchases were part of a strategy to "neutralize" competitors and stifle innovation

I wrote a post here in 2006 when Facebook first became available to the general public. Initially, it was launched in 2004 as "TheFacebook" and was limited to Harvard students. Over time, it expanded to other universities and eventually opened up to anyone aged 13 or older with a valid email address in 2006. I have repurposed that old post here in an updated version.

I jumped in right away. I was at a university, and I immediately thought this would be big with students, and that the faculty needed to know what it was about. The faculty was not interested in the presentations I offered. I did one on "social media" and where it was headed.

Facebook wasn't the first or the only player.

• MySpace was very popular at the time, and it was the go-to platform for music lovers and personal profiles.
• YouTube launched in 2005 and was gaining traction as the place for video sharing.
• Flickr was the favorite for photo sharing and had amateur as well as professional photographers.
• LinkedIn: Focused on professional networking, it was already carving out its niche.
• Friendster's popularity was waning, but it was still a notable player in the early social media scene.
• The lesser-known Orkut gained popularity in Brazil and India but not in the U.S. It was Google's failed attempt at social networking.

In 2004, the soon-to-be social networking giant was a baby called "The Facebook.” The19-year-old co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg needed to explain the concept behind the site,. Check out this explanation he did in his first-ever television interview with CNBC on April 28, 2004.

In my 2006 post, I wrote about the American fascination with turning nouns into verbs, so for a time people were saying that you could be "facebooked."  That verb meant the action of 1) looking someone up on Facebook or 2) asking someone to be your friend on Facebook.
"I Facebooked that girl I met at the party last night, and she Facebooked me this morning, so now we're friends."

You could also "poke" someone which was a suggestive term for a kind of gentle message without content. You could send an email-style message to them or leave a message on their "wall."

It is interesting to read what Zuckerberg said 19 years ago about the website and consider where it is today. The definition of Facebook, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2006:

"The idea for the website was motivated by a social need at Harvard to be able to identify people in other residential houses. Harvard is a fairly unfriendly place. While each residential house listed directories of their residents, I wanted one online directory where all students could be listed. And I've always enjoyed building things and puttering around with computer code, so I sat down and in about a week I had produced the basic workings of the site. 
We had a launch plan to enter into other colleges based on where friends would be most likely to overlap, so the site spread organically based upon that model, and now we operate on a broad spectrum of campuses. It doesn't make sense to exclude anybody or any college from the resources that Facebook offers. This is a product that should be fun and useful for all college students.
We don't view the site as an online community. We bill it as a directory that is reinforcing a physical community. What exists on the site is a mirror image of what exists in real life.
To a certain extent, the website is unfortunate because it oversimplifies things. Everybody's concept of having a friend is different. It can definitely blur the relationships that exist between people. But in the end, I think that thefacebook can only reinforce preexisting communities. We think we have been particularly successful in strengthening those relationships that exist between people who are only “fringe friends.
It's not unusual for us to receive an email from somebody saying, "I spend all of my time on your website and now I have less of a social life than I had before." We would much rather have people meet people through the website and go out and party than stay at home on a Friday night reading other people's profiles. And it's surprising, but we have actually received far less complaints about stalking than we otherwise would have expected."

Here are some of my 2006 stats about Facebook:
- 12 million users (*MySpace has 54 million users)
- 300 million page views per 24-hour period - page views surpasses Google
- Facebook comes in seventh in terms of overall traffic on the entire Web
- 70% of users use the site every day
- 85% use it once a week
- 93% visit monthly
- The site makes more than a million dollars a month in ad revenue
- Since its start, a high school edition and a photo upload and tagging option were added

I joined Facebook mostly to see what it was all about. I knew that my college-aged sons both used it. (It seemed like my younger son - a freshman in 2005 - met a hundred people at his school through Facebook during orientation and the first weeks, plus all his high school friends at other schools that were added to his friends list, and then their friends who added him.

I felt pretty sad at first because I had no one to add to my list. I started with my sons, who "allowed" me to be their friend list (you do have to approve someone's request to be added), though they made me promise never to put something on their wall. Facebook was not really for mom and dad.

Because early on, parents and adults played no real role in Facebook (though alumni can create accounts for their alma mater) I didn't expect to find any of my classmates there. Faculty could have a profile at their school, but that was rare in 2006.

What really bothered me at first was that my profile said, "You have 0 friends at NJIT." I planned to do a presentation to faculty at NJIT about this new website, so I had to Facebook a few students that I thought would say yes to my request. Then I started searching students I had taught in my former K-12 days. Found a few and sent them a message. And that led to a few of their classmates finding me. Social networking...

When I did my first presentation, I had 37 friends - which by Facebook standards was pretty pathetic. It for younger readers to imagine these early social media ( aterm no one was using) times. I only had 55 people on my AOL AIM buddy list, so 37 seems was about right.

When I showed the site to faculty and academic and non-academic friends, the most common comments were:
Yeah. So what's the point? [Remember, most of my friends are old.]
Why does everyone seem to have an alcoholic drink in their hand in all the pictures? [sad but true]
Many more females than males on Facebook. [True]
Wouldn't it scare you if you had a daughter and she was posting pictures, her dorm room #, email address and other info online? [Yes}
Doesn't it scare you that your sons are doing that? [To a degree - but maintaining a common double standard, not as much.]
What about identity theft? [As with any sitaution where you reveal personal information, facebook could open you up to id theft by giving someone enough information to attempt to create a fake account.]

One comment I heard did turn out to be true later that year. "Don't you think employers will check this kind of site when screening clients?" I had heard that but I doubted it would be widespread. It turned out that employers could get access through employees who were students, faculty and alumni from an applicant's school. I saw a posting that said "Monster.com [a very popular jobs site in 2006] is who you portray you are, but Facebook is who you really are."

In the fall of 2005, North Carolina State University disciplined several students for underage drinking after a resident assistant found party photos of them on Facebook. A few days after students rushed the football field following a Penn State win over Ohio State, campus police found pictures of the incident containing identifiable students on Facebook. Northern Kentucky and the University of Kentucky both have disciplined students they had seen drinking in pictures posted on Facebook. Campus police at George Washington University use Facebook to find underage drinkers. Employers and the career center at the University of Kansas use Facebook to evaluate students being considered for KU jobs.

People commented that "You can't seriously think that these people actually have 345 "friends?" Well, not the way we may have once defined "friend." I'm pretty confident that someone who has 345 friends on Facebook realizes that they are not friends in the same way as their 6 close friends that they see face-to-face regularly.

In 2006, I Facebooked Mark Zuckerberg. He had 323 friends already, but hey, you can always use another friend, right?

A decade or two ago when I was teaching one of my social media courses at NJIT, I used to ask students to write a short paper on what they thought was the first social medium or platform. It's one of those questions without a definitive answer and I received a variety of answers over the years. 

Now that we are even deeper into social media and students are even younger - this year's college freshman was born in the 21st century - the early days and history of social media is buried a bit deeper.

The most common answers go back to the 1970s and 80s with forums, bulletin boards and things like AOL's Instant Messenger.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, websites and fledgling social sites and tools were not commercialized. No advertising. How things have changed.

But there were always a few students who went pre-Internet.

On May 24, 1844, some electronic dots and dashes were tapped out by hand on a telegraph machine sending a first electronic message from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. Perhaps, Samuel Morse was prescient about what was to come with his scientific achievement since he wrote, “What hath God wrought?” This was communication and could be two-way but wasn't really a social network. Eventually, there did become a network of users and telegrams could be sent to multiple users.

Technology began to change very rapidly in the 20th Century. After the first super computers were created in the 1940s, scientists and engineers began to develop ways to create networks between those computers, and this would later lead to the birth of the Internet. 

A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory appeared in 1973 and true electronic BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which first came online early in 1978. BBS in big cities were running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and similar personal computers.

Let's back up a bit and look at the PLATO system launched in 1960. It was developed at the University of Illinois and then commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. Later, it would offer early forms of social media features, In 1973, Notes (PLATO's message-forum application) was added and TERM-talk was an instant-messaging feature. The Talkomatic may be the first online chat room. There was also News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper and blog. PLATO used Access Lists so that a note file or other application you created could be limited in access to a certain set of users, such as friends, classmates, or co-workers.

Some people point to the emergence in 1967-69 of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), an early digital network, created by the United States Department of Defense, that allowed scientists at four interconnected universities to share software, hardware, and other data. Though not intended to be "social," apparently social niceties did emerge and by the late-1970s non-government and business ideas passed back and forth and a network etiquette (netiquette) was described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

ARPANET evolved into the Internet after the first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification were witten by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in 1974. This was followed by Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, and established in 1980.

1985 saw the introduction of The Well and GENie. GENie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was an online service created for GE and GENie was still used well into the late 1990s. It had 350,000 users at its peak and was only made redundant by the development of the World Wide Web.

In 1987, the National Science Foundation launched a more robust, nationwide digital network known as the NSFNET.

The IBM PC was introduced in 1981 and the subsequent models of both Apple Mac computers and PCs, better modems, and the slow increase of bandwidth allowed users to do more online. Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s.

The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply "the web") was added to the Internet in the mid-1990s. Message forums became Internet forums.

A number of platforms appeared tht had social tools inlcuding GeoCities (1994) Classmates.com (1995).

The first recognizable social media site might be Six Degrees which appeared in 1997. Users created profiles, give school affiliations and could "friend" other users. It differed from instant-messaging clients (such as ICQ and AOL's AIM) or chat clients (like IRC and iChat) because people used their real names.

It would be 2003 when Myspace launched and by 2006 it had become the most visited website on the planet. Sharing music was a big part of its appeal.

Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University to be used there. But it caught on, spread to other colleges and in June 2004 the company he had started around "TheFacebook" moved to Palo Alto, California. By 2008, it had eclipsed MySpace and in December, 2009, with 350 million registered users it became the most popular social platform in the world.

The original URL - thefacebook.com - still redirects to the renamed Facebook. Myspace was purchased by musician Justin Timberlake in 2011 for $35 million, but it failed to regain popularity.

If Google seems to be missing in this history it is because its attempts to enter social (Orkut and Google+) both failed. Google+ ended in 2018 with the final nail in its coffine being a data security breach that compromised the private information of nearly 500,000 Google+ users.

REFERENCES

online.maryville.edu/blog/evolution-social-media/ 

digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-social-networking/

Infographic via socialmediatoday.com

Eight years ago, I was posting here about Google+ (or Google Plus) which was an attempt by the search giant to compete with other social media sites (especially Facebook) for the social audience.

Now, they are deprecating Google+ (the tech term for turning off, closing, giving up on a service). Google has not succeeded at social.

My theory back in 20111 was that it might be because they weren't able to explain in a simple, clear way what their social services offered or how they were different from others like Facebook.

Do you even remember their earlier services Wave and Buzz and Orkut?

It is 2019 and the Google+ API deprecation which happens this month also affects Blogger’s Google+ integration for blogs like this one. The impact is not major but it does have effects when you kill off an integrated service.

• Support for the “+1 Button”, “Google+ Followers” and “Google+ Badge” widgets on blogs will no longer be available.
• The +1/G+ buttons and Google+ share links below blog posts and in the navigation bar will be removed. That will have some effect on the number of people who share or "Like" your posts.
• Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. That seems minor BUT it also means that the comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog. 

You won't be logging into Orkut any more - if you ever did log in. Do you know about Orkut? Maybe this post about its demise is also your introduction to Google’s first foray into social networking.

Started in 2004, Orkut saw impressive early growth and has been popular in some countries, but never caught on in English-speaking countries. It didn't help that 2004 was also the year that Facebook started in 2004.

Orkut by 2008 was the top social media site in Brazil and India. Eventually, Facebook overtook Orkut even in Brazil and India. In India, Facebook surpassed Orkut in terms of total registered users in 2010. In Brazil, the same happened in 2012. I have written about Orkut a few times and had created an account to see what it was all about, but never really found it compelling.

Meanwhile, Google launched its current attempt at a social network, Google+, in 2011. Plus has been more successful in the U.S. but is still struggling and user numbers still lag way behind those of Facebook.

Google announced it would shut down Orkut (as it has done with a good number of other services like Buzz and Wave) on September 30, 2014 and is no longer accepting new users. You can export your profile data, posts and photos using a service called Google Takeout that will be available until September 2016.