When did they appear social media, such asFacebook, VKontakte andTwitter, our world is divided into online and offline. With their help, we can communicate with each other, even being on different continents, listen to music, read books, look at photographs and much more. Social networks have greatly simplified our lives and tied us tightly to ourselves. Read more about their appearance and development in our article.

The emergence of social networks

A social network is a social structure consisting of a group of nodes, which are social objects (people or organizations), and connections between them (social relationships).

With the advent of the Internet (1969), James Barnes's scientific concept began to gain popularity. This led to the development of social networks on the World Wide Web.

The first social networks on the Internet

The emergence of modern blogs, social networks and the Internet was foreseen by the Russian writer and philosopher Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky back in 1835. At that time, he finished writing his utopian novel “The Year 4338.” The world described by the author is in some way reminiscent of the 21st century: “...magnetic telegraphs are installed between familiar houses, through which those living at a far distance talk to each other.” Odoevsky also talks about “home newspapers” published “in many houses, especially among those who have great acquaintances; they replace ordinary correspondence... The duty of publishing such a magazine once a week or daily is assigned to the dining butler in each house. This is done very simply: each time, having received an order from the owners, he writes down everything that was said to him, then takes the required number of copies using a camera obscura and sends them out to his friends. This newspaper usually contains notices about the health or illness of the owners and other home news.”

It is worth noting that Vladimir Fedorovich is not far from reality. However, of course, he could not have known about social networks, blogs and the Internet then.

17 years later, in 1988, Finnish scientist Jarko Oikarinen invented the IRC protocol - Internet relay chat - and software for its implementation. It is now possible to communicate with each other in real time.

Then the American Randy Conrads created Classmates.com - the first social network in the modern sense. In it, registered users have access to a directory of graduates from various educational institutions. Thus, anyone can find classmates or fellow students. It is worth noting that Classmates.com immediately turned out to be in great demand. By the way, its popularity does not decline even today - more than 50 million people use the social network. Interestingly, Odnoklassniki is the Russian equivalent of Classmates.com. Currently, they have more than 290 million registered users.

History of the most popular social networks

In this part of the article, we will tell you, dear readers, about the history of the most popular social networks in Russia and the world - Facebook, VKontakte, Twitter and Instagram.

Facebook Inc. was founded on February 4, 2004 by four students who studied at Harvard University: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. At the same time, a website of the same name appeared. It was initially only available to Harvard students. A little later, registration was opened for universities in Boston, and then for all Americans with email address in the .edu domain. Starting in September 2006, Facebook became available to all Internet users aged 16 years and older. Today it is one of the top five most visited websites in the world. It is not surprising that the network’s monthly audience is 1.968 billion people.

On October 10, 2006, an analogue of Facebook appeared in Russia - the social network “VKontakte”. Its creator is Pavel Durov. The site is available in many languages, but its main audience is Russian-speaking users.

It is worth noting that the resource was originally intended for students and graduates Russian universities, after a while, it began to position itself as “a modern, fast and aesthetic way to communicate online.” According to SimilarWeb data for December 2017, VKontakte ranks 11th in the ranking of the most popular sites in the world. By the way, more than 410 million users are registered on this social network today.

“They were uploading and sharing photos like crazy,” notes Systrom. In this regard, he and his colleague decide to get rid of all functions, leaving only photo posting.

The move worked, and Burbn, or rather Instagram, gained unprecedented popularity.

Today, the app is ranked 17th on SimilarWeb's list and has more than 200 million active subscribers who have uploaded more than 16 billion different photos and videos.

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With the advent of the Internet, many aspects of our lives gradually migrated to the virtual world. And communication was no exception, quite the contrary. The human need for high-speed communication (information transfer) became the basis for the emergence of the Internet itself. While the older generation still remembers well about live forms of communication, the younger generation increasingly prefers virtual connections. 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, for many people, their morning begins not only with a cup of coffee, but also with viewing their page on one or another social network. According to statistics, about 50% of the population of our planet regularly visit their page on some social network, and some even visit several at once. Their popularity is best demonstrated by data on young people: 96% of young people communicate on social media. networks. And they really are addictive, it’s not for nothing that they’re nicknamed the Internet world wide web. After all, if any insect gets caught in a spider’s web, it remains there forever.

In principle, we can say that the birth of social networks began almost simultaneously with the advent 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? – 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 as classmates. The site provided users with the opportunity to reconnect with former classmates, classmates, colleagues, and friends. Today this network 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 provided with a list of students studying at this institution.

That is why some researchers consider the first full-fledged social network not Classmates, but the SixDegrees.com project, which was launched in 1997. At that time, many web services (dating sites, for example) offered functions such as creating 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 through friends' pages. This project was the closest to modern social networks. networks, however, in 2001, the SixDegrees.com portal ceased to exist. Network founder Andrew Weinreich explained this by saying 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, registered users did not have enough friends and acquaintances with Internet access to make communication on this site at least interesting.

The whole operating principle is based on convenient communication (communication) with users. It can take place in the following ways:

• Groups and communities- they bring together groups of people who are similar in some basic interest. For example, a community of fans of a musical group. There people will be able to follow the news of this group, discuss it, share their opinions, offer their own cover versions of songs, and so on.
• Personal correspondence
• Microblogging and walls— here you can post your own posts. For example, news, and so on. Your subscribers and friends will be able to follow them, like them, and so on.
• Comments

If this is a regular user, then, as a rule, he creates a profile page and customizes it. Next, he looks for his friends, communicates with them, follows their news.

This user can post various information (photos, videos, texts, etc.) on his page. At the same time, his friends will always be aware of the news. That is, if your friend posts a video about his vacation, you will know about it.

You can also join various communities of interests and communicate with like-minded people there.

As a rule, separate groups and communities are created for this purpose. In them, companies provide users with their offers. For example, discounts, competitions, expert content, and so on.

Social networks have become so convenient for communication that businesses have begun to additionally use them as a platform for working with clients. For example, answering user questions. Give some recommendations to your target audience and so on.

History of social networks

First social network

The first social network actually appeared in 1999. It was Live Journal ( livejournal). Moreover, at first it looked less like a network and more like a blog platform. It was invented in the USA. But then the Russian company Klimenko ( Advisor to the President on Internet Issues) bought this project.

Later, this platform began to add communication elements. If previously you could only publish text there, then useful opportunities appeared. For example, following another person, comments, and so on.

Thanks to all these features, Live Journal has become a social network.

In general, speaking about the history of the emergence of social networks, Lately many projects have appeared. However, most of them have not received much recognition from users. Therefore, here we will consider only the most popular sites.

Twitter

After Live Journal, Twitter became popular. This has become a good replacement for livejournal. After all, there were big posts on LiveJournal back then.

But the problem is that only a small percentage of people can write such long poems. As a result, people are unable to interact with themselves through their content. They can only interact in comments.

Twitter made it possible for all people to write short notes of 140 characters to outline their thoughts. This feature has made Twitter a popular replacement for LiveJournal.

Also, do not forget that most people are lazy creatures. Not everyone likes to read huge posts. As a rule, most people prefer to read short notes.

Twitter itself appeared in 2006 and began to rapidly gain momentum.

Facebook

After Twitter, Facebook came to replace it because it became possible to create direct and more understandable communication. In addition to the fact that you can post content, you can also quickly interact with people there. For example, chat with them.

At that time, Twitter did not have this option for private messages. Therefore, due to this, FB grew very quickly.

Initially, since 2004, Facebook was available only to students at various universities. But since 2006, this network has become available throughout the world. In 2008, it became the most popular social network.

Instagram

After Facebook, Instagram appeared in 2011. He became famous for his content in photo format.

But then I wanted to just look through the pictures. The text accompaniment was no longer important. People just wanted to look through the photos. Instagram gave them this opportunity.

Then Instagram came to replace it Snapchat. It used current photo content, which becomes unavailable after 24 hours. By the way, this later became available on Instagram.

But why did it become so popular then? And it became popular because people only needed relevant content in real time.

For example, to write news, a journalist will need time to prepare the material. Come to the scene of the event, find out everything, and so on.

But with the advent of the chance to publish relevant content, we have the opportunity to post material on the go and in real time.

For example, if a car catches fire on my street right now, I can immediately shoot a video and post it on the Internet. As a result, users will be able to get up-to-date information as quickly as possible.

But in addition to providing up-to-date information on Snapchat, there was no way to clearly edit it. Some filters could have been added. But it was impossible to change it harshly like on Instagram then.

Social networks in Russia

However, after adding pirated music and videos, VK began to take off at incredible speed. This gave a big leap in development. As a result, in Russia it became much more popular than Facebook.

Instagram- this is the next leader, who is also popular in RuNet. Thanks to the ability to share posts, this project began to gain popularity.

Facebook is the third most popular project in RuNet. However, for the whole world, it was a cool social network. For us, it moved to another plane after VKontakte appeared.

Well, the latest popular social project in RuNet is Classmates. In fact, they have nothing unique. It’s just that the network itself develops through searching and communicating with classmates. It was created in 2006.

Here I have listed only the most popular social networks. Of course, there were many more. However, many of them are already closed. And besides, you can’t consider all the projects here. Yes, this is of no use.

Why will social networks be trending for a long time?

And despite the fact that you and I have been stewing in this topic for a long time, to social media. We came to networks in the form they are now, not so long ago.

The second point is that these projects are replacing more and more familiar everyday services every year. Usually this:

• Calls, sms
• A television
• Online stores
• Training and so on

The third point is that most large and small businesses are already using social networks. We can assume that the business itself will force ordinary users to use these resources. For example, follow the news in the group.

That's all!

It is generally accepted that social networks first appeared in the 2000s, although this is not entirely true. Now 50% of the world's population uses sites such as Facebook, VKontakte, Twitter and their analogues. All of them were created after 2006, but there are other projects that appeared much earlier.

The first social networks were created back in 1995, although there is still debate about this. The fact is that in 1995 a social prototype was created. networks where you could find people, but personal pages were not created there (a kind of database). The resource with the ability to open profiles was created in 1997.

Social networks from A to Z

Initially, the website Classmates.com appeared, which was a base with people who studied somewhere, graduated from something, served, and so on. With the help of this resource it was indeed possible to find old acquaintances, but it was not entirely convenient. Now the resource has been completely redesigned and continues to exist for people from all over the world. It quickly added functionality that allows you to open accounts.

As for the project, launched in 1997, it can rightfully be called a social network. User pages were already created here and there was functionality that we are used to using now. It was called Sixdegrees.com, and only existed until 2001. This is not surprising; at that time there was no mass distribution of the Internet, so only a few could spend a lot of time online. During its existence, it was even sold for huge amounts of money, this is what it looked like:

The design is outdated, but what did you expect from a site from 2000? At that time there was no technology to improve appearance resources, and the Internet speed left much to be desired.

The Sixdegrees website was based on the theory of “Six Handshakes”; this was discussed in more detail in the article about. Since the advent of this resource, hundreds of analogues have been launched, but none of them have become world famous. It was only in 2004 that the next social project appeared, which everyone now uses.

The first popular social network

This is Facebook, launched back in 2004. Social network, which have earned popularity all over the world, is opened by this resource. However, for the first two years it was corporate and only in 2006 (in September), everyone was able to register on it, provided that they were over 16 years old and had an email.

It is 2006 that is considered to be the birth of the world of social networks, since it was from there that the active popularization of such popular projects as MySpace and LinkedIn began. In the same year, an analogue of Facebook, Vkontakte, appeared, which now deserves the title of the most popular site in Russia and Ukraine.

This list can be continued indefinitely; other analogues soon appeared - Odnoklassniki, Moi Mir, Google + (which was created and redesigned several times) and so on. The era of social networks is now at its peak, but experts are confident that it will become even more developed in the future.

You now know about the first social networks that appeared on the Internet and can use them not only for entertainment. Use and benefit from visiting your favorite resources. Believe me, this is much better than mindlessly scrolling through other people's pages, updating your feed and exchanging empty messages.

According to various studies, about 50% of the world's population in general and 95% of modern youth in particular cannot imagine their life without communication on social networks. These web resources have firmly occupied their niche in the everyday lives of billions of people, easily and quickly satisfying the most natural social need of any intelligent being - the need for communication. But where did this victorious march of communication sites begin and what was the very first social network in the world?

There are two opinions on which web project should be considered the first social network. Supporters of both versions are right in their own way, because both of these sites are, to one degree or another, the prototype of modern social networks.

The first social network appeared in...

And the first version says that the American portal Classmates.com should be considered the very first social networking resource. It was in his image and likeness that Odnoklassniki was created at one time. The project was launched in 1995 by Randy Conrads and provided everyone with the opportunity to find their classmates, fellow students and colleagues.

However, the American Odnoklassniki cannot be considered the first social network in the modern sense, because initially the site did not provide the ability to create personal profiles, but simply provided access to lists of students at a particular educational institution.

And in 1997...

Proponents of the second version argue that the first social network in the modern sense of the term should be considered SixDegrees.com, created by Andrew Weinreich in 1997. This project initially provided users with the opportunity to create personal profiles and create lists of their friends.

Moreover, later, in 1998, the project team implemented a page search function, which greatly facilitated the discovery of old ones and the addition of new acquaintances.

The very first social network today

Unfortunately, the SixDegrees.com portal did not survive to this day and was closed in 2001. According to its creator, the capabilities of this social network were significantly ahead of their time, because at that time too few Americans had more or less stable access to the Internet. But luck was so close, as evidenced by

However, Classmates.com still exists and has more than 50 million users from the USA, Canada, France, Sweden, Germany and Austria.

And yet, which of these projects should be considered the first social network? Probably, the palm should still be given to Classmates.com, because this social network was not only founded earlier than SixDegrees.com, but also continues to unite people to this day.