Emergence of Social Networking Sites

SixDegrees and Friendster

Overview

In the past they were communicate with different ways than we do now. The first idea for distance communications is the letters. Stanley Milgram came up with an idea in the 1960s to write a letters to a friend of his and then distributed to a random people. Then they will send it to another person they knew with the first name. This idea (the six degree) was the reason of the social networking. In 1997, SixDegrees.com was the very first social networking site, which had found by Andrew Weinrech. The engine for this site was the people’s curiosity about whom they might be connected with where this was a new innovation. SixDegrees attracted just 3 million members, which is not enough because a lot of them have seen it not interesting to invite their friends because all what they can do is creating a profile and sending friend request or accept a request. That was the reason that the company shut down and ran of money in 2000. In 2003, Jonathan Abrams launched Friendster that has the same concept and features of the SixDegrees but he added more. Friendster had a network map for you and your friends, which you can track the permissions to view the pages. In the beginning, Friendster attracted just 1.5 million members but after a while (after the Time magazine declared that Friendster is the coolest innovation of 2003) 7 million of members were attracted to it. Unfortunately, the company faced a big problem where they did not have sufficient server to support the rapidly growing in the number of customers. Where the company received a lot of complains from the customer service then the members start changing or jumping to other sites, which they had learned from Friendster’s mistakes such as MySpace.

MySpace

Overview

MySpace was established by Brad Greenspan, Chris DeWolfe, and Tom Anderson who were employees of eUniverse in 2003. It is headquartered at Beverley Hills, CA. It mimicked some of the popular features of Friendster and...