Social Media leading up to today

In 2002, one of the key social networking websites before Facebook was Friendster. It had almost the same features as SixDegrees except that it looked much better, it felt much better to use, and at this time, people really started to connect to the internet so it had a much larger user base.

Picture of friendster.com in 2003

This was the main login screen. I was able to obtain pictures of "take the tour" which shows what a profile looks like.

Sample Profile for friendster 2003

The tour really only consisted of that image, and another which just stated that you can have your own group of friends. By examining the code at this time (2003) and comparing it to SixDegrees (2000) the one main difference is that friendster took advantage of was CSS (refer to blog post about key terms to know more about CSS).

Of course there are many other things used to create websites such as PHP for internal structure, and to manage things like logging in and keeping track of statistics, as well as SQL for storing login information, profile information, posts and much more. However, the main code I will be examining will have to do with the layout and design of the websites.

If we take a jump to 2005, we can see a typical profile in the picture below.

If we compare it from the last picture of a profile we saw, we can see a similarity of the design in the description part, but now we can also see this persons group of friends, what they are a fan of and even blogs! This is a huge leap from just the standard adding friends and posting text which is what we have seen up to here. I believe at this point in time, more than 17 million people were using friendster.

One more key feature which we see in all social media websites today is photos. In 2005, friendster had the ability to store up to 12 photos on a profile, and even more if we were to use a, "friendster blog". The reason I believe they only allowed a set amount of photos compared to today where we can upload thousands is because back in 2005, we were still discovering the technology. Storing data costed much more money back then as servers could only hold up to a certain amount of data which was significantly less than it is today.

In my opinion, the biggest design change of the friendster home page came in mid 2006. It featured a clear, concise, non-bloated page where it felt comfortable being on.

At this point, there were over 27 million profiles on Friendster. It gets harder and harder to analyze the code the further the years go on because of how much more content there is. Another new feature was that people of Friendster could share videos.

As the years passed and as the website was updated, so was most of the code. New standards, features and ideas were brought forward to update the code and with that, new features and designs were created. Looking back from the first login screen to this one, we can clearly see how much more thought went into designing this. In all fairness, in 2002, there probably wasn't the same technology available to create a login screen like this. As people around the world came up with new ideas, more social media websites were being created.

Friendster started to wither in 2004 when another website MySpace surpassed it, popularity wise.


Sources:


"Friendster.com - Internet Archive Wayback Machine." Friendster.com - Internet Archive Wayback Machine. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2014.

"SixDegrees.com - Internet Archive Wayback Machine." SixDegrees.com - Internet Archive Wayback Machine. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2014.

"The Brief History of Social Media." The Brief History of Social Media. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2014.

 

 

Key Terms and Definitions

I will just be defining a few key terms I will be using throughout this blog and explain here what they mean so I do not have to do it every time I mention the terms.

HTML: Acronym for HyperText Markup Language. It is the language that web browsers read to turn into the websites you see today. Originally released in 1993.

CSS: Acronym for Cascading Style Sheets. It is a type of language which works with the HTML and can control how the document can look, positions of things, font, font size, styles and many more things. This gives a much better and easier way to modify how a website looks. Initially released in 1996.

PHP: Used to be an Acronym for Personal Home Page but now has evolved to stand for Hypertext Preprocessor. This is scripting language which lets you manage things server-side. This essentially means that the PHP code that people use is not available to see from the source of a website as it is read by the server to produce HTML code or some other data which the clients (the people who visit the website) can see.

SQL: This is basically a special language which helps you store, retrieve, delete and modify data in a database. I will not explain this much more as I will not be going in depth into it.

The start of Social Networking/Social Media

One of the first Social Networking websites to start up on the Internet was called SixDegrees. This website launched in 1997 and featured letting their users have friends and make their own profiles, as well as sending messages and posting bulletin board items. A description of what sixdegrees was comes straight from themselves in 1998:

"sixdegrees is a revolutionary, free Web-based networking tool that lets members tap into the power of  their greatest resource - the people they know and trust. sixdegrees offers several services, all of which help members capitalize on their own trusted network of contacts in order to gain valuable help and information, communicate directly with their own growing virtual community and make new contacts quickly and easily."

I found this embedded within the code of the website. It was stored under the <meta> tag meaning it was not displayed on the website but search engines and other web services could use it for keywords and to use as a description.

Picture of SixDegrees.com in 1998

To get this picture, I used a website called web.archive.org which is a website that takes snapshots of websites. Unfortunately, I am not sure if the original code (HTML) that the website used in 1998 was preserved.  As you can see from the picture of the websites login screen, it features a logo, the title, login boxes and very basic designs.

Picture of SixDegrees.com in 2000

From looking at the comparison of just 2 years, we can see how much the front page of the website evolved. It went from just a simple login screen with basic elements to more of how a website is structured today. There are ad's all over the website (to generate revenue), much more content, and most of all, there has been a massive increase in features. I would have loved to compare how this actual website had updated in terms of Social Media, however, I was unable to find any pictures of what the website looked like after logging in.

This social networking website ran from 1997-2001, and as it may not look like much, it had roughly 3.5 million users at its prime and gave way to the social media websites today.