Background

Social networking has been around as long as the internet has in one form or another. Geocities is an early example of social networking. Early networks such as Geocities focused on chat rooms and personal homepages designed to share personal information to other users. These features later evolved into having personal pages with the ability to “friend” and send private messages to other users. Even further, later sites allowed users to view other users’ friend lists and more control over personal content and their connectivity with other users.

This evolved into the first major social networking site, Myspace. Myspace combined all the features of earlier social networking sites into it, becoming the first big social networking site. Myspace added the ability to upload photos and customize every aspect of each user’s personal page. This started an explosion in the popularity of social networking sites in general, and Myspace became the reigning king of social networks, at least for the time being. (Myspace, 2010)

Facebook took these features and expanded them even further. It allowed even more connectivity between users, adding advanced search features to find friends. Facebook created an advanced home page for each user which feeds information from each user’s social network into a single page for easy viewing and fast information dissemination. They expanded the importance of photos in social networking. Before Facebook, photos were generally used to show pictures of users, but now photos were a large part of the whole social networking experience. Facebook also added its own innovations that no other social network had used before. They allowed third-parties to create applications to run on their site. A near limitless number of applications now run through the Facebook website, adding another layer to the social networking experience. (Facebook, 2010)

The expansion of these features helped bring Facebook into the forefront of social networking, but it wasn’t only their more advanced platform that brought Facebook into the limelight. Facebook built their focus of networking on users’ existing social networks instead of trying to create its own community. As Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook states: “That's a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We're not thinking about ourselves as a community — we're not trying to build a community — we're not trying to make new connections.” (Time, 2007) It’s this difference that separated Facebook from the rest. Users join networks based on what school they attend and where they live geographically. This automatically creates a social network for each user that is based on their real life social network. (Time, 2007)