In today’s world Social Networking has been the buzz word and all the rage. It is now the hot thing for corporations and individuals to do to enhance their business and personal experiences on the Internet.
I have been online for most of the last 31 years using many different mediums. Social Networking is not new it has just come out to the masses instead of just the technology geeks.
Wikipedia uses the following definition for social networking : A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency.
Using the above definition social networking has been around as long as people have been online.
In the early days most of the people online used Bulletin Board Systems (BBS for short). They were systems where end users could dial into a computer and read and post messages on various topics. In reality this was social networking before we actually coined the term. Some of the BBS systems only kept messages locally where others shared them on international networks. One of those networks was called Fidonet. Fidonet enabled end users to network with people all around the country and the world as long the BBS belong to Fidonet.
Education users used USENET message boards where people could share all kinds of information internationally. Originally Usenet was only useable by Education and Government institutions.
For people who wanted to pay their were services like Compuserv, Geni, Delphi and AOL. These services all offered email, message boards, databases and real time chat. This was social networking with many people on line at the same time.
When the Internet came online their were two programs the revolutionized social networking in my opinion. One was IRC and the other was an IM client called ICQ.
IRC – which stood for Internet Relay Chat was a text chat service where end users got together to chat with other end users in chat rooms to talk about common interests. This Interests included everything from technology, sports, music and even sex. IRC enabled people from different pc platforms to chat and communicate with each other. IRC is real time and enabled communication with people across the world. It was always a pleasure to talk with a friend in Australia or England like they were in the next room. The biggest IRC client on the PC platform was called MIRC and is still updated today.
ICQ – This was the world’s most popular Instant Messaging client in it’s day and is one of the reason’s IM became so popular. ICQ allowed you to have a buddy list(friends list) and chat with friends on your list. It would show you when they were online and offline. It would even let yous end a message to someone who was offline so they could read it when they got online. ICQ was eventually purchased by AOL.
ICQ should be credited for also spawning AOL Messanger, Yahoo Messanger and what is now called Live Messenger by Microsoft.
Once these services started other ones started. Yahoo and Microsoft started their own groups. Services like YouTube, Flickr, Photobuket, Digg, Facebook, My SPace and Twitter started. These are only a few of the social networking services that are around.
The reasons social networking is now so popular are as follows:
1. It is easy to do.
2. People like to share information with other and learn from others.
3. Most of the western world is connected to the Internet.
4. From a capital outlay social networking is cheap.
5. More then just geeks social network these days.
6. It is a great opportunity to meet new people.
7. It is often real time.
Social Networking has become such an integral part of our daily lives and it’s power should not be taken for granted or underestimated.
