History of social networks: emergence and development. The history of social networks The development of social networks in the world

When did social networks likeFacebook, 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 initially the resource was intended for students and graduates of Russian universities; after a while, it began to position itself as “a modern, fast and aesthetic way of communicating 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, in this social network Today there are more than 410 million registered users.

“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.

If you find an error, please highlight a piece of text and click Ctrl+Enter.

This material can be used as instructions for use. If you need to promote your page on a social network, just open the text and proceed step by step!

I’ll tell you how to use an integrated approach to promoting your business, based on statistics, analysis and the use of effective tools for SMM promotion. I have developed 7 steps that will help you develop your page from scratch and make it interesting for your customers.

Step 1. Defining the concept of community

Your page should convey a certain concept. If this concept has already been formed within your business, this is a significant plus. The concept should represent the guiding concept, the set of views of the company's management on current customer problems, and how your business or product can solve these problems.

For example: There is no effective and fast pizza delivery service on the market. Our service helps restaurants deliver their goods to the consumer on time, and for the consumer it ensures fast and inexpensive delivery of pizza, preserving its taste, temperature and taste properties.

Remember that the concept determines the strategy of action and influences further methods of promotion on social networks.

Step #2. Setting goals

We set ourselves goals that will increase key business performance indicators. Goals must be set and based on the SMART system, that is, they must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and controllable.

In our case, we write the following goals:

• Identify our competitors and analyze their activity on social networks.
• Identify and analyze our target audience.
• Optimize our page for the audience.
• Develop a content plan for all segments of our target audience.
• Identify the most effective and profitable tools for page development.
• Test the tools and analyze their effectiveness.
• Start leading a group.

Step #3. Data collection and analytics

This can be done by an individual specialist, an agency, or you yourself. This period includes the following activities:

• Identify all possible competitors and analyze what they are doing to attract users and how effectively. Based on monitoring key queries (wordstat), the number of users and measuring user activity, the leading market players can be identified.
• Identification based on SMM tools and statistics of the audience cores of groups of competitors (active core, moderately active core, inactive core). What is the core audience? It often happens that in a group or page, 10-15% of users from the total number of subscribers regularly engage in user activity: liking posts, leaving comments, reposting on their pages, or actively conducting discussions. If you look at the most active users, you can identify certain patterns in their behavior and preferences.
• Conduct and collect user requirements for each core and develop custom scripts.

For example: Masha Ivanova, 23 years old, works in sales in Moscow, is single, loves smart solutions and life hacks for the home, loves beautiful interior design, cats on Instagram and short useful texts.

Of course, these scenarios will be conditional, but they will help us develop content in the future that will take into account maximum user preferences.

• Identification of effective times for posting content (daily, weekly, monthly, holidays), using analysis of user activity in similar communities. For example, on Saturday morning you can publish material at 12:00, since only at this time your subscribers wake up.

Step #4. Page optimization

Optimization based on user page scenarios for all audience cores (Wiki markup, design, description, short URL, album titles, discussion titles, etc.). Here you need to really invest in a beautiful and pleasant design, and if you have completed the previous steps, it will be much easier for you to explain to the designer what audience he is working for.

Step #5. Content plan development

The most interesting and difficult part of the work is developing a content plan for each core audience. You identify the topic and format of the post.

Example: Monday at 18:31 the history of the creation of the gadget should be published.

Now you must find sources of content. These could be RSS feeds, public pages, blogs, news publications, opinion leaders, copywriters, videographers, photographers, artists.

Describe the content requirements based on the text and title of posts. Indicate what media materials should be present in the group’s posts and albums. What topics should be raised by group members? Ideally, you receive a completed grid of post formats in a content plan for example for a month for posting. Based on these requirements, you can draw up requirements for outsourced performers: photographers, designers, etc.

Step #6. Testing and identifying effective tools

At this stage, you begin publishing your content on the page. To determine the effectiveness of the tools, you must not forget about collecting statistics. For example, track the number of transitions, count coverage, attract new users per day, week or other specific period of time.

Here you should focus on the ROI (return of investment) indicator - the ratio of the amount of profit or loss to the amount of investment. This indicator is expressed in % and will show you the most effective and ineffective channels for attracting audiences on the Internet (advertising exchange, banners, partnership programs, paid publications and posts) for your page. From all these attraction channels, you remove ineffective, time-consuming and expensive ones.

Step #7. Resource development

You have done the almost impossible! You have collected content and a systematic approach to publishing it on social networks. You know your audience almost by sight and know what they like. Considering that quite a lot of money has been spent on analysis, a reasonable question arises: what more can be done? Using the data from these studies, you can not only improve your website, but also expand your business by offering a new product or service.

At the initial stage of community development and business promotion on social networks, fill the group with content for about 20-30 posts. Coming by invitation or contextual advertising the user will want to scroll through the community feed and if you have 1-2 news, then most likely he will not subscribe to it.

On VKontakte it is better to first create a group (on Facebook it is better to create a page). VKontakte allows you to convert a group into a page and vice versa. The group will give you the opportunity to invite users for initial content. Invite only those users who may be interested in the group's materials or your business. Don’t expect high conversions at the initial stage; do a comprehensive advertising campaign using an advertising exchange or direct placement through administrators of similar communities. Please pay attention Special attention advertising post, place a “shooting” picture in the context of the community in which you are advertising. Here's an example -

The term " social network" was introduced in 1954 by Manchester School sociologist James Barnes in his work “Classes and Assemblies in a Norwegian Island Parish,” which was included in the collection Human Relations. He developed and expanded an approach invented in the 1930s to study the relationships between people using sociograms, that is, visual diagrams in which individuals are represented as dots and the connections between them as lines. However, the idea of ​​a social network as a structure, the elements of which are actors (individuals or organizations), was anticipated by scientists back in the late eighties - the French sociologist David Emile Durkheim and his German colleague Ferdinand Tönnies practically described the nature of this phenomenon in their theories and studies of social groups.

The understanding of a social network has certainly changed since that time, and the development of technologies through which online networks emerged played a significant role in this. In this work, by social network we will understand a platform (online service or website) for building social networks or social relationships between people who, for example, have common interests, experience, connections from real life or belong to the same field of activity. A social network consists of each user’s personal channels (usually called profiles), their social connections, as well as a number of additional services.

The first social network in the modern sense of the term is considered to be the site “Odnoklassniki” (Classmates), which appeared in 1995. Created by Randy Conrad, an engineer at Boeing, who really wanted to find his classmate. Like its modern Russian counterpart, the site helped registered users find and maintain contact with friends and acquaintances, with those with whom a person had dealt throughout his life - in kindergarten, school, university, at work or while in military service. It still exists today. However, the American service for classmates did not support the creation of personal pages (profiles) and adding friends for a long time; it was limited to the ability to connect a person with his educational institution and searching through the list of people who studied there, so there is a different opinion on the topic of which social network should be considered first, and it has the right to exist.

Researchers highlight among others the dating site SixDegrees.com, created in 1997. However, unlike Odnoklassniki, this resource existed only until 2000. What makes this site special is a number of tools that allow users to create personal pages, add friends, and, since 1998, search through friends’ pages. Although at that time many well-known dating sites and sites that united representatives of the same community offered similar services separately: personal pages could be created on almost all services, and ICQ and AIM messengers supported lists of friends - only the social network SixDegrees.com combined all these possibilities .

Naturally, sites with such goals and functions did not appear on the Internet out of nowhere. The creation of services on the World Wide Web that are so similar to modern ones is preceded by the history of the transition of social networks from offline to online and their subsequent development on a new platform.

In the offline era, people actively used another network for communication – the telephone network. It was in her and thanks to her that social networks were born. Therefore, the “Era of Telephone Hackers” (1950s – early 1990s) can be considered as the first stage of their formation. In the author’s opinion, it makes sense to talk about this point in more detail than the others, since this stage of development of the social network is the most distant and different from its current state. The first thing to consider is the motives of the hackers: their goal was not to profit from fraud, but rather they were a kind of “technophile” and “phoneaholic” - tech-savvy people who were addicted to communicating on the phone.

These telephone network “researchers” created homemade electronic devices with which they made free calls and gained access to the then-existing experimental telephone system database. They accessed test lines, which they used to conduct telephone seminars and conferences.

In hacked corporate systems voicemail, there were what we might now call the first “audio blogs” or “podcasts.” In order to listen to them, after accessing the corporate line (dial 1-800), you had to enter the correct extension number. As in modern blogs, it was possible to leave comments on the “audio posts” of that time, although only in the form voice messages. The creators of telephone “audio blogs”, as a rule, responded to their listeners in subsequent episodes.

Like many members of thematic communities of social networks, telephone hackers were not limited to telephone communication, they organized meetings in reality (today even a special term -tweetup) has appeared to refer to meetings of Twitter users “in real life”.

Offline networks moved online as they spread personal computers and modems. The first stage of the transition is logical to associate with the period of widespread use of electronic bulletin boards (English: Bulletin Board Systems (BBC)) (1979-1995). These are sites where you could post your ad and read the ads of other users. They had message sections where discussions took place, it was possible to download files and even play online games - in a word, they really had a lot in common with modern social networks. The first such site appeared in the public domain in 1979.

During the same period, the international amateur computer network“Fidonet” (FidoNet), which is also sometimes called the first social network (by the way, in the Russian version the network itself positions itself this way). It was created by American programmer Tom Jennings in 1984 and served to transfer messages from electronic bulletin boards to each other. He originally made it to transfer messages from his electronic board to his friend's electronic board, and the structure of the network was linear: each node communicated directly with the other. As the number of nodes grew, the structure had to be changed to a tree structure. However, its functionality remained quite specific and limited: for example, it was possible to exchange mail with another network node only at a specially designated hour at night, when the cost of phone calls was lower.

The next step of the social network from its origins to its present state was the emergence and spread of commercial online services on the Internet (1979-2001), which brought interactive and social Internet to the masses. In the USA, the AOL service played a particularly large role in this, first growing into a large portal with various forums, mail, online games, and then into a media corporation. Generally online services served as a moderated platform for communication - in some cases even in real time (CompuServe.com offered its users an online chat system in 1980).

After the advent of the World Wide Web in 1991, the Usenet system, a computer network used for communication and publishing files, was initially popular. It appeared in 1980, i.e. before the advent of the World Wide Web, however, in September 1993, the Internet provider AOL provided its users with access to it, and it became part of the Internet and the first Internet platform for discussions. However, soon both she and the electronic bulletin boards could not withstand the competition with the forums that were gaining popularity. In parallel with them (year of creation - 1988), IRC (Internet Relay Chat) developed - a protocol that made it possible to communicate online in real time - and then (after launch in 1996) ICQ (from English I seek you - “I looking for you") and other messaging services. And at the same time, the first social networks of an almost modern format began to appear.

From that moment until today, many social networks have been created, some of them marked the stages of change in the social network as a phenomenon.

For example, LiveJournal, launched in 1999, in addition to becoming the first social network on the Runet, introduced a certain dynamic component as mandatory in the list of components of a classic social network. Being a blogging platform, it was not based on static profiles, but on regularly updated profiles. However, not all researchers classify blogging and microblogging platforms as social networks; some classify them as a separate category. The platform is still popular, although to a lesser extent than before.

As the number of social networks increased in the web space, thematic social networks gradually began to appear, for example, LinkedIn became one of the first and currently the most popular network of business contacts: 225 million registered members. In March 2013, the site became the 22nd most visited site in the world. It is impossible not to mention the social network MySpace, which, continuing and developing the tradition of LiveJournal, marked the transition to an era of providing users with greater opportunities for creativity than before. For a long time, MySpace remained the most popular social network in the United States and around the world; in July 2006, the site became the most visited resource in the United States, overtaking the Yahoo! postal service. (Yahoo!), but for the last few years in a row, traffic to the resource has been steadily declining.

Not everyone knows that the concept of “social network” appeared back in 1954 and, of course, had nothing to do with the Internet, and they began to study this phenomenon back in the 30s of the last century. The concept was introduced by sociologist James Barnes: a “social network” is a social structure consisting of a group of nodes, which are social objects (people or organizations), and the connections between them (social relationships) (more details on Wikipedia). In simpler terms, this is a certain group of familiar people, where the person himself is the center, and his friends are the branches. There are two-way or one-way connections between all network members. For example, this could be a group of classmates in which a certain Jack is the center, and Bill and Catherine are his acquaintances (branches).

Gradually, the scientific concept gained popularity, first in developed capitalist countries, then in Eastern Europe. As society developed, we came to information age, in which a lot of types of communication were created, which led to a leap in the development of social networks, and now this scientific concept is used everywhere. I will look exclusively at the development of social networks on the Internet.

A landmark event was the invention of the Internet, which became public in 1991 thanks to the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee.

In 1995, Randy Conrad created Classmates.com, the first social network in the modern sense. The concept turned out to be very popular, and from this year the rapid development of social networks on the Internet begins. Today, this network still remains one of the most popular in the world and has more than 50 million users.

In 2004, Facebook appeared, which within a few years became the most popular social network in the world. It uses the same communication mechanism, but on a slightly different plane, which leads to a revolution in this area. The number of active users as of mid-2011 was more than 700 million.

In September 2005, Tim O'Reilly made an ideological revolution by introducing the concept of "Web 2.0" in his article "Tim O'Reilly - What Is Web 2.0", which describes the modern Internet. One of the central parts of the new concept is occupied by social networks.

In 2008, the Groupon project appeared - a service for collective discounts, which, on the one hand, is based precisely on the principle of social networks (call your friends and get a general discount), and on the other hand, uses social connections very superficially (only for purchases). The service connects communication and business, which can confidently be called a new level of development of social networks on the Internet, which combines the online and offline worlds.

For avid fans of social networks, I recommend the lightweight program fvcheat. It is very simple and easy to use, it will help you quickly get, for example, a large number of likes. I know that many girls desperately want to see three- or even four-digit numbers next to the heart under their photo. And that’s not all))) For those interested, you can find more information at the link.

If you start looking for stories about the development of social networks, you will find many articles that mention the Facebook project. In fact, it was far from the first, since its simple analogue SixDegrees appeared back in 1997, but as is now known, it did not achieve much popularity.

The start occurred in 2003-2005, just when such popular projects as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn were launched. In Russia, people do not use these sites so often, since their analogues are more popular in our segment (Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Moi Mir, etc.).

How it all began?

A project called SixDegrees was created to prove the theory of six handshakes. According to this theory, all people on the planet are connected by friendly ties in the range of no more than 6 people. At first, the site began to develop well and later, it was even sold for $125 million, but was closed in 2001.

In the first three years after the appearance of the first social network, many analogues appeared. For example, in 1999, the well-known LiveJournal website was launched, which is now more popular as a platform for creating small blogs.

In the 2000s, other large sites began to appear, which every foreigner and many users from Russia now know about - LinkedIn (2003), MySpace (2003) and Facebook (2004). All of these sites are different from each other, but are now extremely popular and are used by millions of people.

Development of social networks in Russia

Everyone knows that the Internet appeared in Russia much later and many projects are analogues of foreign resources. In 2006, Runet users began registering on currently popular sites - Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki and Twitter. Surely you have heard about these networks, and you should be registered in at least one of them.

Every year, more and more people connect to social networks and begin to actively use them. This is not surprising, because all these sites have become an indispensable tool for communication. You no longer have to visit relatives and send them letters; you can go to their page, look at photos, chat, or even start a video call.

What is the future of social networks?

It is unlikely that anyone will say that these projects will “outlive” their usefulness and will sooner or later close. On the contrary, they will actively develop and prosper. Do you know why? Because their owners do not sit idly by, but add more and more functions, modernizing their resources and providing more and more useful tools.

Experts see several options for the development of social networks - some may merge, some will begin to compete with sites from other areas (with search engines, video hosting), many niche social networks will appear. networks. Experts agree on one thing: all these projects open up new business opportunities.

Through sites such as VKontakte, LinkedIn or Facebook, they not only establish business connections, but also earn money directly (). Perhaps you too will find a profitable job on these resources, combining your passion and income.

The development of social networks does not stand still, and the predictions of professionals are gradually coming true. For example, not long ago they talked about the massive use of mobile social networks, and now, every second resident of large cities has modern gadget, through which it is convenient to visit your page. Against this background, new mobile social networks have even appeared. networks, but so far they have not bypassed the most.