The first social networks. The history of the emergence of social networks The first social network was founded by

Social networks are leaders in attendance among other Internet resources. Millions of users visit pages every day to chat, find out the latest news, share information and photos. And if you follow the link, you can explore the features of the mobile version of the Odnoklassniki resource.

Of course, a certain kind of services existed before the development of the Internet era - most often they were intended for communication in a very narrow circle (certain structures). In our article, we will talk about public services used by people around the world.

classmates

The very first social network in the world is the American Odnoklassniki, which appeared in 1995. At first, the resource allowed you to create a profile and a list of friends who can be found solely by the parameters of the school, service or university. Subsequently, the resource was redesigned - it became possible to create accounts, write messages and much more, as a result of which a social network arose in the usual sense of the word. Now you know when the first social network that is currently operating appeared.

And if you need a Russian version and want to download Odnoklassniki to your computer, use this link.

Probably everyone is familiar with the theory of six handshakes, according to which all people in the world know each other through six other people? The world's first social network was called Sixdegrees.com, and it was based on this principle. The resource began to work in 1997 and was a familiar modern network for communication. Who created the first social network in the usual sense for us? This is programmer Andrew Weinreich.

The site did not survive to this day, its functionality was too complicated for the 1990s, when the Internet was not yet so widespread and people spent a small amount of time online. Despite attempts to update, the flow of users was too small and the service was closed, significantly ahead of its time in terms of development. The resource was replaced by others, more modern, functioning now.

Mark Zuckerberg

This name is familiar to every modern student and adult. It was he (in collaboration with three other students) who created the well-known Facebook. It happened in 2004, at first the site was available only to students at Harvard University, then it spread among Boston students, and then conquered the United States, and then the whole world. Just think, four students were able to create a unique product that had no similarity in the whole world. Today it is the most popular social network in the world.

It was an undoubted breakthrough - nothing like it had ever existed. On the site, you can create profiles, write messages, share videos and photos, join various groups. Accounts for business, created specifically for companies, are very popular.

Russian analogue

The very first social network in Russia arose in 2006, it was then that the notorious Pavel Durov launched his VKontakte project. At its core, it is a repetition of Zuckerberg's resource, but it also has distinctive features.

This site, no doubt, is familiar to almost every Russian-speaking Internet user. It gained immense popularity due to its wide entertainment and multimedia capabilities, as well as additional functions (money transfer, video calls, etc.). Users can create their own profiles, write messages, share news and read publics and groups.

Finally, it is worth mentioning the domestic analogue of the first Internet project for communication - Odnoklassniki. The resource was created in 2006 and is only slightly inferior to VKontakte in terms of attendance and popularity. This is an entertainment resource that allows you to search for friends, colleagues and fellow practitioners and stay in touch with them. It is worth noting that this service is intended for an older age category than Vkontakte (the average age of the audience is 16-35 years).

We briefly told you what the first social network was like, analyzed the history of social networks and gave vivid examples of the largest sites for communication, some of which still work today. Choose an option from functioning services, register and start communication.

The whole principle of work is built on convenient communication (communication) with users. It can be done in the following ways:

Groups and communities- they gather groups of people similar in some basic interest. For example, a community of fans of some musical group. There, people will be able to follow the news of this group, discuss it, share their opinions, offer their own cover versions of songs, and so on.
Personal correspondence
Microblogs and walls- here you can post your own posts. For example, news, and so on. Your followers and friends will be able to follow them, like them, and so on.
Comments

If this is a regular user, then as a rule, he creates a profile page and configures it. Then he looks for his friends, communicates with them, follows their news.

This user can post various information on his page (photos, videos, texts, and so on). At the same time, his friends will always be aware of the news. That is, if your friend posts a video about his vacation, then you will know about it.

You can also join various communities of interest and communicate with like-minded people there.

As a rule, separate groups and communities are created for this. In them, companies provide users with their offers. For example, discounts, contests, expert content, and so on.

Social networks have become so convenient in communication that businesses have begun to additionally use them as a platform for working with clients. For example, answer user questions. Give some recommendations to your target audience and so on.

History of social networks

First social network

The first social network actually emerged in 1999. It was Live Journal livejournal). And at first it looked more like a blog platform than a network. It was invented in the USA. But then the Russian company Klimenko ( President's Internet Adviser) bought this project.

In the future, this platform began to add elements of communication. If earlier it was only possible to publish text there, then useful features appeared. For example, following another person, comments, and so on.

Thanks to all these features, Live Journal has become a social network.

In general, speaking about the history of the emergence of social networks, many projects have appeared recently. However, most of them have not received much recognition from users. Therefore, here we will consider only the most popular sites.

Twitter

After Live Journal, Twitter became popular. It has become a good replacement for livejournal. After all, there were big posts in LiveJournal at that time.

But the problem is that only a small percentage of people can write such large poems. As a result, people cannot interact with themselves through their content. They can only interact in comments.

Twitter, on the other hand, made it possible for all people to write small notes of 140 characters in order to outline their thoughts. This feature has made Twitter a popular LiveJournal replacement.

Also, do not forget that most people are lazy creatures. Not everyone likes to read huge posts. As a rule, most prefer to read small notes.

Twitter itself appeared in 2006 and began to rapidly gain momentum.

Facebook

After Twitter, Facebook came to replace it, as it provided the opportunity to create direct and more understandable communication. In addition to the fact that you can post content, you can also quickly interact with people there. For example, chat with them.

At that time, Twitter did not have such an option in private messages. Therefore, due to this, the FB was promoted very quickly.

Initially, since 2004, Facebook was available only to students of various universities. But since 2006, this network has become available worldwide. In 2008, it became the most popular social network.

Instagram

Facebook was followed by Instagram in 2011. He became famous for the content in the photo format.

But then I just wanted to look at the pictures. It was no longer important text support. People just wanted to flip through the photos. Instagram gave them that opportunity.

Then Instagram came to replace snapchat. It used actual photo content, which becomes unavailable after 24 hours. This, by the way, later became available on Instagram.

But why did it become so popular then? And it became popular because people needed only relevant content in real time.

For example, to write news, a journalist will need time to prepare the material. Come to the place of the event, find out everything and so on.

But with the advent of the chance to publish relevant content, we have the opportunity to post material on the go and in real time.

For example, if a car catches fire on my street now, I can immediately shoot a video and put it on the Internet. As a result, users will be able to get up-to-date information as quickly as possible.

But apart from the fact that Snapchat could get up-to-date information, there was no way to edit it clearly. You could add some filters. But it was impossible to change it harshly, like on Instagram, then.

Social networks in Russia

However, after the addition of pirated music and videos, VK began to take off at an incredible speed. This gave a big leap forward. As a result, in Russia it has become much more popular than Facebook.

Instagram- this is the next leader, which is also popular in Runet. Thanks to the ability to rummage through posts, this project began to gain popularity.

Facebook is the third most popular project in Runet. However, for the whole world, it was a cool social network. With us, he moved to another plan after Vkontakte appeared.

Well, the last popular social project in Runet is classmates. In fact, they have nothing unique. It's just that the network itself is developing through search and communication with classmates. It was created in 2006.

Here I have listed only the most popular social networks. Of course, there were many more. However, many of them are already closed. And besides, you can’t consider all projects here. Yes, this is nothing.

Why social networks will be in trend for a long time?

And despite the fact that we feel like we have been cooking in this topic for a long time, to the social. networks in the form in which they are now, we came not so long ago.

The second point is that every year these projects replace more and more familiar services from life. Usually this:

calls, sms
A television
Online shopping
Training and so on

The third point is that most large and small businesses are already using social media. It can be assumed that the business itself will force ordinary users to use these resources. For example, follow the news in the group.

That's all!

Before delving into the history of social networks, we first find out where the very concept of “social networks” came from. And so, the word "social" comes from the word "Society", which means a structured society, that is, the union of social objects, which are groups of people and people themselves. It follows from this that social networks make it possible to build relationships between these objects on the Internet.

The history of social networks takes its beginning in the seventies of the twentieth century. And in the first ways social. communication on the Internet have become: network conferences that allow you to save the history of communication; e-mail, which makes it possible to exchange textual information through computer networks and communication - online, that is, people could communicate in real time. Recall that thanks to the creation of the IRC protocol in the late eighties of the last century, it provided people with the opportunity to exchange information freely. It was the IRC protocol that laid the foundation for the modern concept of "Chat".
Thus, we can safely say that the history of social networks has its origin. Then came a new stage in the development and emergence of new technologies, the principles of social. communication on the Internet. And all this led to the emergence of blogs, guest books and forums.

And so, a real revolutionary breakthrough was made by the American project "Classmates.com", subsequently, the famous and well-known portal "Odnoklassniki" became the Runet analogue. And this event happened in 1995. Since then, the history of social networks has overcome a new frontier and moved to a new qualitative level.

In 2003, there was a real boom, and all thanks to the emergence of such popular Internet projects among users as Facebook.com and MySpace.com. From that moment on, social networks have become an integral attribute of the life of every person, one way or another connected with the World Wide Web.

Absolutely all users, except for simple communication with interesting people, got the opportunity to exchange various media information with each other, and these are photo files, video files, audio files. In addition to all that has just been said, for the use of social. networks for promoting goods, services, Internet resources - new horizons have opened up.

And now some statistics, today the leading social. Western Internet networks were popular and remain so: the well-known Facebook portal (more than seven hundred and fifty million users visit it a day), followed by the Twitter portal (search engines treat the portal very favorably, this made it unusually popular among webmasters), and in third place is the international service My Space, which is well-known among musicians and other representatives of the arts.

What can be said about the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, here, probably, every second user will say that the VKontakte portal dominates, then Odnoklassniki, which lost some of their popularity with the advent of the first portal. Well, the third position is occupied by the well-known "My World", created on the basis of the Mail.ru portal.

Every day, more than 60 million people from around the world visit one of the most popular social networks - VKontakte. Who created this project and how did it happen? Considering that the history of the creation of the service itself deserves attention, we suggest that you go back a few years and see how it all began and what path preceded such an enchanting success. And the appearance of VKontakte is closely connected with the name of one of the brightest figures among the representatives of the new generation of entrepreneurs - Pavel Durov.

Despite the fact that the popularity of Durov's main project brought him great fame, there is not so much information about the creator of the best social network in Runet.

Childhood

The one who created the VKontakte network was born in Leningrad (modern St. Petersburg) on October 10, 1984, in the family of the famous Soviet philologist Valery Semyonovich Durov, the author of a large number of scientific works.

For several years, Durov Sr. and his family lived in where the head of the family worked. It was there that Pavel began to go to school. Upon returning to his native Petersburg, he continued his studies at a regular school, but not for too long - too often he had to point out to teachers their incompetence, which the boy could not accept. However, an alternative was found quite quickly - in the experimental classes of the Academic Gymnasium, such as Durov Jr., they recruited a whole group.

During his school years, Pavel sat at the first desk, often alone, received high scores and was considered a very erudite child, but the "stars" of the class - winners of various olympiads - overshadowed him. Nikolai, Durov's older brother, is a talented scientist who also won competitions in computer science and mathematics.

University admission

Immediately after graduating from the gymnasium, Pavel Durov, following in the footsteps of his father, entered the St. Petersburg State University, the Faculty of Philology, and graduated from it in 2006. In his student years, the one who created the VKontakte social network did not go with the flow like most students, but actively used the time for self-improvement and development.

First steps towards success

A key moment in the biography of the entrepreneur was approaching - the emergence of VKontakte. Who created this you already know. However, few people know that even before its appearance, while studying at the university, Pavel worked on several predecessor projects. One of them is the site durov.com, which had no commercial benefit, but helped students who studied and lived in different districts of the northern capital to exchange opinions and ideas online.

However, soon Pavel let the work of durov.com take its course and shifted his attention to a new project - the university forum spbgu.ru, starting to promote it. First of all, Durov broke the portal to the sites of the faculties, then he began to initiate verbal battles, registered under different nicknames and argued with himself, and in real life he organized beauty and design contests. Meanwhile, the attendance of the forum reached 3,000 people a day, the resource began to be enriched with new social functions. Users were able to blog, raise or lower each other's rating. Pavel was especially careful about monetization, not allowing banners that were not related to education to appear on the site.

By the end of his studies, Durov was firmly convinced that he needed to work on his own projects, and not on translations from English, as indicated in the diploma. By the way, he did not take the diploma itself, so as not to encounter bureaucracy once again.

At the dawn of a new era

We continue to study the biography of the one who created the social. network "VKontakte". Against the background of his other ideas, Durov has long been thinking about the implementation of such a project, where all people could perform under real names. Just at this turning point, in his mailbox there was a letter from a person with whom Pavel lost contact 7 years ago - Vyacheslav Mirilashvili. A student at the prestigious American Tufts University saw how social networks are rapidly gaining popularity, and gave the idea to an old friend.

If they started a little later, the chances of success would be much lower. In the spring of 2006, the number of users in domestic social networks continued to grow, but even the audience of the leader, the Odnoklassniki website, hardly reached 500,000 people.

Beginning of work

Vyacheslav did not have his own funds to launch the project. He had to borrow them from one of the companies of his father, Mikhail Mirilashvili, the owner of the St. Petersburg casinos "Konti" and shopping and entertainment centers "PetroMir". Mirilashvili Sr. is one of the most famous businessmen in the northern capital of the 1990s and is believed to be a good acquaintance of President Vladimir Putin.

Friends established a company in which Vyacheslav remained, and his friends Pavel Durov and Lev Leviev became. Durov was not at all embarrassed that the project could be associated with someone else's name. But he left himself a block of voting shares, sufficient to veto objectionable decisions.

On October 1, 2006, a key event took place - the company registered the vkontakte.ru domain. This day is considered the birthday of VKontakte. Who created this site, you now know. It's time to talk about the development of the project itself.

At first, the site was closed, and it was possible to register only by invitation. Registration was allowed only for those who indicated their real name and surname. Students of the capital's universities vied with each other to persuade each other to register, and in just a few days in November, the newly appeared social network attracted more than 2,000 users. And the main motive was participation in the competition, which, again, was invented by Pavel Durov, the one who created the VKontakte website. The one who was able to invite the largest number of friends was promised an original and expensive gift for that time - a real iPod.

Already 3 months later, free registration was introduced, and the rapidly growing number of participants in the social network prompted the organizers to switch to more powerful servers and actively improve the system.

Further development of VKontakte

Now you know how the social network VKontakte appeared, who created it and continued to develop it. Today the site is constantly changing and improving. It can be said without exaggeration that VKontakte has become a whole world for those who like to communicate, make new friends, listen to music, watch videos, play games, read news and interesting notes.

With the advent of the Internet, many aspects of our lives have gradually migrated to the virtual world. And communication was no exception, rather, on the contrary. The human need for high-speed communication (transfer of information) became the basis for the emergence of the Internet itself. If the older generation still remembers well about living forms of communication, then the younger generation increasingly prefers virtual connections. Sometimes it comes to the fact that even neighbors communicate with each other via the Internet.

The emergence of social networks was a consequence of the development and spread of the Internet. Today, for many, the morning begins not only with a cup of coffee, but also with viewing your page on a particular social network. According to statistics, about 50% of the population of our planet regularly visit their page on any social network, and some even visit several at once. The data on youth speaks best of their popularity: 96% of young people communicate in social networks. networks. And they are really addictive, not without reason the Internet was called the World Wide Web. After all, if some insect gets into the web of a spider, then it remains there forever.

In principle, we can say that the emergence of social networks began almost simultaneously with the advent of the Internet back in 1969. Throughout the evolution of social networks, two main directions of development can be distinguished: purely professional communities and non-specialized networks. Derivatives of professional communities are networks that unite people with the same interests or hobbies.

So, when did the first social network appear and what was it like? - different sources put forward different opinions regarding the emergence of the first full-fledged social network. In principle, the first social network resource can be considered Classmates.com, created by Randy Conrads in 1995. Classmates translates as classmates. The site provided users with the opportunity to reconnect with former classmates, classmates, colleagues, friends. Today this network has more than 50 million users in the US and Canada. In addition, its services are available to residents of Sweden, Germany, Austria and France. But for quite a long time, this social portal did not support the functions of creating personal profiles and adding friends. That is, the user could only be connected to his educational institution and provide him with a list of students who studied at this institution.

That is why some researchers consider the first full-fledged social network not Classmates, but the SixDegrees.com project, which was launched in 1997. At that time, many web services (dating sites, for example) offered features such as creating a personal page or a list of friends (ICQ and AIM), but separately. SixDegrees.com was the first social networking service to combine these features, and over time (in 1998) added a new one, such as search through friends pages. This project was closest to modern social. networks, however, in 2001 the SixDegrees.com portal ceased to exist. The founder of the network, Andrew Weinreich, explained this by saying that the service was simply ahead of its time. In 2000, less than half of US residents had Internet access. In other words, registered users did not have enough friends and acquaintances with Internet access to make communication on this site even interesting.