andogo's blog

New technologies has caused a revolution on internet better know as social networking. These social networking since a decade ago makes it possible to make contacts, find places to hang out, and meet like-minded people. This revolution that began in fits and starts in the late 1990s and reached recognizable form in March of 2003, with the public launch of Friendster .

“The idea was to have the Internet do the work of a dinner party,” says Kent Lindstrom, a former Friendster CEO. A user could set up a profile, with personal facts and a picture, and invite friends to join. Friendster’s servers would then generate a continually updated list of her friends as well as her friends’ friends, mapping relationships out to four degrees of separation. Within nine months, Friendster had a million members.

The big winner has been Facebook, founded less than a year after Friendster went public. Facebook has 540 million users who spend about 700 billion minutes on the site every month; if it were a country, it’d be the third most populous in the world. Facebook conquered in part because it took to heart the lessons of its predecessors’ mistakes. Facebook also lured Internet users with its sleek, easy-to-use interface and engineering wizardry. One of its most innovative features was Multi-Feed, which searches your friends’ databases for new updates and streams them to your home page as a continuous news feed. Facebook now contends with some 30 billion shared updates a month—a monumental processing feat that requires tens of thousands of servers.

Them appears others social networkings as ShareSquare which enable users to print bar codes to “geotag” objects in the real world so they could be followed in the virtual one. Foursquare a friend-locator service, Sixdegrees let users identify their friends. MySpace, Tuenti and others more messaging service, blogging networks or  for job networking. For instance, there’s the messaging service Tencent QQ , which is popular in China; Google’s Orkut , which is popular in Brazil; and Twitter , a blogging network that limits posts to 140 characters, which is popular just about everywhere. There’s Flickr for photo sharing and YouTube for video sharing. There’s LinkedIn for job networking and Classmates for finding long-lost school friends. And there’s a whole host of niche networks: Coastr for beer aficionados, Goodreads for bookworms, ResearchGATE for scientists, and Dogster for dog lovers.

Friendster and its rivals came around at just the right time. Point-and-shoot cameras were ubiquitous. Broadband was cheap and available. Users could be sure that the friends they invited to see their profiles and chat online had high-speed Internet connections and plenty of photos to share. This is exactly the kind of life promoted by Friendster, which was left in the dust by MySpace , which was lapped by Facebook .

Again, it will be the mass adoption of new consumer technologies—this time, smartphones and cloud computing—that will allow people to collect and compute vast amounts of data about places and things. The trend has already begun. We’re heading into a third phase of the Web,” Stump says. The webs between humans and machines, and between humans and the people they trust, have already been spun. The Web of the future will instead connect our physical world with our virtual one, enabling our online social interactions to give us valuable insights into our off-line lives.

From my point of view social networking are a bigger advance for the society provided people use it of appropiate way.

http://fores.blogs.uv.es/2011/07/05/03-social-networking-friended/