Interactive websites (online services) on the Internet, created for communication and information exchange by groups of users united by one or another social sign (hobby, profession, area of residence, recreation or work).
The history of social networks began in 1997. And the first social network was SixDegrees.com. And the heyday of social networks began in 2003 - 3004, when such services as MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook appeared on the Internet and rapidly gained in number of users.
And in 1988, Finnish student Jarko Oikarinen invented the IRC technology (English Internet Relay Chat - relayed Internet chat), which allowed real-time communication.
The turning point 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 in great demand, and this year the rapid development of social networks on the Internet begins. Today, this network is still one of the most popular in the world and has more than 50 million users.
The purpose of the social network was an attempt to prove the "theory of six handshakes" ("Six degrees separation" in English terminology). This theory is one of the main ones in the study of social ties, its essence lies in the fact that any 2 people on Earth are connected to each other by a chain of acquaintances of a maximum of 6 people. SixDegrees already offered such functions as creating your own page, a list of friends and searching for friends on a social network.
The project began to quickly gain popularity. In 2000, it was sold for $125 million. However, in 2001, this social network ceased to exist.
On March 18, 1999, American software student Brad Fitzpatrick created Livejournal.
This service subsequently became a mass hosting of blogs and is very popular in the CIS countries. Livejournal provided the first opportunity to create groups and communicate in them. Today we see it on all major social networks.
The first web-resource focused on finding and maintaining business contacts was Ryze, created in 2001.
It was this project that became the impetus for the creation of more famous projects such as Friendster and LinkedIn.
In 2002, Jonathan Abrams developed the dating site Friendster.
The uniqueness of this social network was that it did not follow the path of its predecessors without trying to make two strangers friends. The main idea of the site was to help people find new friends and acquaintances in their friends lists. This innovation allowed the site to collect 3 million users in the first 3 months of its existence. On the this moment more than 115 million people around the world are registered on the resource.
In the same year, in December, the social network LinkedIn was created.
The social network was launched in May 2003 by Reid Hoffman. The purpose of this social network was to find and establish business contacts. Currently, LinkedIn has more than 200 million registered users representing more than 150 business sectors in more than 200 countries.
It provides the ability to create personal profiles, customize appearance their profiles, create communities of interest, post photos, videos and audios of famous artists.
Upon registration, everyone received their own blog. These advantages allowed MySpace to become the most popular social network in the world in 2006. Rock bands became the main users of MySpace. For many musicians, this site has become a real platform for self-presentation, as well as an opportunity to communicate with their idols, sometimes even be among their friends.
But at the moment, the MySpace rating is falling every day, giving way to larger and more popular social networks. According to the popularity rating of sites in 2009, MySpace was in 5th place, and at the beginning of 2013 it had already dropped to 229th place.
In 2004, Ludicorp launched the Flickr project. The creators of this idea are Stuart Butterfield and Katerina Fake.
The goal of the project was to allow Game Neverending players to save their images during the game in order to post them on the Internet in the future. Immediately, the service began to enjoy great popularity, and already in 2005, Flickr was bought by Yahoo, becoming available to any Internet user.
The Facebook social network was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg.
In 2005, the network became known as Facebook. The initial goal of the social network was to provide an opportunity for Harvard University students to communicate with each other, post photos, videos, change statuses online.
In 2008, the social network Facebook became the most popular social network in the world, and since that period it has never lost its leadership. Throughout its existence, Facebook has been constantly adding new features, including instant messaging, chat, and many applications. It also has its own platform for developers. Facebook today is the 2nd most popular site in the world, behind 1 position search engine Google.
In addition to simple communication with people of interest to them, all users have the opportunity to exchange various media information with each other - sound, video and photo files. In addition, new horizons have opened up for the use of social networks to promote Internet resources, goods and services.
The number of active users as of the middle of 2011 is more than 700 million.
In September 2005, Tim O'Reilly makes 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 2006, Jack Dorsey launched the Twitter project and immediately became a rapidly growing new social networking project. The uniqueness of Twitter lies in the ability of users to send short text messages (up to 140 characters). Initially, the goal of the project was to provide an opportunity for a person to answer simple questions “What are you doing now?” "What are you doing now?" etc. At the same time, the answer was available immediately to all people who are subscribed to this user. This innovation allowed us to quickly conquer the market and expand functionality.
So since 2010, you can watch photos, videos on the site, and the functioning of the site has become faster and easier. At the moment, Twitter is one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world, taking an honorable 8th place at the beginning of 2013.
The Odnoklassniki project was launched on March 4, 2006 by Albert Popkov. The main task of the social network was to search for classmates, classmates, former graduates, friends, acquaintances, as well as relatives with whom contact was lost. In 2012, more than 150 million users were already registered on the site and this number continues to increase every day.
The most famous and popular social network in the CIS "Vkontakte" was launched on October 10, 2006 and positioned itself as a social network for university graduates. To date, the site has more than 42 million daily traffic and is the most popular and most visited resource in the CIS market. In 2012, Vkontakte switched to the new domain VK.com. To date, Vkontakte is the largest video and audio hosting in Runet.
Social networks are increasingly becoming an important communication channel for the business environment. Social networks allow you to solve a number of marketing tasks (in particular, conduct PR and advertising campaigns), monitor and analyze the activities of competitors, share experience with colleagues, and be close and accessible to customers. In addition, social networks (especially industry-specific ones) can be an effective tool for solving personnel issues, being a meeting place for employers and potential employees.
Social networks are leaders in attendance among other Internet resources. Millions of users visit pages every day to chat, learn last 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, resulting in a social network 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 working 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 features(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 (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.
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 tightly tied to them. Read more about their emergence and development in our article.
The advent of social networks
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). 
With the advent of the Internet (1969), the scientific concept of James Barnes 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 this time, he finished writing his utopian novel “Year 4338”. The world described by the author is in some way reminiscent of the 21st century: “... magnetic telegraphs are arranged between familiar houses, through which people living at a distance talk to each other.” Odoevsky also talks about “home newspapers” that are published “in many houses, especially between those who have great acquaintances; they replace ordinary correspondence ... The duty to publish such a magazine once a week or daily is assigned in every house to the table butler. This is done very simply: each time, having received an order from the owners, he writes down everything that was said to him, then he takes the required number of copies into the camera obscura and sends them to his acquaintances. This newspaper usually contains a notice about the health or illness of the owners and other household news.
It is worth noting that Vladimir Fedorovich is not far from reality. However, then, of course, he could not know about social networks, blogs and the Internet.
17 years later, in 1988, Finnish scientist Jarko Oikarinen invented the IRC protocol - relayed Internet chat - and software for its implementation. Now it became possible to communicate with each other in real time.
Then the American Randy Konrads created Classmates.com - the first social network in the modern sense. In it, registered users get access to the catalog of graduates of various educational institutions. Thus, anyone can find classmates or classmates. It is worth noting that Classmates.com immediately turned out to be very popular. By the way, its popularity does not fall even today - more than 50 million people use the social network. Interestingly, Odnoklassniki is the Russian equivalent of Classmates.com. They currently have over 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 Moskowitz and Chris Hughes. At the same time, a website of the same name appeared. It was originally only available to Harvard students. A little later, registration was opened for Boston universities, and then for all Americans with email address in the .edu domain. Beginning in September 2006, Facebook became available to all Internet users aged 16 and over. Today it is one of the five most visited websites in the world. Not surprisingly, the monthly audience of the network is 1.968 billion people.
On October 10, 2006, an analogue of Facebook appears 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 to communicate 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, more than 410 million users are registered in this social network today.
“They were uploading and sharing photos like crazy,” Systrom notes. In this regard, together with a colleague, he decides to get rid of all the functions, leaving only the photo display.
The move worked, and Burbn, or rather, Instagram has already gained unprecedented popularity.
Today, the app ranks 17th on the SimilarWeb list and has over 200 million active subscribers, which have downloaded more than 16 billion different pictures and videos.
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Every day, most of us spend at least a few minutes on our online social media profiles. Marketers, business owners, SMM professionals and many others use accounts to promote their brand and increase their audience. We try to pick up, strive to create the most unique content, learn, Facebook or Twitter.
But most of us have little idea of the people who have gone to great lengths to ensure that we use these resources on a daily basis. And if the name of Mark Zuckerberg is on everyone's lips, then probably not everyone will be able to answer what the merit of Mr. Silberman is. This article contains a brief history of the creators of the most popular social networks.
Lucky ones or "prophets of a new way of life"?
Why know them by sight? Maybe there is no need. But if you are not present in any of the social networks mentioned below, then perhaps brief information about their founders will inspire you to create an account or open up a whole new platform to communicate or promote your products or services.
After all, today almost every social network represents multifunctional features not only to write to a friend from another continent “Hello, how are you?”, But, for example, it allows you to increase your sales by 10, 15 or 30% in 3 days. Who was at the foundation of the most popular social networks in the world?
Who invented the most popular social networks?
Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most popular and influential people in the world. However, Dustin Moskowitz, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes also have full right to subscribe under the authorship of Facebook along with him. It was these people who in tandem created one of the most popular social networks.
Mark Zuckerberg is 33 today, he is married, has a daughter and is expecting a second child together with his wife. The future creator of Facebook was born in a Jewish medical family near New York from an early age was engaged in programming, developed network games. He did not complete his education as a psychologist at Harvard, he called himself a "hacker". In 2010, he was named Person of the Year by Time magazine.
Today, Mark, together with the development team, never ceases to amaze and build ambitious plans. One of them is the creation, which was recently announced at the F8 conference.
Instagram and Kevin Systrom
The American entrepreneur and programmer was born in 1984 in the US state of Massachusetts into a family of marketing and HR executives. Since childhood, Kevin has been fond of programming, in school years sold records in a Boston store. Graduated from Stanford University, was fond of photography.
One of the first serious jobs of the future co-founder of Instagram was the position of a product marketing manager at Google, then there was the position of a developer in the same place. After two years at the famous company, Kevin's ambitions led him to leave Google and start his own venture, which is now admired by more than 700 million users around the world.
Twitter and Jack Dorsey
American Jack Dorsey is the co-founder of Twitter along with Evan Williams and Biz Stone, but most often it is his name that is put in first place when talking about the authors of the popular social network. The 41-year-old software architect by training started with interesting developments in the field of logistics, which are still used by some taxi companies. The idea of creating Twitter came to young Jack while still studying at one of the universities in New York. Twitter was inspired by the example of LiveJournal.
One of the latest high-profile events on Twitter has been the possibility of live broadcasts.
Tumblr and David Karp
One of the youngest founders of social networks, David Karp is barely 31 years old. The American entrepreneur who invented the microblogging service has received several awards and honors from BusinessWeek and Technology Review magazines.
Born and raised in New York, he was homeschooled for some time. He began his career as a consultant on software for one of the American Internet portals. It took a little over a year for the young talent to develop and launch the first version of Tumblr, which is now popular all over the world.
Pinterest and Ben Silberman
The 35-year-old American entrepreneur is considered one of the founders of the rapidly growing visual social network Pinterest. However, it is his name that is most often used when mentioning the authorship of a social Internet resource. Ben was raised in a family of ophthalmologists and was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University. In his career practice - working at Google and developing his own application for the iPhone.
Pinterest is becoming more and more popular every day, developing on a par with its main competitor - Instagram. The developers of the social network have already implemented many functions that make .
LinkedIn and Reid Hoffman
This year's hero of the year, 50-year-old Reed Hoffman, is not only the founder of the professional social network LinkedIn, but also a writer, billionaire and co-founder a large number companies. Born and raised in California, he received a Bachelor of Science degree from the same Stanford University, then became a Master of Philosophy at Oxford. Worked at Apple computer.
In December 2002, he initiated the creation of one of the first business social networks - LinkedIn.
Snapchat and Evan Spiegel
The mobile messaging app Snapchat was also invented by more than one person. American entrepreneur Evan Spiegel was assisted by Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown.
Evan Spiegel is also a graduate of the famous Stanford University. The 27-year-old American was brought up in a family of lawyers from California, who sent young Evan to a school with a bias towards art and the exact sciences. At an early age, Spiegel interned for free in the sales department of Red Bull, worked in a medical company. In May of this year, he married the famous Australian model Miranda Kerr.
Odnoklassniki and Albert Popkov
This year, the creator of the oldest Russian-language social network Odnoklassniki celebrates its 45th anniversary. He was not an exemplary student, dropped out of school, tried many jobs, but eventually came to programming. While studying at a technical school in Moscow, he developed software for Soviet gaming computers.
Since 1995, he began to actively develop websites. On his career list is the position of director of development in the help desk. He launched the Odnoklassniki project in 2006. Albert was named "Person of the Year 2008" by the International Union of Internet Figures.
VKontakte, Telegram and Pavel Durov
Former CEO VKontakte and the creator of the Telegram messenger, 33-year-old Pavel Durov never tired of collecting scholarships and awards as a student: he was awarded a scholarship by the President of the Russian Federation, was a three-time winner of the Potanin scholarship and other high awards.
It is curious that the versatile Durov received a red diploma from St. Petersburg State University with a degree in English Philology and Translation, and before that he studied in the military specialty at the same educational institution. It is also interesting that Durov's father is a doctor of philological sciences, and his brother is a candidate of physical and mathematical disciplines.
How do you like the success stories of the founders of these famous social networks? How many of the resources listed above do you use at work and for personal purposes? Be sure to share in the comments!
Of course, other social networks are also popular today. It happens that some of them have to say goodbye against their will. This happened with the LinkedIn network in Russia or VKontakte in Ukraine, when the governments of these countries blocked access to social networks for various reasons. Subscribers had to look for or try alternatives.
If you manage accounts in several social networks and you constantly do not have enough time for this, use handy tool autoposting. The functionality of the KUKU.io SMM service allows you to quickly and accurately plan publications, organize them in a content calendar, select the necessary time zones and track analytics even for a single post.
By the way, publications to all of the above social networks (except Snapchat) can be scheduled using KUKU.io. Don't miss this opportunity!
It is generally accepted that social networks first appeared in the 2000s, although this is not entirely true. Now 50% of the world's population uses sites such as Facebook, Vkontakte, Twitter and their analogues. All of them were created after 2006, but there are other projects that appeared much earlier.
The first social networks were created back in 1995, although there are still disputes about this. The fact is that in 1995 a prototype of the social. networks where you could find people, but personal pages did not start there (a kind of database). A resource with the ability to open profiles was created in 1997.
Social networks from A to Z
Initially, the site Classmates.com appeared, which was the base with people who studied somewhere, graduated from something, served, and so on. With the help of this resource, it was really possible to find old acquaintances, but it was not very convenient. Now the resource has been completely redesigned and continues to exist for people from all over the world. It quickly made functionality that allows you to open accounts.
As for the project launched in 1997, it can rightfully be called a social network. User pages have already been created here and there was functionality that we are used to using now. It was called Sixdegrees.com, and lasted only until 2001. This is not surprising, at that time there was no mass distribution of the Internet, so only a few could spend a lot of time online. During its existence, it was even sold for a lot of money, this is how it looked:
The design is outdated, but what would you expect from a 2000 site. At that time, there were no technologies that could improve the appearance of resources, and the speed of the Internet left much to be desired.
The Sixdegrees website was based on the theory of "Six Handshakes", this was discussed in more detail in the article about. Since the advent of this resource, hundreds of analogues have been launched, but none of them has become world famous. Only in 2004 did the next social project that everyone is using now.
The first popular social network
This is Facebook, launched back in 2004. Social network, which have earned popularity all over the world, opens this particular resource. However, for the first two years it was corporate and only in 2006 (in September), everyone got the opportunity to register on it, provided that he was over 16 years old and had an e-mail.
It is from 2006 that the birth of the world of social networks is considered, since it was from it that the active popularization of such popular projects as MySpace and LinkedIn began. In the same year, an analogue of Facebook "Vkontakte" appeared, which now deserves the title of the most popular site in Russia and Ukraine.
This list can be continued indefinitely, other analogues soon appeared - Odnoklassniki, My World, Google + (which was created and remade several times) and so on. The era of social networks is now at its peak, but experts are confident that in the future it will become even more developed.
You now know about the first social networks that appeared on the Internet and you can use them not only for entertainment. Use and benefit from visiting your favorite resources. Believe me, this is much better than mindlessly flipping through other people's pages, updating the feed and exchanging empty messages.
