Online Social Networks

Online social networks have been around since the first time I logged into the internet, it is part of us humans that want to build social networks be it online or offline. On reading about the subject it was amazing to what lengths people would go through just to pass a simple message around.

For as long as I can remember I have been dragged from one online social network to another, I'm not a fan of any of them and quite frankly can do without any of them. The only reason I join as well as quit is because all my friends do.

The first social network I was ever a part of was IRC (Internet Relay Chat) based which at that time server the purpose just fine. It allowed us friends to identify each other, have mult-person conversations and speak as privately and publicly as we wanted. Next MSN Messenger started catching on, people where all shifting from IRC to MSN which allows you to identify yourself securely to your friends by your hotmail.com email account as well as accept/reject/block anyone you would want from your contact list. In my opinion the real reason people moved from IRC to MSN was because it looked "pretty". characters such as :) where being automatically transformed into smiling face emoticons and everyone was allowed to select their desired backgrounds and fonts.

Then came all the web-based social networks such as mySpace, hi5, facebook and now Google+, all trying to gain as much of the world's internet's population hostage to the multitude of features (mostly useless) to ultimately generate advertising revenue.

In my opinion the only reason why social networks have ultimately taken over most of the internet's traffic is because they're viral in nature. If you create an account at any of these sites you want your friends to be there too otherwise it's useless, on inviting your friends to join the network you have contributed to the viral nature of these networks and that is why the most successful ones grow exponentially and die off fast.

One could go on forever about the pros and cons on online social networks and would never end up with a definitive answer, yes we need social networks because they fulfill some inner human "feature"which makes us want to be a part of something but yet exposes some of our worst fears about privacy. 

I have spend the majority of this post explaining my personal experience with online social networks yet not made any reference to anything relating to web technologies. I Believe that most of the latest web-technologies we have today are there because of social networks. The internet has been around for decades now but prior to the last 5 years all web-pages were simply that just HTML pages. Social networks have developed on the same technologies (HTTP, HTML, JavaScript) to come up with something as dynamic as a desktop application. AJAX has been technically possible since HTTP and JavaScript were available yet very little tried to implement it prior to the social network boom. That is one thing we should at least all be thankful for :)