1. A Definition of Social Network Sites
Social networks have been around much longer than the Internet itself, as humans have always been sharing spaces, traditions, and culture. To Weaver and Morrison (2008), the basic concept of social networks consists of three or more entities communicating and sharing information. As examples of contemporary types of “offline” social networks, they cite a church, a university, and “any number of other socially constructed relationships” (2008, p.97).
In the Internet context, there are several definitions for social network(ing). Weaver and Morrison (2008, p.97) explain that online social networking means “individuals using the Internet and Web applications to communicate in previously impossible ways.” Landis (2007, p.709) affirms that social networking sites consist of “individual profiles that are publicly viewable. Users can then link their profiles by ‘Friending’ one another, to draw a connection between them that others can see. Additionally, users can interact with their Friends by leaving comments on their Friends’ profiles.” The Library Technology Reports (September-October, 2007) use the Wikipedia definition for Social Networking Services, i.e., “primarily web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, e-mail, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups .”
Boyd and Ellison (2008) provide the definition for the term that we believe it is the most consistent of all those presented in this paper: “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by other within the system” (2008, p.211).
2. Brief History of Social Networks Sites
According to Metz (2006), LinkedIn and similar six-degree sites such as Friendster, Plaxo, and Tribe, respectively launched in 2002, 2002, and 2003, were the pioneers of using the term social networking. . However, the first appearance of a social network site (SNS) according to the definition above was SixDegrees.com, released in 1997. This site allowed users to create profiles, list friends, and surf friends’ list. The service was ahead of its time and early adopters complained that one of the sole activities in the social network was to accept friends’ requests, and most users didn’t want to meet strangers. Consequently, the service closed in 2000 (Boyd & Elisson, 2008). After Six Degrees, from 1997 to 2001, other community tools started supporting combinations of profiles and publicly articulated friends. A identity-driven site called BlackPlanet (started in 1999) allowed people to create separate personal, professional, and dating profiles, and users could find friends without approval for those connections (Boyd & Elisson, 2008).
In 2001, Ryze.com was launched with a focus on business networks, but it never became massively popular. In the following year, Friendster was launched as a “social complement” to Ryze (Boyd & Elisson, 2008). The idea of Friendster was to compete with Match.com, a dating website, and help friends-of-friends meet each other to become romantic partners. Although Friendster was growing in popularity, users encountered technical and social difficulties on the website. As Boyd and Alisson (2008, p.215) explain: “Friendster’s servers and databases were ill-equipped to handle its rapid growth, and the site faltered regularly, frustrating users who replaced email with Friendster.” The other problem was that the company started deleting Fakesters, or fake profiles of celebrities and institutions, while people actually enjoyed these pages for fun or to find people they knew through profiles of colleges, schools, and other institutions.
In 2003, there was a boom of new social networks. Some of them, such as Hi5, Xanga, and Last.FM appealed to the general public and others targeted specific demographics (e.g.: LinkedIn targeted professionals, and Blackplanet and Asian Avenue appealed to specific ethnic groups), and others focused on common interests (e.g.: Couchsurfing connected travelers and hosts, Dogster connected passionate dog owners). The growth of social media and user-generated content motivated media sharing websites like Flickr (launched in 2004) to develop social network services features, becoming social networks themselves. MySpace was launched in 2003, and captured the early adopters frustrated with Friendster, including a large group of indie bands that were expulsed from Friendster because they had Fakester profiles (Rivlin, 2005; Boyd &Allison, 2008). MySpace became very popular because of its features based on user demand and the personalization of pages. In 2004, teenagers joined this SNS in masse. In 2005, the website was purchased by News Corporation for $ 580 million, signalizing the growth and importance of this type of social media.
At the same time, some networks were beginning to focus more on specific demographics (Boyd and Alisson, 2008). Facebook, the most popular example, was started in 2004 by three college students at Harvard, intending to connect Harvard-students only. Eventually in the same year, Facebook expanded to support other colleges, in 2005 integrated high school students, in 2006 professionals, and finally general population. Facebook never allowed users to make their full profile available to everyone. Another characteristic incorporated in 2007 that made this SNS very popular was the ability for developers to build and distribute their applications, which let users to personalize their profiles (Weaver and Morrison, 2008).
It is also important to note that during this period social networks became popular worldwide, not only in the United States (Lipsman, 2007; Lipsman, 2008). Friendster lost popularity in the US, but became popular in the Pacific Islands; Google’s Orkut didn’t work in the US, but it became very popular in Brazil and India; Mixi attained popularity in Japan, Lunarstorm in Sweeden, Bebo in the United Kingdom, and QQ in China, among others.
3. Numbers of Popular Social Network Sites
The popularity of individual social networks sites has been fluctuating in the last few years. We believe among the most important reasons is the continuous creation of new SNS, the development of new features in each social network site, the growth of users and web-servers capabilities, and the fact that people were joining more than one social network at the same time.
In May 2006, MySpace had 51,441,000 unique visitors Classmates.com Sites were second with 14,792,000 unique visitors, and Facebook was in third place with 14,069,000 unique visitors (Lipsman, 2006). According to the site analysis service Compete, Facebook currently leads the most popular social networks ranking in the US with 68,557,534 unique visitors last January. MySpace comes in second place with 58,555,800 unique visitors. Weaver and Morrison (2008), citing the Pew Internet and American Life Project report, emphasize that more than half of 12-17 years-old American use SNS and 55% of teenagers have created a personal profile online. Li and Bernoff (2008) illustrate in the 2007 Technographics surveys that that one in four online American adults visit social network sites at least monthly.
Nowadays, most social networks have either the option to add a picture in the user’s profile, to share series of entire albums, or both. The first social network, SixDegrees.com, didn’t have this feature in 1997-2000, and we believe this is probably related to the late popularization of digital cameras. More recent features on social network photos include commenting on other users’ pictures and tagging.
Facebook is the largest photo sharing site on the Web based on Comscore report of last January (Schonfeld, 2009). Around 70% of Facebook users worldwide had either looked at or uploaded pictures on the site, 850 million photos are uploaded per month (Facebook, 2009), and more than 10 billion photos have been uploaded in total. Facebook Photos had 33.6 million unique visitors, Photobucket had 22.8 million unique visitors, and Flickr 21.9 million unique visitors in January.
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