In the second decade of the 21st century , the birth and development of these media has undergone a stratospheric growth , becoming a fundamental and daily part of our lives. Typically, most Internet users have more than one social profile . However, not only individual users monopolize the network, but large companies have known how to use it to promote themselves and interconnect with their customers. Also the great political leaders have succumbed to its power. The mythical phrase ‘Yes we can ‘ still resounds in our minds, which elevated Obama to the presidency of the United States . The president created profiles on all social networks, becoming a pioneer when it comes to using this type of campaign to reach the electorate, which is why the Washington Post came to name him ‘ the King of the networks ‘. The victory of Donald Trump in the elections also had social networks as a key element , but in a different way …
Although the term ‘social network’ may seem relatively new to us, the truth is that, already in the 90s we can find the origin of the giants Facebook or Instagram. To learn more about its genealogy, we must go back to 1994 , when Geocities was born, considered one of its main predecessors. It consisted of a free hosting for web pages that represented a city in which there were different neighborhoods. The user had to choose one based on the theme of their website, and it could not exceed 5 MB in size. It was bought by Yahoo! for nearly $ 4 billion , a move that proved unpopular and led to it being shut down a decade later.
In 1995 Randy Conrads created Classmates , in order for users to find former classmates from school, institute or university . Two years later, the SixDegrees network was born, which allowed us to create a social profile and a list of friends, characteristics very similar to the concept we currently have of a social network. It was named for the theory of the six degrees of separation , which was based on a short story called ‘ Chains ‘ published in 1929 . The term was popularized by the sociologist Duncan Watts . According to this theory, a person, regardless of where they live on the planet, is connected to another, through a network of acquaintances that do not exceed 5 intermediaries .
With the turn of the millennium, the rise of web 2.0 causes a turning point, in which users cease to be mere taxpayers and become the protagonists, largely due to the takeoff of social networks and blogs where people are content creators .
The first great revolution of social networks came in 2003 with the creation of MySpace , a social network that already allowed you to create a complete profile with areas such as: information about yourself, your tastes and interests, and your preferences when meeting people , as well as the ability to share photos and music. Although it continues to function, it has been relegated by the rise of other, much more powerful networks .
In 2003 , LinkedIn emerged, conceived as a professional business network . It currently has more than 500 million users worldwide. In 2004 , in the midst of Microsoft’s Messenger boom, a very young Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook , representing a before and after in the history of social networks. The premise was very simple, interact with ‘friends’ sharing your daily events through photos in which you could tag them or messages on the wall. Its true success would come with the adaptation of the network to different languages , reaching all parts of the world. To this day the tandem belonging to Zuckerberg and formed by Facebook , WhatsApp , Messenger and Instagram seems already insurmountable.
From that moment, and the success of social networks has been demonstrated, an important segmentation is carried out based on its theme . Youtube was born in 2005 as a platform to share videos. In 2006 , Twitter was launched , a microblogging network that was prominent in events that will go down in history, such as the triumph of the Arab Spring . In 2009, networks for the publication of photographs such as Pinterest became the new boom.
In the era of social networks, the triumph is in reinventing yourself . Instagram incorporated the novelty of ‘ Instagram Stories ‘ and there are already more than 300 million people who upload their ‘stories’ daily. Facebook , for its part, has decided to hit the table and go after fake news accounts.
The success of social networks already seems unstoppable and the current enigma lies in knowing what the future will bring us . Let’s hope it doesn’t end up looking like an episode of ‘ Black Mirror ‘, especially considering the firm foray of augmented reality in our lives …
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