- Original Poster
- #1
The complete reputation of online socialising is what has made us think we should bring you in this post, what is in, from where to start, how to get in with your friends online and all you need to know to get socialising and make hundreds of friends online!
Social Networking: A Little History
You see it everywhere: for time immemorial, homo-sapiens has huddled together in groups. We are gregarious animals, and we've become the dominant species on the planet much because of our habit of sharing informationand our opposable thumbs (to keep the biology majors silent).
So sit back and forget about the Internet for a while, and think about it: it all started when barely-human apes learnt to hunt in packs. Next was the discovery of fire, and our ancestors gathered in front of fires for a millennium after that. Then came cities and ships, and we traversed the globe, still huddled together for warmth and that general feeling of goodness. We've hugged each other excitedly at sports events, consoled each other in times of misery, and continually found new ways to form cuddly, warm groups of like-minded individuals. There's always been a group even the squarest of us can fit intosort of like in a college can­teen: the jocks sit together; the popular ones preen themselves at one table while the unpopular ones look on in awe; the nerds chal­lenge each other with Mensa trivia; the anti-establishmentalists are busy spray-painting the loos. You get the picture...
Then came the COMPUTER.
A PC was, and is, a very personal gadget (perhaps, just perhaps, that's why they call it a Personal Computer!). When it first became popular sometime in the '90s, it was something you could use for hours or daysbut always alone. Gaming was addictive, Windows was fun to use, and MS Office let you get work done so much faster than when you still used books. We got addicted. Problem was, we ended up feeling cold and emptya PC was fun, but it was still a dumb machine (no matter how many times it beat you at chess), and we yearned for the interaction that only other people could give us.
Then came the Internet. A far cry from the lonely machine, the PC was now able to put you in touch with people from any-where at all. It started with e-mail: if you knew a person's e-mail address, you could send him or her a letter in an instant regard­less of geography. Snail mail suddenly seemed this quaint little rustic tool that only tech illiterate people and the elderly used to communicate.
Then, in accordance with the laws of human nature, our ten­dency to want to socialise asked for more. Thus the platform was set: we wanted instantaneous communication, and not just with the people we knewwe wanted to make new friends from various countries.
It was this need that prompted Jarkko Oikarinen, an employee of the Department of Information Processing Science in the University of Oulu, Finland, to sit down and write out the code for the first ever IRC client and server in 1988. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and basically, it's a tool that let you chat over the Net. Prior to this, the only way you could communicate with others was through the BBS (Bulletin Board System) that was around before "the Internet" came in.
IRC was amazing at the time, and got people really excited. You could actually connect to a server, see hundreds of people online and then chat with them (gasp!). As early as July 1990, there were as many as 40 servers running worldwide, each with an average of 12 users. This meant that as much as a hundred users could be online at once and chat in real-time.
There's plenty more to the history of IRC, but we won't get into it here. Suffice it to say that popularity shot up, especially during the first Gulf War of 1991, when IRC was found to be the best way to send information across the world in the shortest span of time. It was in 1991 that the IRC network first saw over 300 people online at the same time.
Since IRC had the concept of channels (basically chat rooms), it wasn't long before people started creating channels based on interests. This is perhaps where the world got their first glimpse of "social networking." There were hundreds of like-minded individ­uals talking and sharing information based on interestsin real-time. When file sharing came into IRC, it became a popular P2P activity, with people sharing information and music, making friends, and even visiting each other offline in the "real world," so to speak.
Next came all the Instant Messengers, notably ICQ. Chat rooms and one-on-one chats made it even easier to build friendships with people all over the world. It obviously wasn't long before Web sites took the cue, and dating sites came up. The most social and popu­lar activity, finding prospective significant others, became a lot easier, with dating sites (matrimonial sites for India) going global.
As early as 1995, the first social networking site came up. Classmates.com was intelligently targeted at anyone who hadn't kept in touch with school mates, and needless to say, became pop­ular. This was followed by SixDegrees.com in 1997; it was based on the principle that even-one on planet Earth was separated only by six acquaintances.
Social networking as we know it really took off with Friendster.com, launched in 2002.
Today, social networking accounts for the majority of surfing done globally. Sites such as MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Facebook, Friendster, Classmates, Bebo, and many, many more, all boast of millions of users. MySpace, in particular, boasts of almost a whopping 200 million registered users! Orkut is very popular amongst us Indians, while more Indian sites seem to be coming up by the month.
Social Networking: A Little History
You see it everywhere: for time immemorial, homo-sapiens has huddled together in groups. We are gregarious animals, and we've become the dominant species on the planet much because of our habit of sharing informationand our opposable thumbs (to keep the biology majors silent).
So sit back and forget about the Internet for a while, and think about it: it all started when barely-human apes learnt to hunt in packs. Next was the discovery of fire, and our ancestors gathered in front of fires for a millennium after that. Then came cities and ships, and we traversed the globe, still huddled together for warmth and that general feeling of goodness. We've hugged each other excitedly at sports events, consoled each other in times of misery, and continually found new ways to form cuddly, warm groups of like-minded individuals. There's always been a group even the squarest of us can fit intosort of like in a college can­teen: the jocks sit together; the popular ones preen themselves at one table while the unpopular ones look on in awe; the nerds chal­lenge each other with Mensa trivia; the anti-establishmentalists are busy spray-painting the loos. You get the picture...
Then came the COMPUTER.
A PC was, and is, a very personal gadget (perhaps, just perhaps, that's why they call it a Personal Computer!). When it first became popular sometime in the '90s, it was something you could use for hours or daysbut always alone. Gaming was addictive, Windows was fun to use, and MS Office let you get work done so much faster than when you still used books. We got addicted. Problem was, we ended up feeling cold and emptya PC was fun, but it was still a dumb machine (no matter how many times it beat you at chess), and we yearned for the interaction that only other people could give us.
Then came the Internet. A far cry from the lonely machine, the PC was now able to put you in touch with people from any-where at all. It started with e-mail: if you knew a person's e-mail address, you could send him or her a letter in an instant regard­less of geography. Snail mail suddenly seemed this quaint little rustic tool that only tech illiterate people and the elderly used to communicate.
Then, in accordance with the laws of human nature, our ten­dency to want to socialise asked for more. Thus the platform was set: we wanted instantaneous communication, and not just with the people we knewwe wanted to make new friends from various countries.
It was this need that prompted Jarkko Oikarinen, an employee of the Department of Information Processing Science in the University of Oulu, Finland, to sit down and write out the code for the first ever IRC client and server in 1988. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and basically, it's a tool that let you chat over the Net. Prior to this, the only way you could communicate with others was through the BBS (Bulletin Board System) that was around before "the Internet" came in.
IRC was amazing at the time, and got people really excited. You could actually connect to a server, see hundreds of people online and then chat with them (gasp!). As early as July 1990, there were as many as 40 servers running worldwide, each with an average of 12 users. This meant that as much as a hundred users could be online at once and chat in real-time.
There's plenty more to the history of IRC, but we won't get into it here. Suffice it to say that popularity shot up, especially during the first Gulf War of 1991, when IRC was found to be the best way to send information across the world in the shortest span of time. It was in 1991 that the IRC network first saw over 300 people online at the same time.
Since IRC had the concept of channels (basically chat rooms), it wasn't long before people started creating channels based on interests. This is perhaps where the world got their first glimpse of "social networking." There were hundreds of like-minded individ­uals talking and sharing information based on interestsin real-time. When file sharing came into IRC, it became a popular P2P activity, with people sharing information and music, making friends, and even visiting each other offline in the "real world," so to speak.
Next came all the Instant Messengers, notably ICQ. Chat rooms and one-on-one chats made it even easier to build friendships with people all over the world. It obviously wasn't long before Web sites took the cue, and dating sites came up. The most social and popu­lar activity, finding prospective significant others, became a lot easier, with dating sites (matrimonial sites for India) going global.
As early as 1995, the first social networking site came up. Classmates.com was intelligently targeted at anyone who hadn't kept in touch with school mates, and needless to say, became pop­ular. This was followed by SixDegrees.com in 1997; it was based on the principle that even-one on planet Earth was separated only by six acquaintances.
Social networking as we know it really took off with Friendster.com, launched in 2002.
Today, social networking accounts for the majority of surfing done globally. Sites such as MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Facebook, Friendster, Classmates, Bebo, and many, many more, all boast of millions of users. MySpace, in particular, boasts of almost a whopping 200 million registered users! Orkut is very popular amongst us Indians, while more Indian sites seem to be coming up by the month.
