The noughties saw a revolutionary expansion of interactive services for personal users – and this trend is certain to continue apace, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
FACEBOOK, TWITTER, Bebo, MySpace, LinkedIn, Blogger, Flickr: they are some of the frontline brands of today’s internet, and many – maybe most – internet users in Ireland will have either visited or actively used such sites in the past few years.
But the kinds of things we use such sites and services for would have baffled many of those online prior to the noughties. It is easy to forget as we tweet, blog, poke and update our status that the web was a far less socially interactive space a decade ago. Almost all of what academics now refer to in scholarly papers as the “SNSs”, or social networking sites, emerged post-2000 as more people got online, the web sped up, computers became cheaper, more powerful storage dropped in price and mobile handsets grew multifunctional.
Prior to 2000, the net was better identified with the explosive growth online of businesses, many simply offering static information sites or “dotcom” services and products that consumers weren’t quite ready to buy.
Individuals also poured online and used the internet to connect and chat and share, but primarily through e-mail. Realtime internet chat was only introduced at the tail end of the 1990s, with ICQ launching in 1998. Few other services targeted the average web user, and the technology barrier for individuals interested in setting up their own web pages remained fairly high, requiring some knowledge of html.
All changed come the noughties, as people began to flock to internet chat and to weblogs (or blogs). Though the term was coined in 1997, and two of the most influential early sites offering free blogs to one and all, Blogger and LiveJournal, launched in 1999, critical mass was only reached in this decade, as millions set up (and some inevitably abandoned) blogs.
One of the key elements of blogs though was not just posts made by authors, but comments posted by readers in response. Blogs suddenly enabled public, multi-person conversations, and the ability to subscribe to receive new comments and posts, and to link and discuss those on your own blog, kept the dialogues alive for days, weeks, even months.
The stage was set for the triumphant arrival of the gabby, live, interactive, social web – almost all operating on the precarious but compelling “free” business model. For the rest of the decade, we just couldn’t get enough, with services “going viral” and ending up not with millions, but hundreds of millions of users.
Social profile sites, where people could offer a snapshot of themselves and link to and communicate with other people (as “friends”, “connections” etc) have been one of the big success stories of the decade, with a changing landscape of players. One of the first was Ryze, in 2001, which (as many initial sites did) focused on business connections. It is still there, but has been eclipsed by LinkedIn, which launched two years later.
The year before, the forerunner of consumer profile sites, Friendster, launched. It too, continues to chug away but far more people moved on to MySpace (2003), Bebo (2005) or Facebook (2005, though not open to everybody until 2007), with Facebook currently the winner in terms of size.
Outside the US, many joined Orkut (2004) or in China, Cyworld (2005). If you wanted a community based on ethnicity, you could join AsianAvenue (2005) or BlackPlanet (2005); if into music, you could try Last.fm (2002). Profiles weren’t limited to homo sapiens, either. If you had a dog, you could create a canine profile on Dogster or Catster (2004).
What to put on your profiles, blogs and webpages? Well, we wanted a place to upload and link to our pictures and photo albums, provided by sites like Muchos (2001), Fotolog (2002), PhotoBucket (2003) and Flickr (2004). This enabled people to easily add a picture to a blog post or profile site. And of course, the phenomenon that is video site YouTube appeared on our computer screens in 2005.
We also wanted to be able to flag articles, images, videos and podcasts we found interesting, and find out what others were watching and listening to – so triggering the rise of services like Digg (2004), StumbleUpon (2001), and Friendfeed (2007). You can let others know of your travel plans via Dopplr (2007).
We also started doing online telephone calls with services like Skype (2003), which soon incorporated instant messaging and conference calling, while instant messaging services went the other way and began to bring in online telephony as an option.
Soon, some began thinking of creating whole standalone communities built around a combination of a discussion board, profile site, blog, photo gallery and chat – and Netscape browser pioneer Marc Andreessen came up with Ning (2005).
Virtual worlds also took off, which people could explore via their avatar – a digitised representation of themselves or a self they wished to create. They could meet others, build homes and carry on an alternative online life. Best known and heavily hyped for a time was Second Life (2003). As net speeds and capacity continue to expand, these virtual places are likely to come more to the fore.
The current king of the SNSs is Twitter (2006), a cross between text messages, blogs and a miniature profile site. Sign up for Twitter and you get a homepage where your “tweets” appear, somewhat like a blog, but they can only be 140 characters long. You can put up a tiny bit of profile information on your Twitter page, but most regular twitter users use their mobiles or third-party programs on their computers to manage their Twitter accounts rather than base themselves from their Twitter homepage.
What comes next? Many think the future is about aggregation – the merging of existing types of social network sites and services into even larger communities of offerings. Larger players like Facebook have been buying in new features, acquiring services like Friendfeed this year. New on the scene is Google Wave, a collaborative space that can bring together personal and work conversations, projects, feeds from other sites and many other services.
And all of this is also going mobile. We don’t just want to access our virtual lives from a home computer, but also from our mobile handsets, while we’re on the move.
In short: expect the next decade to see our real and online lives blur to indistinction, and become mobile and constantly accessible, wherever we are. Beyond that: who knows?
