Social networks are the current phenomenon resulting from technologies in Web 2.0. Communication networks were born in order to interconnect users in a common environment, later with their consolidated platform businesses and inconveniences begin to appear.
by Osvaldo Callegari*
It is possible to generate a large number of functions and or behaviors in the RS, sometimes some can produce some susceptibility, important is to inform it.
One of the most important factors in the success of SR is that the user feels omnipresent, SR gives him the possibility to be in many places at once, this seduces and feeds the ego, not always to the best extent.
Another factor is the content, where a diversity of manifestations are intermingled, all together without distinction of sex, race or political condition, this particularly favors the integration of different communities and or countries.
In some known types of SR, insults, forms of discrimination, etc. are severely regulated. This makes the user limited to utter aggressions towards another person, also this happens in all environments as if it were a natural condition of the human being.
In some cases they generate addiction being forced to check the networks at all times. This point is reinforced by mobile teams that go with the user to any site. It generates distraction to events or situations where other people need his attention, while he remains checking his phone to see who wrote to him on social networks.
We can say that within social networks there are groups or modalities, which come to be the way in which people express themselves, are the most varied and go from the most honest to the most dangerous.
For example:
* Friendship
* Sports or leisure groups
* Clubs or organizations
* Schools, universities, graduations
* Advertising
* Marketing
* Online videos
* Business
* Crimes against confidential information
* Miscellaneous crimes
The communications in the RS are not always the most effective, there are cases where a person raises a joke that falls misinterpreted by the receiver of the same, since the circumstances in which he receives them are not ideal, that is, because just his group of companions saw it and generated the magnified mockery. The criterion for writing on networks is absent in most cases, automation makes one put the first thing that comes to mind, when this is written and published makes impracticable any immediate retraction, different from direct communication between two people.
A little history of Social Networks according to the Technological Observatory of Spain.
History of social networks
Tracing the history of social networks is not an easy task, its origin is diffuse and its evolution accelerated. There is no consensus on what the first social network was, and we can find different points of view about it. On the other hand, the existence of many platforms is counted in very short times, it is well known that there are services that we talk about today that may not exist tomorrow, and new ones will appear leaving obsolete, in a short time, any panorama that we want to show of them. Its history is written every minute in hundreds of places around the world.
What seems to be clear is that the beginnings go back far beyond what we might think at first, since the first attempts at communication through the Internet already establish networks, and are the seed that will give rise to what will later be the social network services that we know today, with creation of a profile and contact list. For all these reasons, we are going to present its contextualized history through a chronology of the most relevant facts of the phenomenon posed by Internet-based social networks.
1971. The first e-mail is sent between two computers located next to each other.
1978. Ward Christensen and Randy Suess create the BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) to inform their friends about meetings, publish news and share information.
1994. GeoCities is launched, a service that allows users to create their own websites and host them in certain places based on their content.
1995. The Web reaches one million websites, and The Globe offers users the ability to personalize their online experiences by publishing their own content and connecting with other individuals of similar interests. In this same year, Randy Conrads creates Classmates, a social network to contact former classmates. Classmates is for many the first social network service, mainly, because it sees the germ of Facebook and other social networks that were born, later, as a meeting point for students and alumni.
1997. Launch of AOL Instant Messenger, which offers users chat, while blogging begins and Google is launched. Sixdegrees is also inaugurated, a social network that allows the creation of personal profiles and a list of friends, some establish with it the beginning of social networks to better reflect their characteristic functions. It will only last until the year 2000.
1998. Friends Reunited, a British social network similar to Classmates, is born. Also, the launch of Blogger is carried out.
2000. The "Internet Bubble" bursts. This year we reach the figure of seventy million computers connected to the Network.
2002. The Friendster portal is launched, reaching three million users in just three months.
2003. MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook are born, although the date of the latter is not clear since it had been brewing for several years. Created by the well-known Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook was initially conceived as a platform to connect students at Harvard University. From this moment many other social networks are born such as Hi5 and Netlog, among others.
2004. Digg is launched, as a social news portal; Bebo, with the acronym of "Blog Early, Blog Often"; and Orkut, managed by Google.
2005. Youtube begins as a video hosting service, and MySpace becomes the most important social network in the United States.
2006. The microblogging social network Twitter is inaugurated. Google has 400 million searches per day, and Facebook continues to receive multimillion-dollar offers to buy its company. In Spain, Tuenti is launched, a social network focused on the youngest audience. This same year, Badoo also begins its activity.
2008. Facebook becomes the most used social network in the world with more than 200 million users, ahead of MySpace. Tumblr is born as a microblogging social network to compete with Twitter.
2009. Facebook reaches 400 million members, and MySpace regresses to 57 million. Facebook's success is unstoppable.
2010. Google launches Google Buzz, its own social network integrated with Gmail, in its first week its users published nine million entries. Another new social network, Pinterest, is also inaugurated. Internet users this year are estimated at 1.97 billion, almost 30% of the world's population. The numbers are staggering: Tumblr has two million posts a day; Facebook grows to 550 million users: Twitter computes 65 million tweets, messages or short text posts daily; LinkedIn reaches 90 million professional users, and Youtube receives two billion visits daily.
2011. MySpace and Bebo are redesigned to compete with Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn becomes the second most popular social network in the United States with 33.9 million visits per month. This year Google+ is launched, another new commitment of Google for social networks. The newly created Pinterest reaches ten million monthly visitors. Twitter multiplies its figures quickly and in just one year increases the number of tweets received to 33 billion.
2012. Currently, Facebook has surpassed 800 million users, Twitter has 200 million, and Google+ registers 62 million. The Spanish network Tuenti reached 13 million users in February of this year. But, as we said at the beginning of this section, it is a matter of weeks that these figures become outdated, and throughout the same year we can find completely different records.
Success Stories
As usual we analyze case studies and success stories. Today we discuss the popularity and impact of a pioneering company in Argentina such as Atma.
Customer service is an increasingly difficult task, Atma bet on the use of social networks as a tool to improve this service. Today a presence on a website is not enough but it is necessary to have more interaction with users responding to concerns or technical requests.
So much so that on Twitter as on Facebook Atma expands in greater detail the characteristics and use of the products, informing of new and multiple benefits.
This type of implementation has been satisfactory with respect to the previous provision of a line 0800, where a number had to be dialed for technical service, another for customer service, and so on. In this way you save a lot of time in the response to the client, being in turn more friendly through social networks.
According to Atma the dialogue through the RS is much greater, there is like a vote of confidence to have closer service in some way.
A big advantage is that the spread of the products is greater since other friendly contacts also see the service. Entering their site, we can see that recipe books are offered with the products they manufacture, as a greater extension to the benefits. Users replicate comments of how they did with this or that recipe there is a certain interaction within the page.
Summary
We can say that social networks like other tools on the Internet have their good and bad side, the way users use it will define the position.
Networks that offer trust, privacy and above all aspects freedom will prevail. At present, new networks oriented to social groups are appearing directly, important changes will be seen in the short term.
In the next article we will talk about the classification of social networks: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal social networks do not have a defined theme, are aimed at a generic audience, and focus on contacts.
Vertical social networks gain thousands of users daily, as many specialized ones are created to accommodate the tastes and interests of people looking for a common space of exchange.
The names and brands mentioned are names and registered trademarks of their respective companies, a thank you to the Technological Observatory of Spain.
*If you wish, you can write to the author of this article for queries or concerns to [email protected]
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