Social networking has been around for longer than Twitter and Facebook (one could argue that social networking has been around longer than computers, but we’ll save that argument for another day). Digital social networking started the day that two computers could communicate with each other and send messages between people. Onlineschools.org has created an infographic of the history of social networking (digital), which does convey that social networking has been around longer than Twitter and Facebook, but missed a few key events:
Creation of the Internet
Onlineschools.org has the beginning of (digital) social networking with the sending of the first email in 1971. But I believe the start of digital social networking was when two computers were able to send messages to each other for the first time: the creation of the Internet, when ARPANET first started. From wikipedia: “The first message on the ARPANET was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 p.m, on October 29, 1969.”
Important Online Communities
The infographic from Onlineschools.org also skips from 1978 to 1994, missing the creation and rise of important online communities like Prodigy and The Wall, to just name a few. There were also text-based online gaming communities, called MUDS (multi-user domains). These communities are important because they allowed people with similar interests to interact in ways not formerly possible.
The Graphical Web
The Web as we know it was started in 1990-1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, which is important not only because it allowed a graphical user interface to the Internet, but also because it made information publicly available for the first time:
On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.[9] This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. The first photo on the web was uploaded by Berners-Lee in 1992, an image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes. – World Wide Web | Wikipedia.org
More than Twitter & Facebook
What the infographic from Onlineschools.org (see below) does show that social networking, at least digitally, has been around for much longer than the past 5-10 years. How we use technology to connect to each other is constantly evolving at a very fast rate. It’s impossible to predict what tools we’ll use in the future or exactly how we’ll use them. For marketers and strategists, this means that we need to keep up on new technologies and we need to be ready to change the tools we use as new developments arise.
Via: OnlineSchools
What do you think?
(Infographic found thanks to The Social News)
(photo by seier+seier, on Flickr)