Development of online social networks

History of Internet Communities

From 1968 till today...


By MARKO ANDREJIC
from Belgrade, SERBIA


1968 - first predictions of creating new people communities that will communicate through the Internet - virtual communities (mentioned in the documents of ARPANET, first computer network made by U.S. Advanced Research Project Agency)

1978 - first BBS Services created (local precursors of the Internet) and first usenet newsgroups as one of the services of Internet network then (like e-mail in 1973, FTP etc.)

1986 - 1991 - Internet services for realtime communication: IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and first mailinglists for e-mail circular letters

1992 - first time concept of virtual community mentioned in the Internet

1995 - Word Cunningham made concept of Wiki, based on collaboration during creating web contents. This idea of online communities became famous after launching big project of "open encyclopedia" - www.wikipedia.org in 2001

1996 - ICQ service is launched and started development of instant messaging communication system

1997 - first Internet phone services ( 2001 - VoIP service www.skype.com)

1998 - 1999 - appears www.blogger.com indicating new blog revolution after 2002. At the same time there is a very important RSS (Real Simple Syndication) started

2000 - 2001 - service www.deja.com was bought by Google and Google Groups service was launched

since 2002 - online social networking starts becoming popular and many websites were created: Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, Tagged...


Source: E magazin, No. 24