Friendster was the first modern social networking site to enter the market was. It employs the “degree of separation concept” like SixDegrees, but renamed it as ‘Circle of Friends’. Friendster was a dating site that wasn’t only about dating. Friendster was able to gain 3,000,000 users in the first three months, i.e., one in every 126 web users were members of Friendster at the time. Most of Friendster’s current traffic comes from Asia, especially the Philippines and Indonesia.
MySpace soon followed suit and was launched after only ten days of coding. MySpace gave users the freedom of customisation through music, videos, and a more trendy online environment. It garnered 90 million registered users and is still a favourite in the USA.
Another site with notable success is LinkedIn, established in 2003, exhibiting a more business-oriented and professional approach to social networking. LinkedIn focuses on building business contacts and has 30 million registered members today.
The next entrant into the market was Facebook, which was launched in 2004 to connect US college students. Facebook was initially exclusive to Mark Zuckerberg’s alma mater Harvard, and you could only join only if a member of Facebook had invited you. Nevertheless, more than half of the 19,500 Harvard students had already signed up in its first month. After only two years, the exclusive, campus-only networking site became open to the general public.
In 2008, Facebook outperformed MySpace and Friendster to become the leading social networking site. Today, Facebook has more than 150 million members worldwide.
