March 27, 2009 - 2:51pm

Making virtual friends: The evolution of social networking

Come into MySpace
Then in 2003, MySpace arrived and brought social networking into the mainstream. MySpace is the first online space to pull together many of the features of the previous networking sites into a comprehensive package. It allows users to extensively customize their profiles to include music, videos, and other types of media.

While more of a social destination, many MySpace members use the service for business, posting song demos or portions of their portfolios for the rest of the community to enjoy - or not.

Enter Facebook
The arrival of Facebook in 2004 caught on like wildfire and ultimately stole much of the thunder from MySpace. Facebook works around the now-familiar personal profile system, and on the surface is no different from many of the other services that came before it. But Facebook includes the breakthrough of allowing users to develop applications that can run within its framework.

And develop applications they did. From Super Pokes and Super Walls to applications that integrate with other web services like Flickr, to More Cowbell (because you got to have more cowbell!) - users love it. Facebook continues to grow and now boasts almost double the members of MySpace.

Tweet with Twitter
The next evolution? One day two guys decided all of these great features were no longer relevant, and that 140 characters of plain text was plenty. Say hello to Twitter.

Twitter is a different kind of social networking service. Some call it a "micro-blogging" service which is a pretty accurate description. It asks one question: What are you doing? And it gives you 140 characters to answer that question. People can follow you - meaning they will receive your "tweets" as you post them - and you choose who you want to follow.

What this is leading to is a social hierarchy phenomenon of sorts, where the upper Twitter-echelon (those who have the most followers) are labeled "Twitterati."

But it still comes down to 140 characters. The past decade of development in social networking services has now been deconstructed and vetted down to brevity. One can say it's come full circle - back to plain text. Everything old is new again.