In September 2005, one month after Thefacebook changed it’s name to simply Facebook, it allowed students from high schools in the US to join. It finally crossed the Atlantic a month later, when universities in the UK were added.

In September 2006, Facebook went global when they allowed anyone with an e-mail address over the age of thirteen to join the site. From there, the number of people with Facebook accounts just kept on climbing.

By April 2007, there were 20 million active users on Facebook. This number climbed to over 100 million in August 2008, and has recently passed the 500 million mark less than two years later.

But what has made Facebook so popular? What makes it so different from all the other social networking sites that have begun over the years? After doing some research on the subject, I have narrowed it down to a few important points.

• Pre-existing communityFacebook was first marketed to a pre-existing community. One of the reasons Mark Zuckerburg created the site was because Harvard didn’t have an online student directory, and so he found a niche waiting to be filled. This meant that Facebook already had thousands of people in one group who would use the site.

• Desirability and unattainability In the beginning, Facebook was only available for college students. There is a well known, and very true saying that you want what you can’t have, and so the fact that most people in America couldn’t join the site, made them want to join even more. In fact, there were even high school students who based their decisions on what college they wanted to go to, on whether or not they would have access to Facebook! This meant that once Facebook opened for everyone, people who weren’t previously able to join had already heard of the site, and already wanted to become members.

• Trust Having a site created by a fellow student made Harvard undergraduates more confidant to use it. Zuckerburg had also already created a name for himself among the Harvard student with his previous sites, and because of their popularity, once Facebook came out, the students were quick to hop on the bandwagon. This meant that Facebook had a jump start on other social networking sites, as it already had people willing to join from the beginning.

  Harvard also holds some measure of trust in the US, as do the other Ivy League Schools that were first given access to the site after Harvard. The result was that Facebook gained a level of trust among the public because of the relationship between it and these universities.

• Ease of sign up Most other sites like this require a unique username. This means when you sign up, you need to try out different combinations to find a username that no one else has, but that you also like, and that means something to you. This is all very well when just a few people sign up, but once it gets to the millions, it becomes very difficult. You find yourself adding random digits to the end of your name to try and make it unique, and now not only do you need to remember your password, but your username as well!

  Facebook changed all that. You don’t need any sort of username, all you need to do is to use your actual name. This makes it far easier to sign up, and so there won’t be anyone put off in the first few minutes of interacting with the site from the frustration of having to find a username.

Many Social networking sites are created and then die out because not enough people sign up for them. Facebook started with the perfect combination of factors to make it the internet giant that it is today.

On 28 October 2003, while trying to distract himself from the fact that he had just been dumped, Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerburg, created a type of “Hot or Not” website for Harvard Students which he named Facemash. The site showed two random pictures of Harvard undergraduates, and allowed users to vote on who was better looking. Harvard quickly shut down the site, and it emerged that Zuckerburg had hacked into secure parts of the Harvard computer network in order to find these photos. He was subject to a disciplinary hearing, and narrowly managed to escape expulsion.

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When most of us think about online social networks, we most probably think about Facebook. Facebook is by far the most popular social networking site we have today with 500 million Facebook users.

However, Mark Zuckerberg was definitely not the first person to ever have built a social network – he was just the first to succeed in the way that he did.

In truth, one of the first social networks to really take off, was named Sixdegrees.com.

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If you ask anybody which Social Networking Sites they use, the majority of people will say Facebook, and others may include Twitter. But just how long have Social Networking sites been a part of the web and our lives? We look back to what was possibly the first Social Networking site – SixDegrees.com, which was founded in 1997, and the many Social Networking sites that have popped up over the years since. Some have died along the way, others have just plodded along and others have thrived.

Social Networking sites, especially within the South African context, have only really taken root in our conciousness and conversations over the past few years. I recall when MySpace was the place, you had to have a MySpace account. Then came along this vanilla style, white & blue site called Facebook!  This simple looking site has taken the world by storm. Much like the Microsoft of the 80′s and the Google of the earlier millennium, this site is the juggernaught of  Social Networking sites, albeit with it’s fair share of controversy.

Social Networking Sites Timeline

As you can see, 2003 was when Social Networking started to gain “collective” consciousness and momentum. Sites like SixDegrees.com and Friendster were important players, and the likes of Facebook learned from their failings to gain worldwide popularity.

We are going to profile some of these Social Networking Sites over the next month, some of the more important sites that shaped the Social Networking space. So please stay tuned for more.