Business and society
In this article we will not tell, who or what the ancestor of social networks became. We will only try to learn who the first in this field of the Internet was as it developed, we will look, what it is necessary to count on for users in the near future.
First, what is a social network in the Internet? The answer is simple - it is the service uniting people on th basis of some unique features and interests. There is a heap of other treatments, for example: social service is a service for interaction of people in group.
The first social network became SixDegrees.com, which existed from 1997 till 2001 when it has been sold for $120 million It was first and successful enough attempt to construct in online model of mutual relations between real people.
Soon (in 1999) LiveJournal appeared. The LJ, despite the the fact that it is based on blogs too is a social network with association on interests. The LiveJournal - a huge step to development of online-community and blogs in spite of the fact that now very few people speaks about LJ in a context of social networks.
Facebook became the first network uniting graduates, schoolboys and students worldwide and now is the largest site of a similar sort.
Soon another social networks began to appear like LinkedIn and Ryze. LinkedIn since then became the sample of a professional social network and has caused occurrence of huge crowd of clones practically in all domain zones of the world.
In 2002-2003 the popular Friendster, Tribe.net. Friendster have appeared, - interesting but inconsistent services.