Thesis Title: Subtitle

Why Facebook: A Short History of Social Networking Sites

Over the past five years, SNS such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and others have become part of the fabric of many individuals’ daily lives. The proliferation of these online hubs provides further compelling evidence that social relations exist in a complex and often intertwining series of networks (Castells 1996; Wellman 1999). Some commentators argue that social media is now an integral part of managing identity, lifestyle and social relations in the 21^st century (Livingstone 2008). Facebook is now the most popular of these sites with:
350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world (Hafner 2009: np).
Since 2009, Facebook’s use base has grown to 1 billion members (Facebook 2014). While Facebook is now the most popular of these sites, its predecessors such as Friendster and Tribe.net lay important technological and social groundwork. However, unlike Facebook, these sites did not emphasise real world connections to the extent that Facebook does.
Both Friendster and Tribe.net allowed users to choose their own usernames, which could be real or pseudonymous, while Facebook encourages the use of real names.
Additionally, the structure of the Tribe.net and Friendster emphasised interest-based or subcultural connections. They were more public than Facebook as visibility (publicly viewable profile) was required to connect to those in the same subcultural networks.
Technologically, sites like Tribe.net and Friendster often struggled to keep up with the demand that their popularity placed on their servers, frequently experiencing down time or slow page loads that frustrated users (Kirkpatrick 2010). Sites such as Friendster also had trouble communicating its business decisions to and understanding its anonymous users. Despite Friendster’s initial permissiveness, its owner became determined that users should user their real names. This resulted in a very public ‘clean up’ of the service, in which profiles deemed fake were deactivated or deleted. Friendster’s initial success ultimately was the cause of its decline; consistent engineering misjudgements meant that it was unable to manage the performance problems associated with its growing user base.
Two years of performance issues meant that users went elsewhere. Nonetheless, Friendster had laid the blueprint for successful social networking sites like MySpace, which quickly picked up where Friendster left off (Kirkpatrick 2010; Ellison and boyd 2013).
MySpace was a departure from Friendster because it freely enabled users to pick whatever identity they chose. Additionally, unlike the un-customisable Friendster profiles, Myspace allowed users to customise the appearance of their profile, by adding a different background, flashing images and music. In contrast, when TheFacebook (as it was then known) launched in 2004 it lacked any of these affordances. The user interface was simple to the point of being stark; it had limited user functions and required an email address at an elite university to join (Kirkpatrick 2010).
Facebook’s heady growth, seems to have tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, offering its users something that was missing not only from the internet, but from contemporary social life. Facebook capitalised on the groundwork laid by earlier, less successful social networking sites that ironed out many of the kinks in previous social networking incarnations. Technologically speaking, Facebook arrived at the right time. The widespread availability of broadband in the US also made Facebook’s foray into photo hosting viable. This helped Facebook capitalise on what was most attractive about social media: sharing photos of people you know with people you know. In addition to allowing users to view and comment on photos, Facebook also enabled tagging which allowed
users to indicate who was in the photos they posted. Tagging people in photographs added another layer of networking to the site. Quickly,
Facebook became the most popular photo-sharing site on the Internet (Kirkpatrick 2010). The popularity of Facebook as a photo-sharing site was linked to the rise in the ubiquity of mobile phones with built in cameras. This enabled people to take photos of their daily activities with Facebook providing a place to share them. Sharing photos on Facebook added a social dimension to an otherwise mundane activity; it placed photos in their social context. Consequently, Facebook is now the most popular photo-sharing site. Over time, Facebook has added more media to the social: sharing of content from outside websites is strongly encouraged, and many websites have a button to “Share” content on Facebook, making the process much more streamlined than copy and pasting a link into a status update. Facebook now also supports the uploading of video direct from users’ phones.
Facebook and the general pace of technology are well matched. Facebook, it seems, capitalises on technological advances to evolve and infiltrate even more aspects of their users’ daily life. The growth of the smart phone market has led to more users engaging with Facebook through their mobile phones. The advent of 3G meant that users had access to wireless internet on the go, in much the same way that the advent of broadband expanded use by enabling users to upload and view photographs much more easily than before. Facebook has benefited from complex social and technological processes, allowing it to position itself at the centre of users’ daily lives.
The scale of Facebook’s reach which is currently estimated at over 1.2 billion monthly active users; the largest ever for a single website (Facebook 2014). Its mobile capacity is similarly large, with its total number of monthly active mobile Facebook users currently at 945 million (Facebook 2014). From 2012 to 2013, its user base increased by 22%. These statistics demonstrate that the scale of Facebook is unprecedented. On Facebook, we can investigate the new types of social spaces SNS are creating, and their implications for the self, and in turn our relationships. Facebook represents the beating heart of these issues. Unlike Twitter, Facebook still places a great deal of emphasis on real names and other real world information and takes steps to embed itself in users’ other online activities.
Many websites have enabled one-click sharing to Facebook from their sites. A new mobile dating application, Tinder, only allows logins through Facebook accounts. Facebook has become something of a digital passport, which is fitting when considering that its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, claimed that, “you only have one identity” and that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”(Kirkpatrick 2010: 199). Thus, Facebook
has become a site where questions of identity, the self and the mediation of our social relationships have come to the fore.
Given the opinions of its founder, which have influenced the way Facebook is designed, Facebook presents an interesting venue for examining self-presentation online, as it offers less flexibility than other forms of computer-mediated-communication (CMC) like Internet Relay Chat (IRC) messages boards and blogging which are more flexible and allow anonymous and playful self-presentation. Additionally, Facebook’s emphasis on mapping real-world connections raises the questions regarding how it might be influencing and shaping these relationships.