The Death of a Social Network: SixDegrees

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Today nearly everyone is a member of at least one online social network, proven by Facebook having over 500 million members, but not every social network is thriving, in fact many of them are dying or are dead (Wauters). There are several potential causes, but of these the ones that may prove to be the most prevalent are uncontrollable exponential growth, niche market restriction, and lack of innovation and renovation. Social networking sites have been established as being an online environment where people who share “personal or professional interests, place of origin, education at a particular school, etc.” can connect (“social networking”). The most popular examples of these web communities are MySpace and Facebook, but these are only genetic mutations of their predecessors. One of, if not, the first social networking sites was SixDegrees.com, established in 1997, and within the following five plus years several others would appear, most notably Friendster (Boyd and Ellison 5). The popularity of Friendster soared due to media coverage, peaking by its having been listed second highest in Time magazine’s 50 Coolest Websites (Buechner). The growth that followed this media coverage was unexpected by Friendster, and that meant that their systems were ill equipped to handle the volume of traffic generated. When browsing the Internet, the most frustrating experience, especially early in the twenty first century was load time. Frustration with load time would diminish significantly from 2002 to 2005 when the average user’s ability to connect at speeds at or above 1Mbps increased nearly 25% ("Poll: Internet Connection Speed "). Friendster’s users became conscious of their inability to handle user volume as speed connections increased.... ... middle of paper ... ...orks Cited Wauters, Robin. "Zuckerberg Makes It Official: Facebook Hits 500 Million Members." 21 July 2010: Web. 21 July 2011. . "social networking." Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, 2011. Web. 4 Aug 2011. Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. "Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship.." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13.1 (2007): 0-19. Web. 21 July 2011. http://jcmc.indiana.edu Buechner, MarryAnne Murray. "Tech Time: 50 Coolest Websites." Time Magazine June 2004: n. pag. Web. 4 Aug 2011. http://time.com "Poll: Internet Connection Speed." kdnuggets.com (2005). Polls. Web. 4 Aug 2011. http://www.kdnuggets.com Boutin, Paul. "How Google+ Will Balkanize Your Social Life" Technology Review: The Authority on the Future of Technology. MIT, 11 July 2011. Web. 25 Aug. 2011. http://www.technologyreview.com

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