Expert Perspective

The History of Social Networking

BY JD Rucker | 01-24-2011 | 5:49 PM

This article is written by a member of our expert contributor community.

In case you hadn't heard, social networking is big. Sites like Facebook and Twitter dominate the tech news sites with every move they make getting attention. How much are they worth? Who's using them now? What changes are coming? As with everything, social networking has a history.

Looking back over the decades, we can see what has led up to this "social revolution" that is taking over the Internet and entering into our real lives. It seems that as a society, we share almost everything. What we eat, where we shop, what we're watching on television (or Hulu, or Netflix, or...)--slowly but surely everything is losing its status as "sacred" with sharing becoming the norm.

As we dive into the past, our friends at Online Schools take us into a distant decade when social networking was about knocking on doors and asking friends and relatives to talk about this new form of revenue called "the pyramid scheme." Now, it's grown to so much more.

To understand what's next with social networking, it's important to look back and see where we've been and what has gotten us here.