People always want to communicate with other people. People used to just visit the people they wanted to see. The longer the distance, the harder it was to communicate. Throughout history, people came up with various ways of communicating: through post, pigeons, telegraph, light signals and telephone. Getting responses a few hundred years ago meant waiting for months or a year. Thankfully humans never stopped looking for a faster method to communication. The 20th century brought us the internet. Social networking was born one day in 1971, when the first email was sent. The two computers were sitting right next to each other. The message said “qwertyuiop’. In 1978, the BBS-or Bulletin Board System, was created. The BBS hosted on personal computers, where users need to dial in via the modem of a host computer, and exchanging data through phone lines to other users. The BBS was the first system that lets users interact with one another through the internet.
It was slow, but it was a good start, and only one user could log in at a time. Later that year, the very first web browsers were distributed using Usenet, the earliest online bulletin board of the time. Usenet was created by Jim Ellis & Tom Truscott, where users posted news, articles and funny posts. Unlike the BBS and forums, Usenet did not have a ‘central server’. This concept soon inspired the ‘Groups’ feature we know today; such as Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups and Facebook Groups.The first ever version of instant messaging was around 1988, called IRC or Internet Relay Chat. IRC was Unix-based then, and thus exclusive only to a few people. IRC was used for communications, as well as link and fire sharing. Soon the earliest copies of web browsers were distributed via Usenet. In 1994, the first social networking site was created, Geocities. Geocities allowed the users to create and customize their own web sites, grouping them into different ‘cities’ based on the site’s content. AOL was probably the true precursor to today’s social networking sites.
The Social Media Why
The member profiles allowed its users to write a biography and share details about themselves. The profiles were searchable so people could look your profile up. It was the most innovative feature at that time. Other sites followed suit, creating social networking sites such as Classmates, Friendzy, Hi-5, just to name a few. Many were dating sites, while some were more niche driven. For example, Classmates allowed users to reconnect with old classmates, pals, bullies and crushes. It was a hit immediately, and today Classmates still has some 40,000,000 registered users. The idea is based on the theory that people are separated by no more than six degrees from one another. It also allowed users to create profiles, make groups, search and invite friends. However, they encouraged members to invite more people to the site and had too many membership drives. Many people complained that the membership invitations were spam, filling up their websites with junk.
125 million but completely shut down the year after. In the mid-1990s, the internet was at its full force. Amazon had begun selling books. Every household was getting a PC. The World Wide Web showed no signs of slowing down. The first modern social networking site that we define today is Friendster. It also uses the degree of separation concept similar to SixDegrees, but dubbed it ‘Circle of Friends’. Friendster was basically a dating site that wasn’t all about dating. In the first 3 months, Friendster was able to amass 3,000,000 users. This means 1 in 126 web users were Friendster members at the time. Social Networking went to maturity stage upon the launching of Friendster. Soon MySpace followed suit, who cloned Friendster. It was launched after only 10 days of coding. It soon became more popular than Friendster. MySpace gave users more freedom than Friendster when it came to customization; with music, videos and a hipper online environment. It garnered 90 million registered users-and even if it is no longer the top networking site in the world, it is still a favorite in the USA.
It was launched in 2004, and the primary intent was to connect US college students.
The glory days of Friendster have passed, and its popularity is now surpassed by MySpace and Facebook. Today most of Friendster’s traffic comes from Asia, especially Indonesia and the Philippines. Another site with considerable success is LinkedIn. It was established in 2003, and took a more professional and business approach to social networking. Other sites focused on getting dates, having friends, and reuniting with old classmates, but LinkedIn focused on building business contacts and professionals. Today LinkedIn has 30 million registered members. Facebook came into the social networking scene a little bit later. It was launched in 2004, and the primary intent was to connect US college students. Facebook first began with Mark Zuckerberg’s alma mater Harvard. At first it was exclusive, and you could only join in if you had been invited by a member of Facebook. The ‘exclusive’ feature proved to be a success, and in its first month, over half of the 19,500 Harvard students signed up.
Today’s social networking sites are like yesterday’s front page headlines.
Two years later, the campus-only networking site became open to the public. In 2008, Facebook surpassed MySpace and Friendster as the leading social networking site. It now has over 150 million members around the globe. Many people are still speculating about the future of social networking. Will it be the ultimate communication tool of the future? Or just like the dot-com crash, will it crash and burn eventually? The economic crisis was bad, closing down many small and large businesses and leaving many people jobless. Nonetheless, it still didn’t stop users from using the internet, and new sites are still launched today. But how about the people’s interests? It is true that most networking sites may seem promising and fun at first, but soon the fad cools down and people start to get bored. Today’s social networking sites are like yesterday’s front page headlines. Most of us now get news and information through the internet-especially the younger generation.
Social networking has become very mobile, from our PCs to our smart phones. Thus social networking has become more ‘intrusive’. Do we really want to know what your office mate had for breakfast at Subway or your third degree cousin just lost her car keys? Will Facebook still be the king of social networking? That, we cannot be sure of. Just last year Google made efforts with making its own social networking site, which became very boring and very empty. As of this writing Facebook already has over 600 million active users. But many people suggest that social networking is more of a fad, something that we will get tired of, and will soon switch to a newer site soon enough. In five years time, Facebook might be replaced by a newer web site-or it might be the only one. The thing is, the future is very hard to predict, especially for social media.
The scope and environment of social networking is highly unpredictable, determined by users’ online actions and behaviors. We have seen the history of social networks, but did you ever wondered about the history of the internet? If you did, then you just have to read the next section. For this time I wanted to share one more fun site. This website is building a digital library of Internet sites and other digital form resources. As for me - this resource page caught my interest, because in 1998 or 2000 I didn’t even know much about Internet - now we have a chance to look how design and web development is evolving. There is 85 billion pages out there. Just type in a URL in the form and go way back..! Hope You will enjoy this one valuable and fun web site. The history lesson is behind us. As a web designer or even more as a freelancer you have to do a lot of social networking to increase your chances of success. Learn how in the next and few following chapters.
Being part of a web design and development community offers you many possibilities and chances for self-development. Each one of us knows about these communities and, at some point in time or another, wished or even was part of one of them. Knowing other individuals in your industry is something I recommend to everybody, as you can get a lot of help from such experts. Communities are not only created around people, but also around offline web design agencies, which give you even a better set of possibilities and a different network that you can use during your career. Design, development, social media, marketing or blogging (part of the web in general) are industries evolving a lot lately and this will not stop soon. Working by yourself was an option more than five years ago, but today things have changed and many of us have started to outsource in order to finish projects faster and earn more money. Being part of such a network or community can help you develop your skills and bring new people around you.
And we, designers and developers, have that too.
In this article I will talk about why it is important to keep yourself close to these networks and in the end we will take a look at some of the well-known ones as of this period. Moreover, we will see if building your own network is an option. A community is important because it brings us all together and this helps us to grow individually and as a group of experts. Fashion, football (and sports in general), computers and other devices - some niches off the top of my head that enjoy large support communities. And we, designers and developers, have that too. Communities are important and helpful for personal development because they feature tutorials, forums, posts, advice, tips and so on. If you do not have a university degree, there is a high chance that all you know about designing is due to one of these communities. People share their knowledge, often for free. As a famous advertising campaign says, sharing is caring. It seems we all care a lot about each other in this industry.
A good example could be the articles we post here on 1WD. We take our time to write articles for you, while others from the community come and share even more in the comments. This is one of the ways to learn a lot - by reading and interacting with people from your own industry. The trick of our field is that everything evolves and changes fast. If you don’t pay attention to the trends, you will find yourself knowing too much about old stuff and not enough about what is really important. Spending money all the time on books would be ineffective for us, as many books get renewed and improved two-three times per year, due to the industry advancing so fast. In order to avoid spending so much money, you can always turn your attention to networks and communities on the internet. If you look at it from another point of view, being part of design communities can get even more helpful.
Try to look back and remember how many frameworks, resources and tools you’ve used - many of them provided by these communities. And then try to remember how many of them were free of charge. Now imagine how much time or money you would have to spend to use those things if you needed to develop them yourself or to hire someone to do it for you. And let’s move our attention to the things that are not free. Even the premium resources are delivered very cheap compared to the market price; all this thanks to the design and development communities. WordPress, Boilerplate, CodeIgniter, Drupal, GIMP, Inkscape - how many times have you used these open-source tools? It may come as a surprise to you, but all of them were developed by these communities at some point or another. Now don’t get me wrong, I am sure WordPress is a money powerhouse today, but looking back in the past, it all started as a community project.
Image by steven w. And to top it off, communities are helpful at something else as well - and that is probably the most important asset. Getting recommended there happens quite often and outsourcing happens most of the time inside these communities. Only if and after not finding someone suitable, freelancers use third-party websites to search for individuals to work with, otherwise everything starts off from communities like forums or blogs. All of us can create our own communities or networks, Social-Media-Nutzung: Facebook verliert but most of us prefer to use the ones already populated with experts and people with years of experience in the field. However, I am sure all of us start from social media. We share lots of interesting links on Facebook and Twitter and it is probably where lone developers or designers start. Blogs are also considered networks. Not so much personal blogs as the ones related to a specific topic or an industry. 1stWebDesigner is an example. With a blog getting bigger, the community behind it gets bigger as well.
We talked about advantages a bit earlier.
All these blogs turned into communities develop side-projects, just as here at 1WD we publish eBooks for Amazon’s Kindle. Some other popular communities might be forums (CodingForums is hot), social networks, web pages and so on. What more is in it for you? I am sure most of you know the answer to this question by now. We talked about advantages a bit earlier. But there is more than just open-source tools and support. You can gain a lot by starting such a community yourself, by creating an application or an open-source tool people can use. By getting involved, others can hear about you and your reputation within the industry will grow as fast as you never experienced before. If you want to build a community, there are some steps you might want to start with - it is usually how everybody starts. It is not a success guaranteed method, but it will aid your cause. Knowing how to use social media properly will give you a huge advantage over the others.
Don’t forget that your short-term goal is to get as many people as you can interested in your product. There is no better way of doing this than using Twitter, Facebook, Digg and the other social sharing giants. Use all these to share links, tips, resources and ask for feedback. Engage the community as this will make a whole buzz around you and it will bring you even more interest. If you like writing, blogging is also a way to aid your start-up. It doesn’t even have to be a full-time job, but having a blog that you update once or twice per week will keep people interested. Experts advise bloggers to update the content far more often than this, but don’t forget you are not a blogger, rather you are a developer or a designer. Blogging is only a way to help yourself, you don’t look to earn money out of it. If you are involved in other communities and networks, this will improve your reputation as well. Be involved in as many as you can, talk to people, share their links, interact with them over social media and so on.
Getting involved is one of the best ways to get recognized and earn people’s respect. I read an article a few months ago about social media strategies. The author mentioned the fact that a retweet is not as effective as when a personal comment is included. It also makes a lot of sense. You need not create articles that are robot sharing, rather you need to add a personal touch to them when sharing. Real popular communities are based on active people who get involved on a professional and personal level, not on social media robots. If you have knowledge of something worth sharing, don’t keep it to yourself. Be selfless and give advice. Help people if they need it. Offer them tips and show them the right path if you’ve been there before. It is also about earning respect and getting recognized. You might not get much in the short-term, but you will earn a lot in the long-term out of being generous. If you have your own community, providing tools or services for free will always bring you traffic and referrals. People love free stuff, it is a general and an easy-to-notice behavior.
Topic title: Seven Ways You Can Companies And Social Media Marketing Without Investing Too Much Of Your Time
Topic covered: best sites for social media news, free social networking sites, social media assistant, social network world, the social
