Does anyone remember Friendster and MySpace? (stupid question, I know)
But before Facebook opened itself to non-edu TLD email addresses (read: enrolled college students only), these were the only two major ground-breakers in terms of social media (or what I prefer to refer to as public AOL Buddy Lists).
There was a major difference between Friendster and MySpace though, and it's a big one that was hugely ignored:
Friendster actually provided real social network graphs,
that showed you your own Kevin Bacon relationship with every user
page you viewed.
MySpace blindly declared that "EVERYONE" was in your network,
because YAY! WE ALL USE MYSPACE, SO WE'RE ALL FRIENDS IN ONE BIG
NETWORK: MYSPACE! SQUIDDLEY DOO! (especially wrt our big
buddy: "Tom")
Of course everyone flocked to MySpace because they could customize their CSS to look extra cool, and/or inject JavaScript and Flash objects that sniffed out IP addresses, and watch lurkers.
Meanwhile, technically competant scrapers, could still build out the actual Kevin Bacon degrees of separation for MySpace by scraping the public pages and re-compiling and aggregating the data themselves, but still... friendster gave it to everyone, and understood the significance of degrees of separation between people, but no one seemed to care.
But before Facebook opened itself to non-edu TLD email addresses (read: enrolled college students only), these were the only two major ground-breakers in terms of social media (or what I prefer to refer to as public AOL Buddy Lists).
There was a major difference between Friendster and MySpace though, and it's a big one that was hugely ignored:
Of course everyone flocked to MySpace because they could customize their CSS to look extra cool, and/or inject JavaScript and Flash objects that sniffed out IP addresses, and watch lurkers.Meanwhile, technically competant scrapers, could still build out the actual Kevin Bacon degrees of separation for MySpace by scraping the public pages and re-compiling and aggregating the data themselves, but still... friendster gave it to everyone, and understood the significance of degrees of separation between people, but no one seemed to care.