Social networking, in some form or another, has been around for as long as man. It's not hard to imagine cave dwellers who shared a common bond gathering together for a conversation about the day's events - even if grunting and elaborate charades was the only means of communication.
Perhaps the first person to identify and label a form of social networking was Auguste Comte back in 1853. He observed that one person in a certain social system were interconnected with others in the same system.
It was an observation way ahead of its time, and good old Auguste didn't even have a modem.
Wikipedia, the online mecca for information both accurate and questionable, defines a modern social network as: A social structure which, in general, facilitates communication between a group of individuals or organizations, that are related by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as: a special or common interest; shared values; visions, ideas, or perhaps ideals; financial exchange, friendship, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade.
Auguste was, indeed, way ahead of the curve. But since this column is more about technology, let's fast forward more than a few decades and all the way to the 1970s.
Other than just disco, which is the best invention man (or woman) ever created, folks started piecing together integrated circuits and a bunch of wires to make their own, early, personal computers.
Trying to find a way to communicate over standard telephone lines, a couple of kids in the Chicago area found a marriage between hardware and software for the first bulletin board system. The modem allowed data transfer from one point to another.
Hobbyists all over the world started to create their own BBS systems and users would dial into the centralized computer to share files, post messages and create new software.
As the young hobbyists grew older, they recognized a possible business opportunity. CompuServe and America Online came to the forefront in the 1980s, and file sharing, e-mail and data transfers became more and more popular. Groups of like-minded computer users would often create their own chat rooms inside the online communities.
As the Internet boom continued, the ideas took another leap forward. Instead of creating a chat room or social network inside AOL or CompuServe, the idea of using a dedicated Web site was born. Yahoo! and a host of other services hit the scene in the 1990s and Yahoo! Groups became a gathering place for many.
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techESC: What was old is new again