Social Networking Phenomena

By: Adrien Kwok
Date: December 31, 2007

    Talk to any teenager on the street and they'll most likely know what Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, HI5, Bebo, or Orkut is. These networking websites capitalizes user participation on their websites in order to generate revenue. The brainchild of many of these websites is the human society. Little do most people know is that these websites haven't been around for very long. It's been credited to Friendster and MySpace for popularizing social networking websites during the early 2000s. It really caught worldwide attention when MySpace took more page hits than even the search engine giant Google (owner of Orkut) in 2005.

Brief History

    The idea of a social networking can date back to as early as 1995 with Classmates.com where users can locate their old friends and classmates from elementary school to university (or even the United States military). Later on, in 1997, other websites like SixDegrees.com (now defunct) have sprang up before the turn of the century.

Classmates.com is one of the earliest social networking websites.

    There are currently two systems in practise when it comes to social networking services (SNS for short). The one that most (if not all) SNS use is the Circle of Friends system developed by Jonathan Bishop in 1999. The older system was called  Web of Contacts. They were similar, however, the Circle of Friends system wasn't only used for telling you friends are, but they also allow you to manage them.

MySpace

    MySpace is the world's largest SNS, with more than 210 million users and growing. It is the United States' largest SNS and has been growing ever since. Its popularity skyrocketed when News Corp bought out MySpace and announced that the service had 106 million users. The website was founded by eUniverse in August of 2003. Its first users of the website were its employees. To spur user registration, the company hosted competitions to see who can get the most users to sign up.
   
    The website's key feature is that anyone is allowed to put their own HTML/CSS code at their free will, as long as people do NOT cover the website's advertisement. However, this has created concerns in the technical community for registering more than 100 errors on the W3C HTML Validator for just the MySpace front page. Not only did the MySpace front page fail validation, but poor user created codes have the potential to crash web browsers due to bad CSS programming. Furthermore, inexperienced "webmasters" do not realize that if you embed too many high bandwidth objects like flash videos or abundance of extra graphics it can crash people's web browsers. For these reasons, PC World named MySpace as the worst website ever. Even with these serious flaws, it's been very popular amongst celebrities and musicians. They use MySpace as a way to promote their products to their fans and to do some PR in cyberspace due to MySpace's large consumer base.
   
    MySpace hasn't been under fire for only their serious flaws in HTML, but also with security. Not only does MySpace have flaws in users' profiles but it has became a hotbed for malware being spread. A notorious worm was spreading through MySpace as a result. Dubbed Sammy (or JS.Spacehero), the worm is a XSS worm (the first one ever) that will infect a profile and would display "but most of all, Samy is my hero" into a person's infected profile. In order for infection, one must visit the profile to be infected. Within 20 hours of its release in October, 2005, it became the fastest spreading virus of all time. Phishing has also became one of the worst problems on MySpace. Victims usually get their personal information stolen, including the account's password via phishing. None of these problems would exist if MySpace would clamp down on security and restrict users from inserting any code they want. For these many reasons, many experts highly recommend Internet users to have their own websites at established websites such as but not limited to Yahoo! GeoCities, Lycos Tripod, and Angelfire. These services  have the ease of use such as MySpace, but will always be more secure due to the fact that all the sites are "quarantined" from each other unlike MySpace. For those who actually know how to use scripting languages, they can always resort to "true" webhosts like Trap 17, Astahost and X10 Hosting.

Orkut

    Orkut is the world's second largest SNS with more than 67 million users worldwide. It was founded by Orkut Büyükkökten in January 2004 as a side project while working at Google. Orkut is Brazil's most popular SNS and it's the country's second most visited website. It is also one of India's most popular SNS. Started out as an invite-only beta program, Google decided to open up Orkut in October 2006.

    Orkut's key features included the ability to send offline and online messages to other users across the website, it's just like Facebook's wall system but Orkut allows you to embed JavaScript and Flash into your scrapbook messages; another big feature of Orkut is its ability to create communities, this is something like groups on other websites where users are allowed to create a page for the group's interests. These features are standardized into what makes it a modern SNS.

    However, Orkut faces some of the same challenges as MySpace does. The service has been flagged down with attacks and exploits with notorious malware such as MW.Orc worm which uses Orkut to propagate images to infect the user's machine. The largest exploit that is directly linked to the Orkut's flaws included the ability to embed malicious JavaScript into Orkut's scrapbook function, effectively spreading the W32/KutWormer.

Facebook

   
    Facebook is the third largest SNS in the world with more than 58 million users, after MySpace and Orkut. It is Canada's largest social networking service, with more than 25% of its population (of 32 million people) using the service (around 50% of them being adults). Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. The website originally served as a gateway for Harvard students to connect with each other. After a while, other universities across the United States. In 2005, Mark Zuckerberg and his team decided to open the SNS to high school students. In 2006, the company decided open its doors to everyone no matter where they belonged. For doing that Alexa Internet reported that the website's popularity jumped from rank 60 to rank 7 between September 2006 to September 2007.

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