Chapter 1
Overview
1.1 Introduction
Social media sites (SMSs) such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Cyworld, and Instagram have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices. As of this writing, there are hundreds of SMSs supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around SMSs are varied [1].
SMSs are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. Some SMSs have more than millions of active users (Facebook have 1.65 billion active user in 2016). The way that these sites handle different user needs and serve a huge number of users is phenomena worthy of study.
In this chapter, we first define the social media and the deference between the social media sites and other sites. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After that, we discuss why we need new social media and the features of this new social media. And finally, we briefly take a lock on research organization.
1.2 Social media definition
Social media refers to applications and websites that make it possible for users to create and share different kinds of content or take active part in social networking. In simple terms, these are platforms that enable the user to participate in the communication process. With social media, you can add comments, add videos, like or 'participate' in any other form. It includes social news, social networking and social photo and video [2]. Others define social media as the wide range of Internet-based and mobile services that allow users to participate in online exchanges, contribute user-created content, or join online communities [3]. The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition; however, there are some common features:
1. User-generated content (UGC) is the lifeblood of the social media organism.
2. Users create service-specific profiles for the site or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.
3. Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals and/or groups
What differentiates a social media site from the typical website? The typical website might be controlled by one person or organization, with the purpose of simply pushing out information; social media sites, on the other hand, invite users to actually respond. In fact, the vast majority of content on social media sites (or social network) comes from the public itself. Web users have the most control over what content goes on the site, with free reign to log on and post comments, links, photos, videos or responses to other users’ posts. By encouraging interaction among users, these sites create an interactive experience that users do not get from a typical website. Over the past few years, however, social networking has evolved from a personal interest to a professional one. Increasingly, businesses are finding ways to promote products and services, connect with customers, generate new ones and drive revenue – all through social media. Even more recently, organizations are using social media not only to generate new customers, but to recruit new employees as well. After all, social media offers the opportunity to engage in two-way conversations with job candidates [4].
1.3 History of social media sites
There are hundreds of SMSs on the Internet, but only few of them were effect on people or stay in the Internet for long time.In this section we take a lock on some of the important social media starting from the first known social media.
According to the definition of social media above, the first recognizable social network site launched in 1997. SixDegrees.com allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends (To differentiate the articulated list of Friends on SNSs from the colloquial term), surf the Friends lists. SixDegrees promoted itself as a tool to help people connect with and send messages to others. While SixDegrees attracted millions of users, it failed to become a sustainable business and, in 2000, the service closed. Looking back, its founder believes that SixDegrees was simply ahead of its time.
From 1997 to 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various combinations of profiles and publicly articulated Friends. AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGente allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profile. Users could identify Friends on their personal profiles without seeking approval for those connections.
Likewise, shortly after its launch in 1999, LiveJournal listed one-directional connections on user pages. LiveJournal's creator suspects that he fashioned these Friends after instant messaging buddy lists. On LiveJournal, people mark others as Friends to follow their journals and manage privacy settings.
The Korean virtual worlds site Cyworld was started in 1999 and added SMS features in 2001. Likewise, when the Swedish web community LunarStorm refashioned itself as an SMS in 2000, it contained Friends lists and diary pages.
The next wave of SMSs began when Ryze.com was launched in 2001. Ryze is a free and paid social networking website designed to link business professionals, particularly new entrepreneurs. Both paid and unpaid membership levels are offered. It was one of the first of a new generation of social networking services, and was a heavy influence on Friendster.
Tribe.net was founded in early 2003; the population of Tribe was skewed heavily towards people living in the San Francisco Bay Area, though the geographic distribution is gradually normalizing as people from other places join. In Tribe.net, anyone may register as a new tribe user, and may then define his or her immediate network of Friends, either by choosing from existing members or by inviting new members to join. Each of these users may in turn define their own network of Friends.
In 2002, LinkedIn.com is founded. LinkedIn is a social networking site designed specifically for the business community. The goal of the site is to allow registered members to establish and document networks of people they know and trust professionally. It introduces premium services for generating revenues, achieves profitability (being the first major social network enterprise to do so), becomes the most popular site for work based networking, and acquires its first startups.
Friendster.com was founded in 2002; Friendster was one of the first sites to attain over 1 million members, although it was preceded by several other smaller social networking sites such as SixDegrees.com. As Friendster's popularity surged, the site encountered technical and social difficulties. Friendster's servers and databases were ill-equipped to handle its rapid growth, and the site faltered regularly, frustrating users who replaced email with Friendster. Friendster was finally closed because of technical issues.
In particular, the people behind Ryze, Tribe.net, LinkedIn, and Friendster were tightly entwined personally and professionally. They believed that they could support each other without competing. In the end, Ryze never acquired mass popularity, Tribe.net grew to attract a passionate niche user base, LinkedIn became a powerful business service, and Friendster became the most significant, if only as "one of the biggest disappointments in Internet history".
In 2003, MySpace.com was created. It allows its users to create webpages to interact with other users. Users of the service are able to create blogs, upload videos and photos, and design profiles to showcase their interests and talents. MySpace has provided a place for users to meet new friends and keep in touch with people across the world. The site has grown tremendously since its inception in 2003. Myspace had a "Groups" feature that allowed a group of users to share a common page and message board. Groups could be created by anybody, and the moderator of the group could choose for anyone to join, or to approve or deny requests to join. Myspace considered one of the successful social media sites that have over 50 million users.
Everything changes in 2005, YouTube.com was founded. It is the first website that makes it easy to upload videos to the Internet. Besides uploading videos, you can comment on videos, share videos and like or dislike videos. Most of the videos found on YouTube are created by amateurs, but some professional film makers also use the platform to share their work. Virtually all types and genres of videos are posted on the site, from sports accidents to homemade music videos. Youtube is the biggest social media after Facebook. It contains billions of videos with millions of views every day. In November 2006, it was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion. YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.
In the same year of Youtube's creation (2005) Facebook was coming to Internet. Facebook is the biggest social media ever that provide a global communication between users from different countries and cultures. Facebook change the view of the Internet. It provide simple way of making relationship between users, making post of different types (text post, image post, multiple images post, video post, location post, and in 2015 Facebook add the live video to its posts types), commenting on posts, share posts, interacting with posts and even playing games.
By the coming of 2006, Twitter.com comes to world. Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets". Registered users can read and post tweets, but those who are unregistered can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS or mobile device app. Twitter service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with more than 100 million users posting 340 million tweets a day in 2012.
We thing that the important social media applications (Facebook, Youtube and twitter) are change our lives daily. Everything that we know about live was effected when these sites comes to the world. According to the book "The new digital age", which is wrote by the CEO of Google, these social media will stay for long time and will change and continually change the world and our live. They are effect on economy, politics, security international, religions, and ever on our food. Why these sites effect more than other sites? This is because these sites have billions of uses and the popularity of them is continually increased and in the few coming years the expectation is that almost every person in the world would has at least one account on these popular websites. On these sites the boundaries are eliminated, person from the far west can easily communicate with person from the far east.
Figure (1-1) shows the timeline of most social media between 1997 and 2006.
Figure (1-1): Timeline of the launch dates of many major SNSs
1.4 Need for new social media
Should we build new social media? Why not just use existing social media such as Facebook or twitter? May be it’s the most important question in this research. To answer this question, we have made a questionnaire to know if people want a new social media. The questionnaire has been made for a number of people from different countries; those people have been chosen randomly from the Internet to answer the three following questions:
1. Do you want to add more features to current social media?
2. Do you want to add new post type to current social media?
3. Is current social media safe for children and teenagers?
The questionnaire is made by the help of Google Forms (Google Forms can simply be described as free, collaborative survey software. It records all responses in Google Spreadsheets which is just one subset of the Google Docs applications and can be downloaded as a Microsoft Excel) and it is published to people through the Internet. However, the questions did not contain a direct question that says "Do you want new social media?" this is because we think that most people will say "No, there is no need". This is due to the nature of people who are not like to change things. Thus, the indirect questions are more useful to know how people think about the current social media. The results were as follows:
1. For the first question, 65.6% of the answers want to add new features to the current social media.
2. The second question, 19.1% of people say that they need new types of posts, while 40.1% say that existing types of posts are enough but there is no problem if new types of posts are added.
3. The last question, 99.9% of people say that current social media is not safe for children and teenagers.
Figure 1-2 shows more details about the answers of the three questions.
Figure (1-2): Statistical data for the replies to the three questions
Based on the result of the questionnaire, many people want more features in social media and they think that is better and add new type posts. Also, almost all people believe that the current social media is not safe for children and teenagers. Despite the fact that the current social media can be developed to meet people needs, this will take long time. This is due to fact that developing any website (especially if the developing process will change the database) is a difficult process and may even fail (more detailed about this will explain in chapter three). We conclude that building new social media website is better than waiting the others to develop their websites.
Our goal in this research will be constructing a social media that have most features of any social media as well as more features, new type of posts and more safety for children and teenagers. The proposed social media will have the following specification:
1. Create account and managing it.
2. Create text, image, multiple images, or video posts.
3. Writing comments and replies.
4. Send and accept friendship requests
5. Send and receive messages (chat system).
6. Create groups of different types and managing them.
7. Create pages and managing them.
8. More features to the profile (discussed in chapter four).
9. New type of posts (discussed in chapter four).
10. More safety to children and teenagers.