My History of Social Networking

After seeing the new movie, Social Networking, about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, I decided to look back on my history of social networking.

I was one of the original 5 million or so Facebook users from the days when only college students could use it, by registering with their student e-mail address.

Going back to when I was in 8^th grade (1998-99) at U.L. Light Middle School, my Language Arts teacher, Mr. Granger would have his students write a weekly journal every Monday.  It gave students a chance to reflect on their lives and how they felt about different things going on.  When I wrote my last entry for Mr. Granger in early June, I wrote how I would like to start keeping a journal about my life.  Since I had no readers, I didn’t have much motivation to actually try it on my own for five more years.

In the fall of 2000, my BHS friend Mary created an e-mail address and got AIM and it sounded interesting enough that I decided to try it.  I had a group of friends that I would talk to on AIM regularly over the years, especially Mary, BJ, Lindsay, Liz, Stephanie.  In June 2001, Lindsay introduced me to Ashley C. on AIM and we got to know each other pretty well before we finally met in person at a student council meeting in Sept. 2001.

In the spring of 2004, my BHS friends Stephanie, Lindsay, and Liz started to write a blog on the website Xanga.  Since it was our first year of college, it was a good way to keep up with high school friends.  Several others and myself decided to jump on board with this trend as spring semester ended in May.  Over the next two years I would write about different things that were going on in my life, including people I knew who married, died, and my views on sports and politics.  I would sum up the years events in a year-end review, which I continue to use blogs.  There were a lot of interesting surveys on there too.

Early in 2006, I moved my blogs from Xanga to MySpace, where there were more users.  MySpace began to die out in 2009, so in late 2010, I created my blog at BlogSpot.  Over the years, I have posted blogs less frequently, but I still make it a point to keep something going that accounts for the major events of my life.  There are many social networks available, but Facebook serves the needs of just about everything except blogging.  I will use Facebook status to give people updates on my blog.  During the first few years, MySpace had more people on it, but once Facebook lifted its restrictions, MySpace dropped off.  I no longer have Xanga and MySpace accounts, but I backed my favorite post up on a USB key so I have access to them.  In the meantime, Twitter began popular, especially with younger views.  Given my wordy journalistic way of expressing myself, I have no desire to use Twitter, which restricts post to 140 characters.

Facebook first came to Ohio in early 2005 at Ohio St. and Miami of Oxford.  The first two people I knew that used it were Liz F. (Miami student) and Megan L.  Megan had transferred to the UA, but she was able to use her OSU e-mail to get on.  By the beginning of summer, Facebook came to UA and I was signed up before long.  Kent St. got in around the same time and my friends at Malone, Adam and Brett, were on soon after.  In September 2005, a high school version of Facebook was founded and a year later, everyone over the age of 13 could register.

Facebook has changed significantly in the decade that I have been on it.  Most have been good, but there's a few things I don't like.  The News Feed was introduced in 2006, which helped people to see what others were posting to their page.  In 2008, the chat featured was introduced, which led to the demise of AIM.  By 2009, Facebook began allowing users to post photo albums (which have improved in quality over the years), which I do on a moderate level, and videos, which I still don't use.  Facebook status was becoming popular by then, but I was slow to use it because I didn't know what type of content to post on it.  I have come to enjoy using the status as a social commentary for sports and current events, with the occasional posts with links to article I really enjoy.  The creation of the Timeline added  great convenience because scrolling down if I wanted to look through my Facebook history was becoming very tedious.  The one thing I liked better about the original Facebook was the simplicity of the About page.  All of the user's basic information was listed on their home page in narrative form, instead of on multiple places with links like it is now.  I now have about 700 friends on Facebook.