Socialinės žiniasklaidos kūrimo platforma. Sėkmės istorijos.

The evolution of social networks and the history of their successful implementations are associated with two main factors - the desire to discover new experiences and technological advances to implement the plan. In a way, the first factor affects the impossibility for the largest universal social networks to cover the entire range of human emotions and interests. They are mostly sustainable public companies and must provide good reporting to investors, and this fact forces them to pay more attention to maintaining their paradigm than finding new niches.

Social networking backstory

It can be considered curious that the history of social networks could have started in 1844. That's when Samuel F.B. Morse conducted the first broadcast of the message thanks to a telegraph machine for the first time. Interestingly, these were broadcast messages that were available for receiving and reading on any telegraph connected to the line. In a sense, each telegraph machine was a source of a news feed. It is noteworthy that the phrase abbreviations currently common on the Internet were also used on the telegraph. For example, "G M" meant "good morning", "S F D" meant "stop for dinner".

The next notable technological step was the first data cable transmission between two computers in the ARPANET digital network in 1969. Connected computers for the most part did not have a single software, so the network expanded very slowly.

Another revolution occurred in 1973 when a single TCP/IP network exchange protocol was proposed. The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP was officially completed on “Flag Day”, January 1, 1983, when the new protocols were permanently activated. From that moment on, the term Internet began to be used to refer to switched data networks.

In 1985, under the auspices of the National Science Foundation (NSF), a new NSFNET network was created, which replaced ARPANET and successfully coped with the unification of disparate regional segments of university networks. In 1993, the NSF changed the architecture of the network to allow private backbone networks to it, and in 1995 completely transferred management functions to the private sector.

In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser WorldWideWeb for viewing hypertext documents, which can be considered the beginning of the WWW era.

The establishment of standards for data transmission protocols and their display on user terminals made it possible to create what we now call social networks.

The dawn of a new age

Ripened technologies aroused great interest in their application. Few people will remember the first social projects Six Degrees (1997), Friendster (2002). However, there is another example, the social network Classmates (1995) has gained new investors and continues to be popular in its homeland in the United States. All of them have become pioneers who led the way for the hearts and wallets of users.

While some were investigating options for linking users to each other, others focused on concentrating users around interesting content. Low network bandwidth and high cost of data storage in the 2000s naturally limited content types. Therefore, weblogs proposed by LiveJournal in 1999 have become extremely popular. Google did not stand aside, and joined the race, acquiring the publishing platform Blogger in 2003. But the technologies of transmission, storage processing made such a quick leap that they soon left them on the periphery of public attention.

It is necessary to mention two more companies that could not stay on at Olympus. Myspace (2003) seemingly had become the ruler of the minds, inviting users to share music directly on their profile pages. In 2006, it was the most visited website on the planet, but Myspace's aggressive and inflexible advertising policy forced users to go to Facebook. The fall began in 2008, and now nothing reminds us of its former greatness.

Google started well by launching its social network Google+ in 2012. However, six years later, the project had to be closed after compromising the personal data of almost 500,000 users. It seems incredible, but a security vulnerability has given third-party developers access to user records for three years. Google never recognized this error as critical, did not apologize to users, but just in case did not relaunch Google+. Looking ahead, it should be noted that such scandals on Facebook and Twitter could not shake the determination of their CEOs to continue taking over the world.

Modern lords

Today’s social networks suggest a set of services that retain the attention of more than 5 billion mobile users around the world. Here's an overview of the most famous social networks of 2021:

LinkedIn (2002) - the network website for career-oriented professionals. By 2021, it had grown to more than registered 770 million users worldwide.

Facebook (2004) - the king of social media has almost 2.9 billion users in the world, covering more than 69% of adults in the United States.

Reddit (2005) - news and social comment aggregation site, covers 430 million users.

Etsy (2005) focused on handmade or vintage items and craft supplies. The number of active Etsy buyers is over 90 million.

Twitter (2006) developed the idea of blogging, simplifying it by adding the micro prefix. Now has an audience of 463 million users.

Instagram (2010) was made as a photo-sharing site, has more than 1.4 billion users around the world.

Pinterest (2010) - the visual pinboard, became a public company in 2019 and has more than 454 million monthly active users.

Snapchat (2011) introduced the concept of stories or serialized short videos and filters. Coverage of 535 million users.

TikTok (2016) - a short video sharing service was merged in 2018 with the American mobile application Musical.ly and became popular with teenagers and youth. As of November 2021, it had more than 1 billion users worldwide.

The entire evolution of social networks has been made possible thanks to two factors:

The first factor is the miniaturization and availability of social media access means. What once started on an expensive desktop computer moved to affordable smartphones and tablets as cellular communication expanded.

The second factor was the improvement of data networks. Firstly, it gave access to social networks on the go, and secondly, it allowed you to share multimedia content and large files.

Enterprises took advantage of this new consumer mobility, serving their customers with new methods of interaction and ways to buy goods and services.

The first iPhone, launched by Apple in 2007, helped shift the focus of creating an online community to mobile devices. Now, the creation of mobile applications has become vital, as it allows keeping the user's attention throughout the time of activity during the day.

On the other hand, technological improvements to phones have shifted users' attention to the use of video and images. And this is in addition to written messages that users can now share in real-time. Now, it is already obvious how successful it was to acquire Instagram by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion in cash and stock, as it is the audiovisual driver of Meta's growth.

As social networks increased their user base to hundreds of millions, the business of the social platforms themselves began to form. Tracked user data has a unique value, as it gives marketers a clear picture of consumers. Selling such data in the form of offering targeted advertising (like Facebook) or providing an API to analyze twits (as in Twitter) is the main source of income for social networks. And against this background, the changes in Apple's policy in 2020, requiring developers to disclose the types of data collected by the application, caused undisguised irritation of social media giants.

As consumer coverage opportunities expand thanks to social networks, marketing specialists quickly adapted. The evolution of social networks provided measurement tools that gave marketers unprecedented access to valuable, effective data on consumer demographics, habits, and more. In addition to advertising on social media platforms, companies have discovered the potential usefulness of cultivating an active, involved presence in social networks. While advertising on social networks must be paid for, the act of creating and exchanging informative or entertaining content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms is an attempt by brands to organically expand the audience, in other words, without paying directly for it.

The future of social networks

What happens next in social networks will almost certainly be determined by the evolving business model, as well as advances in technology. It seems that spoiled social media users are already starting to get bored, and today many players are trying to take their place in the opening niches. Already today, it is obvious that the greatest attention of users will be drawn to services offering technologies of augmented reality or virtualization of worlds. But this does not stop supporters of minimalism, which confirms the extremely successful launch of ClubHouse.

The future of social networks is limited only by the imagination of their owners. A brief history of the industry has proved that rapid changes - technological achievements, growing financial needs, cultural changes - will change the current landscape of social networks.

How will mega-platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and others make money? Which way will enterprises distribute their messages and use social networks to create an audience? The answers to these questions will determine the next stage of the evolution of social networks. Well, while the traditional model of building, developing, and monetizing social networks is working, there is no point to abandon it. Moreover, it's not too late to take advantage of this window of opportunity. One way is to create your social network. Which niche should all efforts be focused on? This is a very individual issue, and the customer always solves it himself.

However, choosing a platform for creating a future social network is a more general question, to which there is a very specific answer. The platform should not be inferior to the giants today, otherwise, all efforts may be in vain. There is no doubt that large companies have enough resources to improve their products every day. Therefore, when creating a new social network, you can't save money and rely on yesterday's technologies, hoping to improve them tomorrow.

The users' number of modern social networks is tens and hundreds of millions, but companies count it differently, some claim all registered users, others include only daily or monthly active users. In any case, the platform of any social network should withstand the load from simultaneous access of hundreds of thousands of users. And not just to withstand, but to instantly serve users’ requests. Otherwise, the network will be unresponsive and users will leave it at least for the duration of recovery. Regular repetition of such events will make them look at your competitors. This can be the beginning of the end for any project. Therefore, high load capacity is a crucial, albeit difficult task.

Another question concerns the scalability of the new social network. There are only a few social networks like Facebook that showed a rapid rise in popularity even at the start. The most likely scenario is hundreds and thousands of users in the first months, tens of thousands in the second year. Does this mean that you can sacrifice the performance of the platform to save resources on infrastructure rental at first? By no means! The well-scalable platform will not require the lease of unnecessary resources at the start, but will always be ready to carry an additional load, even if it will be millions of simultaneous requests. The problem of scaling is solved at the stage of creating the platform, long before the first symptoms of social network overload appear. Scalability is not an important feature for all-in-one products for an elementary reason - it is impossible to make a universal solution that works well on the home server and in a modern data center.

A huge number of functions must be performed flawlessly on the platform, therefore forming an environment for user interaction requires the use of a specially optimized framework. You can spend a lot of time searching for individual modules and libraries to implement the function you need, or order their development. But if no framework determines all functions on the platform, the work done will be useless.

If everything is so difficult and the requirements for creation are so high, is it impossible to create a serious social network? Of course, that's not true. The solution is complicated by the narrow choice of a suitable platform. On the one hand, all real social networks use their framework, protect it as intellectual property, and do not offer it on the market. On the other hand, there are an incredible number of free or inexpensive solutions that promise to fulfill whatever you want. But in reality, they allow you to design a website that only looks like a social network. It's naive to count on future success with such a project.

It remains to find the middle ground, albeit not a free solution, but allowing you to build a real social network. Market analysis shows that there are very few offers in this segment. Company X Networks offers one of the best platforms, their Qwerty Social Network Engine (QSNE) is a symbiosis of framework and infrastructure originally designed to create high-load social networks and web portals. Even a brief look at their offer shows that the QSNE platform can realize all the functions of any modern social network. The platform testing also confirms the high load resistance that can be caused by both users' requests and DDoS attacks.

We recommend getting to know this company better if you are interested in creating your real social network.