Who created the social network. The history of the emergence of social networks. Further development of "VKontakte"

Who doesn't dream of implementing a cool startup, the cost of which is estimated at amounts greater than the annual budgets of many countries? Probably everyone. This post is about those who not only dreamed, but tried to make their dream come true and were able to do it.

Who created Facebook?

The most popular social network in the world, Facebook, appeared in 2004. At the time, it was very different from the current network. The first years of its existence "TheFacebook", as it was called at that time, was available only to students, first at Harvard University, and later also some other educational institutions in the United States. Since 2006, already "Facebook" has become a site accessible to users from all over the world, aged 16 and over. In 2016, the number of active network users was 1.71 billion.

Who created YouTube?

The world's largest video hosting YouTube, dates back to 2005 from the small town of San Bruno, California (USA). The Flash Video (FLV) technology used in it, which made it possible to obtain relatively high-quality video with a minimum amount of transmitted data, quickly gained popularity. Initially, YouTube was used as a non-profit entertainment platform. The first advertisement on the resource was posted with an apology to visitors and contained the text - "Not enough money to pay the plumber." Already at the end of 2006, Google bought YouTube from developers for $ 1.65 billion.

Video hosting was founded by three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Javed Karim.

According to Wikipedia, the idea of ​​creating YouTube belongs to Chad Hurley, who could not transmit the video to his friend over the Internet, after which the idea of ​​creating a project arose in his head. Chad stayed on YouTube until October 2010, after which he left and, to everyone's surprise, began creating menswear for programmers.

Steve Chen is YouTube's Chief Technology Officer. Before meeting Chad Hurley and Javed Karim at PayPal, Steve worked at Facebook (one of the early employees). Subsequently, Steve Chen became a shareholder in Google and went to work there in 2014. The stock he bought from the company soared to $ 365 million a year later.

Another YouTube founder, Javed Karim, after the sale of the Google project, received good package shares of this company, entered graduate school at Stanford University. The video with Javed is the first to be published on YouTube. You can watch the video on his YouTube profile jawed(the only publication).

Who created Instagram?

The story behind the Instagram app did not start with Instagram at all. In 2010 in San Francisco, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger puzzled over the implementation of the Burbn app. The guys finished their app and found it too feature-rich and overcomplicated. Not having the desire and strength to start all over again, Kevin and Mike cut everything from Burbn except for photos, likes and comments. What remained later became known as Instagram. In 2011, hashtags, filters and some other features were added to the application. Until 2012, Instagram was only available for Apple devices... The application for Android platforms, which appeared this year, has been downloaded more than a million times per day. In the spring of 2012, Instagram acquired Facebook Inc, paying $ 300 million in cash for the photo app and about $ 700 million in company stock.

The main person of the application is Kevin Systrom, who worked at Google before developing Burbn. After the idea was born, Kevin quit his job and started working on a new project. Mike Krieger later joined him. In the first two weeks of work, Systrom managed to attract 500 thousand dollars of investment. After the sale of Instagram, Kevin went on to work for the new company, under the supervision of Facebook.

Who created Vkontakte?

The social network Vkontakte was launched in October 2006. Initially, VK was positioned as a social network for students and graduates of Russian universities. According to 2017, more than 410 million accounts are registered on the resource, and the daily active audience of the site is 87 million users. Vkontakte is the largest social network in Europe.

The social network developer is Pavel Durov. Before the advent of Vkontakte, Pavel ran the website durov.ru, where he published various articles and solutions for examination subjects. At that time, Durov was known in narrow student circles. He was prompted to create VK by the desire to create a resource where students from different universities of the country could communicate. Soon, having learned about the Facebook network that appeared in America, Durov decided to create its analogue in Russia. As you know, the result was a success!

Who created Odnoklassniki?

The social network Odnoklassniki appeared in 2006. The resource was created by Albert Popkov, who lives in London. The site was developed as a hobby, which was planned to be monetized through advertising. But the rapid growth in the number of social network users led to the fact that Albert had to register entity... Now the site belongs to Mail.Ru Group.

Albert Popkov entered the field of programming at the age of 16. As a college student, he already worked as a programmer. In the 90s, Albert traded in the market. After that he worked as a programmer in the help desk. He was invited to a larger company in the same sphere and during a half-year break (the time of transition from one company to another), Albert created Odnoklassniki. After working for some time in a new job, he quit to continue working on his social network.

Who Created Twitter?

Twitter became known to the world in 2006. The creator of the microblogging social network is a programmer and entrepreneur in one person, Jack Dorsey.

Jack Dorsey became interested in programming at the age of 14. His early work in logistics is still used today in taxi companies. The idea of ​​creating a "short message service" came to him in his student years. Then he already wrote programs for various taxi call services and emergency services. After university, Dorsey went to work for Odeo, which developed and improved instant messaging programs. There, Jack Dorsey, together with programmer Biz Stone, created a Twitter prototype in two weeks. The idea immediately found fans and an investor in the person of the creator of the blogging service Blogger - Evan Williams. Dorsey, Stone and Williams became the founders of the company, from which Twitter soon emerged. Inc.

Who Created Tumblr?

Tumblr is an analogue of Twitter "but with more functionality. The service is positioned as" the easiest way to blogging. "The founder of Tumblr" and is David Karp, and the main developer is Marco Arment. The microblogging network was released in 2007. It is known for the fact that an application for BlackBerry smartphones was developed for Tumblr (before that there was an application only for Iphone). In 2013, Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo for $ 1.1 billion.

David Karp began work on the first Tumblr concept at age 20. Prior to that, he worked as a consultant for software Internet portal UrbanBaby, the main specificity of which is the topic of young parents. In 2009 he was named the best young entrepreneur in the field of high technology by BusinessWeek magazine.

Who created My World?

The social network "Moi Mir" belongs to the Mail Group company. Initially, the resource was created as a link between various services from Mail, including: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc. The social network was launched in beta version in 2007 and in the same year it was brought to the main one. The release of this resource was not well received. In 2007, the chains were awarded second place in the Disappointment of the Year nomination. Now the main emphasis in "My World" is on video, music and games.

Who Created Pinterest?

Pinterest's worldwide catalog of ideas was created in an apartment rented for work by the creator of the project, Ben Silberman. The first beta version of the site was released in 2010. Registration was initially by invitation only. Ben personally wrote the first 5,000 invitations. 9 months after launch, the number of Pinterest users reached 10 thousand. In 2012, registration on the site became open. In the same year, the cost of the project was estimated at $ 1.5 billion.

Who Created WhatsApp?

The famous instant messaging app for mobile platforms was created by Ian Cook and Brian Acton. Although the second is just a business partner. In 2009, in Mountain View (USA), WhatsApp Inc was founded, which has been owned by Facebook Inc. since 2014. The company was sold for $ 19 billion, of which $ 4 billion was transferred in cash, and the rest in Facebook shares. Today, over a billion people use WhatsApp.

Jan Kuk is a native of Ukraine. When he was 16 years old, he and his mother moved to California. At first, the family made ends meet. Jan worked as a janitor and studied programming on his own in his free time. Later, Yang got a job at Yahoo. Once, when he was working out in the gym, his boss called him asking where he was. Cook thought that it would be nice to be able to set a status so that you are not disturbed when you are busy. Some time later, an application was released that takes away from cellular operators hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Who created Google+?

Social developer google networks+ is Google. It is interesting that in cases where a social network is developed by one or a group of programmers, and the project is successful the first time, the creation of its own social network at Google for a long time did not bring the desired results. Since 2004, the company has been trying to enter the social media market. The first social network from Google - Orkut - was given to the Google branch in Brazil, since the American user, having faster and more convenient analogues, did not want to deal with Orkut. Later, Google bought out various platforms: social network Dodgeball (transformed into Google Latitude), mobile social network Zingku, social search service Aardvark, photo sharing service Slide Inc, social aggregator Angstro, and some other projects. Using various tools and supplementing them with their own developments, Google has smoothly moved from "repositories of information about itself" to a full-fledged social network. The Google+ launch was announced in the summer of 2011.

With the advent of the Internet, many aspects of our life have gradually migrated to the virtual world. And communication was no exception, rather the opposite. The human need for high-speed communication (information transfer) became the basis for the emergence of the Internet itself. While the older generation is still well aware of live forms of communication, the younger generation is increasingly giving preference to virtual connections. Sometimes it comes to the point that even neighbors communicate with each other via the Internet.

The emergence of social networks was a consequence of the development and spread of the Internet. Today, many people start their morning not only with a cup of coffee, but also with viewing their page on one or another social network. According to statistics, about 50% of the population of our planet regularly visit their page in any social network, and some even visit several at once. The data on youth speaks best about their popularity: 96% of young people communicate in social networks. networks. And they really tighten, it's not for nothing that the Internet is nicknamed world wide web... After all, if some insect gets into the spider's web, then it remains there forever.

In principle, we can say that the birth of social networks began almost simultaneously with the advent of the Internet back in 1969. Throughout the evolution of social networks, two main directions of development can be distinguished: purely professional communities and non-specialized networks. Derived from professional communities are networks that unite people with the same interests or hobbies.

So, when did the first social network appear and what was it like? - different sources put forward different opinions regarding the emergence of the first full-fledged social network. In principle, Classmates.com, created by Randy Conrads in 1995, can be considered the first social networking resource. Classmates translates to classmates. The site provided users with the opportunity to reconnect with former classmates, fellow students, colleagues, friends. Today the network has over 50 million users in the US and Canada. In addition, its services are available to residents of Sweden, Germany, Austria and France. But for quite a long time, this social portal did not support the functions of creating personal profiles and adding friends. That is, the user could only be connected to his educational institution and provide him with a list of students at this institution.

That is why some researchers consider the first full-fledged social network not Classmates, but the SixDegrees.com project, which was launched in 1997. At that time, many web services (dating sites, for example) offered features such as creating a personal page or friends list (ICQ and AIM), but separately. SixDegrees.com was the first social networking service to combine these features, and over time (in 1998) added new ones such as friend search. This project was the closest to modern social. networks, however, in 2001 the portal SixDegrees.com ceased to exist. The founder of the network, Andrew Weinreich, explained this by the fact that the service was simply ahead of its time. In 2000, less than half of US residents had access to the Internet. In other words, the registered users did not have enough friends and acquaintances with access to the Internet for communication on this site to be at least interesting.

More than 60 million people from different countries world visit one of the most popular social networks - "VKontakte". Who created this project and how did it come about? Considering that the history of the creation of the service itself deserves attention, we invite you to go back a few years and see where it all began and what path preceded such an enchanting success. And the emergence of VKontakte is closely related to the name of one of the most prominent figures among the representatives of the new generation of entrepreneurs - Pavel Durov.

Despite the fact that the fame of Durov's main project brought him great fame, there is not so much information about the creator of the best social network on the Runet.

Childhood

The one who created the VKontakte network was born in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) on ​​October 10, 1984, in the family of the famous Soviet philologist Valery Semyonovich Durov, the author of a large number of scientific works.

For several years, Durov Sr.with his family lived in where the head of the family worked. It was there that Pavel began to go to school. Upon returning to his native Petersburg, he continued his studies in a regular school, but not for too long - too often he had to point out to the teachers their incompetence, with which the boy could not come to terms. However, an alternative was found quite quickly - a whole group was recruited into the experimental classes of the Academic Gymnasium, such as Durov Jr.

During his school years, Pavel sat at the first desk, often alone, received high scores and was considered a very erudite child, but the "stars" of the class - the winners of various Olympiads - overshadowed him. Nikolai, Durov's older brother, a talented scientist, also won competitions in computer science and mathematics.

University admission

Immediately after graduating from the gymnasium, Pavel Durov, following in his father's footsteps, entered the St. Petersburg State University, the Faculty of Philology, and graduated in 2006. In his student years, the one who created the VKontakte social network did not go with the flow like most students, but actively used the time for self-improvement and development.

First steps towards success

Was approaching key moment in the biography of an entrepreneur - the emergence of "VKontakte". You already know who created this one. However, few people know that even before her appearance, while studying at the university, Pavel worked on several predecessor projects. One of them is the site durov.com, which had no commercial benefit, but helped students who studied and lived in different parts of the northern capital to exchange views and ideas online.

However, soon Pavel let the work of durov.com take its course and turned his attention to a new project - the university forum spbgu.ru, starting to promote it. First of all, Durov broke the portal into faculty sites, then began to initiate verbal battles, registered under different nicknames and argued with himself, and in real life he organized beauty and design contests. Meanwhile, the attendance of the forum reached 3000 people per day, the resource began to enrich with new social functions... Users have the opportunity to blog, raise or lower each other's ratings. Pavel was especially careful about monetization, not allowing banners not related to education to appear on the site.

By the end of his studies, Durov was firmly convinced that he needed to deal with his own projects, and not translations from English, as indicated in the diploma. By the way, he never took the diploma himself, so as not to run into bureaucracy once again.

At the dawn of a new era

We continue to study the biography of the one who created the social. network "VKontakte". Against the background of his other ideas, Durov had been thinking for a long time about the implementation of such a project, where all people could act under their real names. Just at this turning point in his mailbox it turned out to be a letter from a person with whom Pavel had lost contact 7 years ago - Vyacheslav Mirilashvili. A student at the prestigious American Tufts University saw how social networks are rapidly gaining popularity, and gave the idea to an old friend.

If they started a little later, the chances of success would be much lower. In the spring of 2006, the number of users in domestic social networks continued to grow, but even the audience of the leader, the Odnoklassniki website, barely reached 500,000.

Beginning of work

Vyacheslav did not have his own funds to launch the project. He had to borrow them from one of the companies of his father, Mikhail Mirilashvili, the owner of the St. Petersburg Conti casinos and the PetroMir shopping and entertainment complexes. Mirilashvili Sr. is one of the most famous businessmen of the northern capital of the 90s and is considered to be a good friend of President Vladimir Putin.

Friends founded a company in which Vyacheslav stayed, and his friends Pavel Durov and Lev Leviev became. Durov was not at all embarrassed by the fact that the project could be associated with a false name. But he retained for himself a package of voting shares sufficient to veto unwanted decisions.

On October 1, 2006, a key event took place - the company registered the vkontakte.ru domain. This day is considered the birthday of VKontakte. Who created this site, you now know. It's time to talk about the development of the project itself.

At first, the site was closed, and registration was possible only by invitation. Registration was allowed only for those who indicated their real name and surname. Students of the capital's universities vied with each other to persuade each other to register, and in just a few November days, the newly appeared social network attracted more than 2,000 users. And the main motive was participation in the competition, which, again, was invented by Pavel Durov - the one who created the VKontakte website. The one who was able to invite the largest number of friends was promised an original and expensive present at that time - a real iPod.

After 3 months, free registration was introduced, and the rapidly growing number of participants in the social network prompted the organizers to switch to more powerful servers and actively improve the system's performance.

Further development of "VKontakte"

Now you know how the VKontakte social network appeared, who created it and continued to develop it. These days the site is constantly changing and improving. It can be said without exaggeration that VKontakte has become a whole world for those who like to communicate, find new friends, listen to music, watch videos, play games, read news and interesting notes.

Not everyone knows that the concept of "social network" appeared back in 1954 and, of course, had nothing to do with the Internet, and they began to study this phenomenon back in the 30s of the last century. The concept was introduced by sociologist James Barnes: "social network" is a social structure consisting of a group of nodes that are social objects (people or organizations) and the connections between them (social relationships) (more on Wikipedia). Speaking more simple language- this is a certain group of familiar people, where the person himself is the center, and his friends are branches. There are two-way or one-way connections between all members of the network. For example, it may be a group of fellow students, in which a certain Jack is the center, and Bill and Katrin are his acquaintances (branches).

Gradually, the scientific concept gained popularity, first in the developed capitalist countries, then in Eastern Europe. As society developed, we came to the information age, in which we created a lot of types of communication, which led to a leap in the development of social networks, and now this scientific concept is used everywhere. I will focus solely on the development of social networks on the Internet.

A landmark event was the invention of the Internet, which went public in 1991 thanks to the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee.

In 1995, Randy Konrad created Classmates.com - the first social network in the modern sense. The concept turned out to be in great demand, and this year the rapid development of social networks on the Internet begins. Today this network is still one of the most popular in the world and has more than 50 million users.

In 2004, Facebook appears, which in a few years has become the most popular social network in the world. It uses the same communication mechanism, on a slightly different plane, which leads to a revolution in this area. The number of active users as of mid-2011 was over 700 million.

In September 2005, Tim O'Reilly made an ideological revolution by introducing the concept of "Web 2.0" in his article "Tim O'Reilly - What Is Web 2.0", which describes the Internet today. Social networks are one of the central parts of the new concept.

In 2008, the Groupon project appeared - a service of collective discounts, which, on the one hand, is based on the principle of social networks (call your friends and get a general discount), and on the other hand, it uses social connections very superficially (only for purchases). The service connects communication and business, which can be confidently called a new level of development of social networks on the Internet, which combines online and offline worlds.

For inveterate fans of social networks, I recommend the lightweight program fvcheat. Very simple and easy to use, it will help you quickly get, for example, a large number of likes. I know that many girls madly want to see three or even four-digit numbers next to a heart under their photo. And that's not all))) Who cares, you can find more information at the link.

Before we delve into the history of social media, we’ll first find out where the very concept of "social media" came from. And so, the word "social" comes from the word "Society", which means a structured society, that is, the union of social objects, which are groups of people and people themselves. It follows from this that social networks make it possible to build relationships between these objects on the Internet.

The history of social networks dates back to the seventies of the twentieth century. And the first methods of social. communication on the Internet have become: network conferences that allow you to save the history of communication; Email, which makes it possible through computer networks exchange text information and communication - online, that is, people could communicate in real time. Recall that thanks to the creation of the IRC protocol in the late eighties of the last century, it provided people with the opportunity to exchange information freely. It was the IRC protocol that laid the foundation for the modern concept of "Chat".
Thus, we can safely say that the history of social networks took its beginning. Then a new stage began in the development and emergence of new technologies, principles of social. communication on the Internet. And all this led to the emergence of blogs, guest books and forums.

And so, a real revolutionary breakthrough was made by the American project "Classmates.com", subsequently, the famous and well-known Odnoklassniki portal became a Runet analogue. And this event happened in 1995. From that moment on, the history of social. networks overcame a new milestone and moved to a new quality level.

In 2003, there was a real boom, and all thanks to the emergence of such popular projects among Internet users “Facebook.com and MySpace.com”. From that moment on, social networks have become an integral attribute of the life of every person, one way or another connected with the World Wide Web.

Absolutely all users, except for simple communication with interesting people, got the opportunity to exchange different media information with each other, and these are photo files, video files, audio files. In addition to all that has just been said, for the use of social. networks for the promotion of goods, services, Internet resources - new horizons have opened.

And now some statistics, currently leading social. Western Internet networks were popular and remain as follows: the well-known Facebook portal (more than seven hundred and fifty million users visit it per day), followed by the Twitter portal (to the portal search engines are very supportive, this made it unusually popular among webmasters), and in third place is the international service My Space, which is well-known among musicians and other representatives of art.

What can be said about the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, here, probably, every second user will say that the VKontakte portal dominates, then Odnoklassniki, which lost a little of their popularity with the appearance of the first portal. Well, the third position is taken by the well-known "My World", created on the basis of the Mail.ru portal.