First thoughts.

The beginnings of social networking on the Internet can be traced back to the mid 1990's in the form of  on-line communities which were focused bringing people together to interact with one other through chat rooms by sharing personal information on web pages. Features such as user profiles and 'friend' lists were developed during this time on websites such as sixdegrees.com and Classmates.com. However it was really with the emergence of Myspace and Bebo in the early 2000's that social networking websites really began to boom. The emergence of Facebook in 2004 started by Mark Zuckerburg in his Harvard dorm room led to it becoming the most popular social networking site in the world. So much so that a 2011 survey showed 47% of American adults now use the site. Entertainment Weekly summed up the concept and success of Facebook when it wrote "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remeber our co-workers birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" in 2009. But it is the rise in popularity and affordability of smart phones which let users access sites like Facebook and Twitter any time and anywhere that created a huge boom in the usage of these sites and also meant people began starting to question the possible detrimental impact on education, privacy, employment and online bullying amongst many others things that the invasion of social networking on society could have. In this blog I will look into an analyse the constant changing world of social networking in the 21st century.