Serendipity35

A decade or two ago when I was teaching one of my social media courses at NJIT, I used to ask students to write a short paper on what they thought was the first social medium or platform. It's one of those questions without a definitive answer and I received a variety of answers over the years. 

Now that we are even deeper into social media and students are even younger - this year's college freshman was born in the 21st century - the early days and history of social media is buried a bit deeper.

The most common answers go back to the 1970s and 80s with forums, bulletin boards and things like AOL's Instant Messenger.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, websites and fledgling social sites and tools were not commercialized. No advertising. How things have changed.

But there were always a few students who went pre-Internet.

On May 24, 1844, some electronic dots and dashes were tapped out by hand on a telegraph machine sending a first electronic message from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. Perhaps, Samuel Morse was prescient about what was to come with his scientific achievement since he wrote, “What hath God wrought?” This was communication and could be two-way but wasn't really a social network. Eventually, there did become a network of users and telegrams could be sent to multiple users.

Technology began to change very rapidly in the 20th Century. After the first super computers were created in the 1940s, scientists and engineers began to develop ways to create networks between those computers, and this would later lead to the birth of the Internet. 

A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory appeared in 1973 and true electronic BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which first came online early in 1978. BBS in big cities were running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and similar personal computers.

Let's back up a bit and look at the PLATO system launched in 1960. It was developed at the University of Illinois and then commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. Later, it would offer early forms of social media features, In 1973, Notes (PLATO's message-forum application) was added and TERM-talk was an instant-messaging feature. The Talkomatic may be the first online chat room. There was also News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper and blog. PLATO used Access Lists so that a note file or other application you created could be limited in access to a certain set of users, such as friends, classmates, or co-workers.

Some people point to the emergence in 1967-69 of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), an early digital network, created by the United States Department of Defense, that allowed scientists at four interconnected universities to share software, hardware, and other data. Though not intended to be "social," apparently social niceties did emerge and by the late-1970s non-government and business ideas passed back and forth and a network etiquette (netiquette) was described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

ARPANET evolved into the Internet after the first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification were witten by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine in 1974. This was followed by Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, and established in 1980.

1985 saw the introduction of The Well and GENie. GENie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was an online service created for GE and GENie was still used well into the late 1990s. It had 350,000 users at its peak and was only made redundant by the development of the World Wide Web.

In 1987, the National Science Foundation launched a more robust, nationwide digital network known as the NSFNET.

The IBM PC was introduced in 1981 and the subsequent models of both Apple Mac computers and PCs, better modems, and the slow increase of bandwidth allowed users to do more online. Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s.

The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply "the web") was added to the Internet in the mid-1990s. Message forums became Internet forums.

A number of platforms appeared tht had social tools inlcuding GeoCities (1994) Classmates.com (1995).

The first recognizable social media site might be Six Degrees which appeared in 1997. Users created profiles, give school affiliations and could "friend" other users. It differed from instant-messaging clients (such as ICQ and AOL's AIM) or chat clients (like IRC and iChat) because people used their real names.

It would be 2003 when Myspace launched and by 2006 it had become the most visited website on the planet. Sharing music was a big part of its appeal.

Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University to be used there. But it caught on, spread to other colleges and in June 2004 the company he had started around "TheFacebook" moved to Palo Alto, California. By 2008, it had eclipsed MySpace and in December, 2009, with 350 million registered users it became the most popular social platform in the world.

The original URL - thefacebook.com - still redirects to the renamed Facebook. Myspace was purchased by musician Justin Timberlake in 2011 for $35 million, but it failed to regain popularity.

If Google seems to be missing in this history it is because its attempts to enter social (Orkut and Google+) both failed. Google+ ended in 2018 with the final nail in its coffine being a data security breach that compromised the private information of nearly 500,000 Google+ users.

REFERENCES

online.maryville.edu/blog/evolution-social-media/ 

digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-social-networking/

Infographic via socialmediatoday.com

Eight years ago, I was posting here about Google+ (or Google Plus) which was an attempt by the search giant to compete with other social media sites (especially Facebook) for the social audience.

Now, they are deprecating Google+ (the tech term for turning off, closing, giving up on a service). Google has not succeeded at social.

My theory back in 20111 was that it might be because they weren't able to explain in a simple, clear way what their social services offered or how they were different from others like Facebook.

Do you even remember their earlier services Wave and Buzz and Orkut?

It is 2019 and the Google+ API deprecation which happens this month also affects Blogger’s Google+ integration for blogs like this one. The impact is not major but it does have effects when you kill off an integrated service.

• Support for the “+1 Button”, “Google+ Followers” and “Google+ Badge” widgets on blogs will no longer be available.
• The +1/G+ buttons and Google+ share links below blog posts and in the navigation bar will be removed. That will have some effect on the number of people who share or "Like" your posts.
• Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. That seems minor BUT it also means that the comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog. 

You won't be logging into Orkut any more - if you ever did log in. Do you know about Orkut? Maybe this post about its demise is also your introduction to Google’s first foray into social networking.

Started in 2004, Orkut saw impressive early growth and has been popular in some countries, but never caught on in English-speaking countries. It didn't help that 2004 was also the year that Facebook started in 2004.

Orkut by 2008 was the top social media site in Brazil and India. Eventually, Facebook overtook Orkut even in Brazil and India. In India, Facebook surpassed Orkut in terms of total registered users in 2010. In Brazil, the same happened in 2012. I have written about Orkut a few times and had created an account to see what it was all about, but never really found it compelling.

Meanwhile, Google launched its current attempt at a social network, Google+, in 2011. Plus has been more successful in the U.S. but is still struggling and user numbers still lag way behind those of Facebook.

Google announced it would shut down Orkut (as it has done with a good number of other services like Buzz and Wave) on September 30, 2014 and is no longer accepting new users. You can export your profile data, posts and photos using a service called Google Takeout that will be available until September 2016.

I stumbled upon a Google site to promote computational thinking in K-12 classrooms.  http://www.google.com/edu/computational-thinking/

Computational thinking (which they abbreviate as CT, but I think of CT as critical thinking) involves a set of problem-solving skills and techniques that software engineers use. It makes sense from a Google perspective to approach things like an engineer, but I am not so sure that all things in education need to be approached that way. I always thought that Google's problem with doing social (see Orkut, Wave, Plus) was that it was designed by engineers rather than a mix of people with the emphasis on non-engineers.

Nevertheless, here are a few examples they give of techniques that their engineers use to write programs.

Decomposition: When we taste an unfamiliar dish and identify several ingredients based on the flavor, we are decomposing that dish into its individual ingredients.

Pattern Recognition: People look for patterns in stock prices to decide when to buy and sell.

Pattern Generalization and Abstraction: A daily planner uses abstraction to represent a week in terms of days and hours, helping us to organize our time.

Algorithm Design: When a chef writes a recipe for a dish, she is creating an algorithm that others can follow to replicate the dish.
That last item, Algorithm Design, is something we hear about frequently these days even though most of us have no idea what that measn other than "it has something to do wih math."  They define it as the ability to develop a step-by-step strategy for solving a problem. Algorithm design seems to include the other techniques: look at the decomposition of a problem and the identification of patterns that help to solve the problem. In computer science as well as in mathematics, algorithms are often written abstractly, utilizing variables in place of specific numbers. Look at the examples they provide:
- When a chef writes a recipe for a dish, she is creating an algorithm that others can follow to replicate the dish.
- When a coach creates a play in football, he is designing a set of algorithms for his players to follow during the game.
- In mathematics, when we calculate the percent change between two numbers, we follow an algorithm along the lines of:

If the original number is greater than the new number, use the following equation to calculate the percent change: percent decrease = 100*(original - new)/original.
If the new number is greater than the original number, use the following equation to calculate the percent change: percent increase = 100*(new - original)/original.
If neither is true, then the original and new numbers must equal each other and there is no percent change.

They lose me when they say that you can take it "a step further" and implement this algorithm in Python so that a computer calculates this for us:


original = float(input('Enter the original number: '))
new = float(input('Enter the new number: '))
if original > new:
percent_decrease = 100 (original - new) / original
print 'Percent decrease:', percent_decrease, '%'
elif new > original:
percent_increase = 100 (new - original) / original
print 'Percent increase:', percent_increase, '%'
else:
print 'There is no percent change.'

Of course, the "step further" is the key for an educator. Google says in its professional development section that this is intended for math teachers and on the web resources page it is all math, science and computer science. What I would be interested in seeing are some applications in other areas.

The one site I could find was the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers which is a research project that introduces students to CT via the creation of online magazines. The computational thinking is via digital media, interactive graphics, animation, video and database design in a collaborative setting. It is designed to foster computational and writing skills and they also get to to share their online magazine with family, friends and teachers. This research project is led by three computer science and journalism faculty and a gender-equity specialist at The College of New Jersey.