danah boyd and Nicole Ellison's Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship from 2007 covers the first half of them same time period Mark's writing about. what's intereting is that their timeline starts in 1997 with Six Degrees, then LiveJournal, Asian Avenue, Black Planet, LunarStorm, MiGente, Ryze, and Cyworld -- all before Friendster in 2002 and MySpace in 2003.
That's much more useful ... I can't take any of the "historical" reviews that don't bother to mention SixDegrees, CollegeClub and a bit later the CommunityConnect sites.
Both Friendster and Myspace are very close to Asian Ave / CommunityConnect's platform and UI.
Friendster’s computer systems couldn’t keep up with the explosive growth (reportedly due to the complexity of the security model set up to control connections, privacy and authenticity of users) so MySpace was hot on the heels and swept up the market in a very rapid ascent. Friendster was DOA.
Not bad overall, but I think he's wrong about friendster. They did have scaling problems, but what I remember most is Jonathan Abrams actually going to war against his users because he wanted friendster to be a dating service.
And this bit of epic fail:
After a few flashes of what appears to have been a trademark grimace, Abrams took the strongest position of the evening, declaring that Friendster is not a social networking business and observing that "When I started Friendster, I never imagined that it would part of a 'space'".
In fact, Abrams deried the idea that there was any sort of space here at all, perhaps astutely adding that this buzz seemed to him like 'push' or 'web servives' — not just in being areas which ended up overinvested, but in that they were not real 'areas' to begin with, just loosely associated businesses (or pseudo-businesses) grouped around a hot topic. Abrams came away with the nice line "When I hear entrepreneurs and VCs talking about a space, it means there is trouble ahead."
I remember at the time thinking "either the rest of us have succumbed to some sort of groupthink mass delusion and only he can see clearly, or he's an idiot who got lucky by accident and is now making the mistake of the decade."
danah boyd and Nicole Ellison's Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship from 2007 covers the first half of them same time period Mark's writing about. what's intereting is that their timeline starts in 1997 with Six Degrees, then LiveJournal, Asian Avenue, Black Planet, LunarStorm, MiGente, Ryze, and Cyworld -- all before Friendster in 2002 and MySpace in 2003.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html