Social Networks Before Smart Phones Part II

The second part of our exploration of online social networks before smart phones, with a special focus on the early 2000s and Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, early Facebook, and Google+.

Taryn Ward  Hi, I'm Taryn Ward.

Steven Jones  and I'm Steven Jones.

Taryn Ward  And this is Breaking the Feed, Social Media: Beyond the Headlines. This is the second episode of a two-part series exploring online social networks before smartphones. So if you missed the first episode and are interested in social networking in the 90s, it's worth checking out before you continue.

Steven Jones  And with that, we'll get back to our question and dive straight in. Why did social networking start online in the first place? In other words, what need did it serve? Or what need was it designed to serve?

Taryn Ward  It's fair to say that although the answer was straightforward in the beginning, online, social networking started because people were desperate to connect the shape of that need and how it was addressed, changed right along with, and in response to societal and technological developments. The early 2000s weren't so long ago, although I still tend to think of them as 10 years ago, rather than 23. Still, it's worth setting the scene. Steve, if you can remember back to 2000, 23 whole years ago, what was the mood in the UK? 

Steven Jones  Okay, that's a great question. And I was really only in the UK at the very beginning of the 2000. So for the Millennium year, and 2001. I think this was this was a cool Britannia started kickoff, we had built at numerous expense, a Millennium Dome, the total occupancy of which far exceeded the occupancy limits on any of the attractions inside causing a great deal of consternation for any of us for children were to visit. And we had survived Y2K without any disasters. Thanks, I think largely to the work of a lot of people who made sure that were any, whilst it cost a lot of money. And a lot of people worried about it. It wasn't all bad. My friend, Matt got a job with British Gas on their Y2K team, and managed to work with them for the next 20 years or so. So, you know, that worked out for him. And that was the classic example of us spending money on something which didn't happen. And everybody afterwards saying, Well, why did we spend all of that money? Well, did aeroplanes fall out of the skies? 

The answer for that, I guess. It was pretty hopeful, Blair had been lifted. So the UK was cool. There have been a big change in, in the way that what the government was doing or released in the way presented itself was possibly not in policies, but then 2001 happened. And, you know, 9/11, put the kibosh on all of that potential optimism pretty pretty hard. I remember I was working at Porton Down in the UK, the Ministry of Defence at the time, and we'd been in a meeting with American colleagues discussing, you know, joint research projects. And we came out of the meeting and one of our technical staff was, was leaving work for the day. And he shouted over that somebody had driven a plane into the in one of one of the Twin Towers in New York, and like probably everybody else who heard that news for the first time that day didn't really, it didn't really compute, but I can still picture that image in my head really clearly, it is one of those things, I guess, like where you were when Kennedy was shot, if you realise you're never gonna forget it. And that was definitely one of those things. And we went back to the to the office, went home. And then I spent the rest of the evening watching that this devastating TV coverage of of the subsequent second attack, and then the collapse the buildings and the aftermath. And that really changed everything. And I think there was real concern that in the UK for a brief period of time that once those weapons once those planes were called weapons of mass destruction, everybody knew what the American response military response to weapons of mass destruction use was. And he was a little bit concerned that missiles would fly in probably inappropriate directions. And I think initially, we were quite happy that Tony Blair seemed to be a bit of a restriction on the excesses of what we expected George Bush to do. 

But back to connecting people, we were suddenly hosts to a bunch of Americans who could not get home because no planes were flying in or to the United States. And that lasted for days, right. And so suddenly, and with the poor communication capabilities that we had, like, security, Internet Security was a big concern. At this time, we had one externally connected computer on our floor of possibly 50 or 60 people. And we didn't have internal Ministry of Defence or DSTL, that email addresses we were using Hotmail addresses at this point to connect to the outside and all of our American colleagues had to sort of queue up and use this this computer because, of course, cell phones and, and telephone networks in the US were absolutely chock a block because of people trying to call in and connect with loved ones that probably drove it to some extent that experience probably drove for anybody who was involved in a desire to build better communication networks, because actually, in crises, people really need to communicate and you see that now if anything, if ever anything happens, you know, the first thing you do now is check in on Facebook or let people know that you're okay. That wasn't an option back then. was really sending emails and then desperately waiting for the responses. And not in real time because you had to get off the computer so somebody else could use their email to email their family and in the US. So yeah, that that was the start of the, of the 2000s. For me, and then we moved to Canada.

Taryn Ward  I think it's really helpful for you to draw that line between 2000. We survived Y2K. Yay, to 9/11. I think, you know, in very close proximity, we had these two events happen that we all felt at the time, we would always remember where we were when these things happened. Y2K the year 2000, which for me was a big deal, because I was allowed to go to a party that went beyond midnight, I was young enough that that was still actually quite a big deal. And I remember where I was, and who I was with and what we were doing and feeling like I'm becoming an adult, just like we're we're treading into 2000. And it was his very big deal. And when the world didn't fall apart after that, I think we did have some of this optimism from the 90s. Sort of, you know, we're all clinging on to that. And I think when 911 happened, it really did change things in a way that it's hard to explain or describe. Again, I was still I was still a young person, really when this happened. And it changed everything. I think all the optimism, everything that we felt was suddenly in question. And everything felt very precarious. And what what was it going to mean? So the contrast was huge in a short period of time. Today, we're going to be talking about from 2000 to 2008. There's sort of a terrible sandwich situation here between 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008. And so really, when we talk about this period, we're talking about what happened in between. So, to go back, early 2000s, were still largely dial up days, we had more computers, cell phones were around, not everybody had them, but they weren't, they weren't. It wasn't unusual to have one in the same way it was even five years before. We're talking now, just for people who don't know about flip phones and keyboard phones, not smartphones, there were no iPhones, there is nothing even approaching an iPhone. And even if you had an iPhone, there was no network to support it on your phone. So you wouldn't have anything to do with it. And still, there was no widespread, reliable internet, the way we think of it today.

Steven Jones  Yeah, that's right. I mean, if you think about it, like 1999, I think the matrix came out. And in that the machines had decided that that was the peak of human civilization. Right? That was it. And you had Neo on his, you know, Command Prompt computer at night hacking into things. That was it. And we had this vision, the rest of the movies were this vision of what AI and what computers could eventually do for us and these simulated realities, and whatever. But, but the reality was using these, you know, PCs, in cube farms, and, you know, none of that was graphical or in any way interesting to look at, you know, the contrast between the computer and then the CGI that they use to make the world work in that movie was really interesting. And I remember talking about the phones that they had these banana phones, the ones who just like, slide down. And when that phone was released in the UK, it didn't have a spring-loaded mechanism. And people complained, and they had to put it in, which actually made the phone less reliable, because it was it was another component to break. But it was that was that was that was a feat, you know, and it was the most boring phone you could possibly imagine other than it would was in the film The Matrix because there was no screen. And you could even remember texting people on those things. You had to press three times in order to get to the third letter in some numbers had four letters on them, and it was even more annoying. And then how very rudimentary predictive text system in communicating on those devices was miserable. It's no wonder we called people instead of texting them. 

Taryn Ward  Yeah, and early on, that was really all you could do. I mean, for me, for years, the first years of having a cell phone was basically for emergencies only. You know, I grew up in Wisconsin, where it was very, very icy and cold in the winter. So really, the purpose of me having a cell phone was if I got into a car accident call for help. And that was really it. So it's really, really come a long way. 

Steven Jones  Yeah, I mean, we got our first my wife and I got our first cell phones, probably 1998/99. And the only, like, there were probably three people We called each other, and a friend each that was about it. That was the limit of cell phone penetration. They were still pretty expensive. So yeah, it's really interesting. And when we got to Canada, we brought our phones from the UK, but the network here wasn't as advanced as the UK one. And so they wouldn't connect. And so we didn't actually have cell phones for a while in Canada because we thought we didn't see how ridiculous is that?

Taryn Ward  It's hard to imagine. It's really hard to imagine. It is right. And yet during this period, we still see a lot of growth and online social networks.

Steven Jones  Friendster came out in 2002, with a simple concept to six degrees. But dubbed circle of friends, again, this circle of friends idea, it focused on the common bones of discovery, maintenance, and the similar features to some online dating sites. And within a year, there were 3 million registered users, which when you consider the pool of potential people to join, it was actually really good. And adding that phrase in there, like maintenance of friendships is was one of the things that it was really important, right? It made it easy and quick to just, you know, have these easy, soft touch points with friends. 

Taryn Ward  Yeah, and I think other, other networks would pick up on that later on. I learned recently that actually it was designed to compete with match.com. The idea was that friends of friends would make better romantic partners than perfect strangers. And so that was really one of the driving ideas behind it. 

Steven Jones  Isn't that fascinating? And I mean, I was reading recently, statistics for dating sites online, and they're like, they're really not very successful. And maybe there is, but I mean, I guess it depends on what sort of relationship you want some successful for some things, but like long-term partnerships, it turns out not so much. And why not? Whatever, it's quite good idea, right? That friends of your friends of people, you're likely to have something in common with? I didn't know that. That's absolutely amazing.

Taryn Ward  Yeah, it's, it's really interesting, right. And it makes a lot of sense. And I think we've seen various iterations on this idea since then, unfortunately, one of the problems they had is they moved very quickly from sort of inorganic growth model to rapid growth, thanks to some unexpected, I think, unexpected media coverage. So it really upset the community balance is something that had been really about friends of friends and sort of growing that way, all of a sudden, there were all these new people on the network. And there are some technological challenges with that. But it also really shifted the community away from being a place for people you knew, to being a place where there were, there were lots of strangers. And in fact, in 2003, so, so not long after that, we saw LinkedIn for the first time. For those of you who don't know, LinkedIn is actually not this new phenomenon that happened a few years ago, I think it's more popular than ever. And somehow, it's become a cool thing to do. But back in 2003, it was not, it was a networking resource for business people. And the idea right from the beginning was about connecting professionals in particular, and making it about only connecting with people, you were really you had some sort of trusting relationship, and so endorsements for skills and things like that. So in a way, if you think about what happened with Friendster in where things went wrong, LinkedIn, in a lot of ways was designed to address that.

Steven Jones  Yeah. I mean, I didn't get a LinkedIn account in 2003, because I was not that sort of connected. But I got one pretty soon afterwards. And at that time, I was travelling a lot on for work, and meeting a lot of people from the UK in the US, largely in government. And LinkedIn was sort of a bit of a serious network that, you know, you met people at these meetings, you had something in common or a common problem that you wanted to work on. And, you know, you would sort of connect with them online, it was definitely nothing like it is today. But it was sort of like serve that very sort of specific purpose. And you know, you were you were only yeah absolutely you were only connected with people that you had professional connection with. And I guess at that time, we certainly didn't view it as a way to get employed, which is definitely what it's become now to search for and to find jobs. Yeah, it was, it was quite a new and different sort of thing. Definitely not in any way cool.

Taryn Ward  That was, you know, partially by design so so one thing that I think is really fascinating is the founders of LinkedIn, Friendster and some of the other networks popular than like rise and tribe were personally and professionally connected. So they were never designed to compete directly with each other they all sort of viewed this as a way that they could all coexist and support each other. And the idea was I think we would all be online connecting in this these various ways in using different networks to connect for different reasons or different seasons and in different circumstances.

Steven Jones  Yeah, it was really interesting idea and I mean, I think with the rise of multiple networks now Nish ones maybe we're gonna see that sort of develop organically over over time that be really interesting to work on. See what what happens and to talk about it on the show.

Taryn Ward  Can I just interrupt to say one thing? I think it would be great to see a move back towards this and away from cage matches.

Steven Jones  Who would win? Who's your money on if that were ever to happen, Taryn?
Taryn Ward  My money is on it never happening.

Steven Jones  Oh, would that is the good money. It's interesting. That's the state of affairs for two of the richest men in the world. We solve our disputes disputes by cage fighting, it tells you a lot about the networks they manage, doesn't it? You should not expect better.

Taryn Ward  It's true and how far we've come from this core idea of more connection and connecting with each other. When even the founders, the whole idea was connecting with each other, personally and professionally, and now we're sort of in this strange place where I don't even know what to call it other than a cage match?

Steven Jones  I mean, I'm a little bit sorry, to be honest. I mean, whilst I deplore the behaviour, I'm a little bit sorry, we're not going to see it. Because, again, a bit like JFK and 9/11, you would never forget where you were, and what you were doing. He saw Elon fight Mark Zuckerberg in a cage.

Taryn Ward  So who do you think would win?

Steven Jones  I mean, if the cage collapsed on them, everyone, but I mean, my money's on my money's on Mark, because he seems to be pretty confident. I mean, he, he seems, he seems to be you know, the one who's keener for this to happen. And Elon is perhaps not in as good a shape as he needs to be to take on Mark who's who's you know, younger and can rely on his android skeleton to protect him from on.

Taryn Ward  Do you think he's paying Elon Musk to make him look competent? Because some of this I don't think Mark Zuckerberg has ever been as well-liked. Is he is right now watching this whole thing play out. He looks like the grown-up. 

Steven Jones  Well, I mean, someone needs to pay ELan, because he's lost an awful lot of money buying Twitter and turning it into X.

Taryn Ward  Yeah, I think he's probably still in pretty good shape. I wouldn't mind exchanging bank accounts.

Steven Jones  Yeah, well, let's be honest. We would be happy with the money he's lost. So let alone the money. He still has. It's true. Back to social networks of the early 2000s. And, and something which is, unlike Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk was at the time, cool, which was MySpace, which came out in 2003. And was really focused on the young adult demographic, which at this time, I have to say was probably not me, I think I was probably about 35 At this point, and I was not targeted and marketed to me. It was designed to compete with Friendster. And to attract people who left Friendster it was really popular with teens who would never use Friendster and MySpace actually changed their policy right to allow minors to to join between 2005 and 2009. Remarkably, it was the largest network in the world. Taryn, you were a young adult at the time, were you a MySpace fan?

Taryn Ward  I was not right away in 2003. But definitely, when it was at its peak between 2005 and 2009, it was great for what it was, you could search for people, customise, your profile, it was almost like having your own personal website, your own little corner of the web that was was just for you. You could choose colours, designs, fonts, and music. You didn't have to be super creative to make something that that felt creative. And it felt like you were sharing a little bit of who you were, and how you saw the world with with everyone. The consequence of that, of course, is that each profile could be really unique, not just in colour in design, but even the outlay of the page. So there was a real lack of uniformity, advantages and disadvantages to that. But you couldn't very easily click from one page to another and find exactly the same information in the same spot.

Steven Jones  That's interesting. When we've been talking to people about Bright, one of the things that a lot of people have asked for, interestingly enough, was, was the ability to customise the look of their profile page and how they present themselves to the world. But do you think that that sort of Myspace, sort of like fluidity and how you could present that that page, impacted their branding and success long term are impacted that people's ability to navigate the those pages and was detrimental? Or? I mean, what was the balance? I said, I never really used this this network?

Taryn Ward  I think that's a great question. I don't know exactly. But I think Facebook coming out a year later. So Facebook launched sort of privately in 2004. So it launched his a Harvard only network and remained specifically limited to campuses. And then I think high school students came next. So it wasn't until 2006, that it was available to everyone. And I think there was a really clear contrast here. So Facebook was very uniform, it was very simple. In the early days, you didn't really have to do anything or put anything into it to create a profile. You, you just, you could upload a photo or not for a long time. I had no photo. I took a lot of flack for that. But the point was, you didn't have to show anything about yourself at all. You could just have your name or you could have a very simple quote. Whereas my space I think sort of the point of it was to give a little bit more of yourself and I think probably the results speak for themselves, at least in the time period we're talking about.

Steven Jones  Yeah, that's right. It's it's interesting, isn't it? But it's also interesting that people still some people still hanker after being able to customise their the way they, they're presented on online. It's going to be an interesting balance for us to try and thread that needle.

Taryn Ward  Yeah, absolutely. And I think the pendulum does swing in some of these cases. So it may just be that it's time, you know, people people want this back while disability back and they're willing to put in that little bit of extra effort. If they can control what is presented in the format, I think we'll have to see, from a technology standpoint, it's a little bit more complicated to do that from an app than it is on a web page. It's not insurmountable. But I think, just as a reminder, in 2003, and 2004 people we're not using MySpace or Facebook on a phone. It wasn't an app, it was largely web-based.

Steven Jones  Yeah, of course. And the idea of people using social media on the computer now is a bit alien to well, anybody under the age of 35? Probably.

Taryn Ward  Yeah, exactly. So speaking of Facebook, 2004 launch, we've covered that, currently, the estimate is 1.3 billion active users, which is really incredible. Even if you allow for the fact that some of these accounts are probably not truly separate accounts, they may not belong to real people, it's still a staggering number.

Steven Jones  It is, we all know, the story of Facebook. But it's worth a quick reminder, if you didn't watch the social network, and you haven't watched any of the documentaries on how it was founded. But Facebook started as a way to rank how attractive young women at Harvard were, as if frat boys in the early 2000s, needed any other ways to objectify women, we think about the why. And we can probably imagine the link between this and wanting to connect with people. But there's also a big disconnect between that purpose and the purpose of these other early online social networks. You know, I think that's true from the things you said about how LinkedIn started, and the willingness of these other networks to work together and to connect people from different spheres of their lives. That's a big, there's a big gulf between those lofty goals, and wanting a way to rate how cute the girls at Harvard are, which is, let's face it, not a winning strategy today that got "Me Too" written all over it.

Taryn Ward  As you were talking about this, it struck me that today we talk about disruption, as a great thing. We really that that word gets thrown around and to be disruptors, this, this great badge of honour. But actually, it's it doesn't always shake out quite that way. It's not always necessarily the case, that the person doing the disrupting, is doing it for the best reasons. And sometimes the outcome isn't necessarily what we would want. And this whole move fast and break things ethos that has really sort of become part of how we see the world, I think, really started with this launch in 2004.

Steven Jones  Yeah, I mean, it turns out that some of the things that you break are, are the mental health of teenagers and the fabric of society, if you follow that to its natural conclusion. And those are not things that we wanted broken. We're gonna get into this a lot more during the series of podcasts. But I mean, it is a sobering thought that the biggest social network in the world, both in terms of the money that it makes, and the number of members that it has whichever way you count them, started as a way for boys to objectify women. I've made it we really didn't need another way to do that. And these people are still and will, for the foreseeable future, continue to run that network and make decisions based on their worldview, which is obviously quite different from yours and mine.

Taryn Ward  Yeah, unfortunately, I think that's true.

Steven Jones  Google, who, perhaps now aren't really thought of as being in the social game released Google Plus in 2007, which again, I was not cool enough to use. And that had features like Hangouts for live video chats off the back of success, of G chat, which also I was not cool enough to use. And that allowed users to have to live chats within their email ecosystem. Did you use this Taryn?

Taryn Ward  They did. I was one of the cool kids for once. I actually started using Gmail before this. I can't remember if 2007 you still needed an invite. But when I started using Gmail, you had to be invited by somebody who was already using it, which felt very special and cool. So you really did feel like you were you know, you are part of something. But I use GChat a lot, in fact, a lot more than I should have when I was in law school. It's very easy to sort of keep it open. over emails and to have these sort of side conversations, always about torts and civil procedure, of course. But it was a way of sort of live chatting when you were somewhere where you couldn't live chat, partially because I think many of us had become addicted to AOL Instant Messenger and or AIM and similar technology. So we wanted to be connected more and more often.

Steven Jones  Yeah, and let's remember that the first iPhone, which let's face it, in terms of spec was a bit rubbish was released in 2007. And there's no way that you could have used it to, to do these sort of things. So we really, were still doing this on our laptops. And I'm not sure that being one of the cool kids and discussing torts are mutually compatible. I'm just gonna say that, but the rest of us turn. 

Taryn Ward  Well, a little secret between you and me. We weren't just discussing torts. As much as if my parents are listening to this. We absolutely were. I was, I was making good use of my time in law school. But but there are other conversations happening as I'm sure you can imagine.

Steven Jones  Yes, I'm glad to hear it, because that troubled me for a second there. So a quick recap, web-based social networking was different in a few ways. They were designed to provide a comprehensive social networking experience, possibly because some of the design limitations of the technology of the time, some people use real names. Some people use pseudonyms, but, but no one was constantly sharing photos or videos of the personal lives, it wasn't convenient, you didn't have the the upload and download speed for that type of interaction. There wasn't the storage. And you know, we didn't have phones, you were using your laptop, you didn't have a camera, if you wanted to upload something, you had to take a picture with a camera connected to your computer, upload it track, the like it was just work, right, and no one wants work. So your webcam, in very grainy 640 pixel pictures, were probably the the limit of how we were communicating people's people with video. And only if you were fortunate to have a good connection,

Taryn Ward  Right? The technology meant you had to be on your computer to use any of these systems. So although doing scrolling was an option, in theory, it was a lot less practical, not just because of content limitations, but because you would have to do it and mostly behind the desk. We just weren't online constantly, and there was no expectation that we would be. However, the stage was set through all these things for social media in the age of smartphones. Just in time for Apple's launch in 2007 of the iPhone, which was just around the corner. We sort of take this through 2008. Because although the iPhone was released in 2007, as you rightly point out, Steve, not many people had it. And even those who did, that functionality was so limited it is it was really nothing like the iPhone that I have sitting on my desk right now. 

So next time we'll look at how the release of the iPhone and the more widespread use of smartphones generally change social media, and also consider how the widespread use of social media may have influenced the use and development of smartphones. Then we'll discuss the influence TikTok in particular has had on social media smartphone use and more broadly in our society. In the meantime, we'll post a transcript of this episode with references on our website. You can find this and more information about us at TheBrigitApp.com. 

And if you'd like to take a deeper dive into the earliest online social networks, check out our episode on early internet socials.

Steven Jones  Until next time, I'm Steven Jones.

Taryn Ward  And I'm Taryn Ward.

Steven Jones  Thank you for joining us for Breaking the Feed, Social Media: Beyond the Headlines.