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The beginning of what is known as the “ Web 2.0 era ” drastically changed the way we communicate through the Internet. Now the information is not only read by the masses, but is also written by the masses .

What are social networks

It is difficult to find a consensual definition of the term “ social networks ”, but one of the best (and also most accepted) was formulated by Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein . According to them, those also known as social media are "a group of applications available on the Internet, built and technologically and ideologically based on Web 2.0 that allow the creation and exchange of user- generated content ".
This is how this post written by Rafa began in 2016. In “only” two years, a lot has changed, but what a LOT, things ...
But let's start with something that hasn't changed. How it all started:

The (pre) History of social networks

How did this whole thing start to take shape? Does all this have an explanation? Let's go by parts. To complement the previous serious definition, there is the popularly known "Theory of the six degrees of separation"; a hypothesis that tries to demonstrate that any inhabitant of our planet is connected to any other person on the globe through a chain of acquaintances of no more than five intermediaries, that is, only with six links. Chinese tale? No.
At the end of 2011 and after investigating the friendship relationships of more than 721 million Facebook users , the University of Milan published a study in which it tried to demonstrate the veracity of this theory. The results of the study showed that, surprisingly, the "Theory of the six degrees of separation" actually exaggerates the number of links between users: 99.6% of the user pairs analyzed are connected by 5 degrees and 92% It does so only through 4 degrees, as explained by Facebook on its blog, where they analyzed the results of the analysis .
But let's go back to the beginnings of this type of service, to the dinosaurs. Although the creation date of Classmates.com , one of the first social networks known as such, dates back to 1995, the golden age of social networks did not begin until 2003, the launch date of the MySpace social network , and also from the professional networks LinkedIn and Xing . Yes, this is more than 10 years ago.
It was in 1997 when SixDegrees.com appeared as the “first recognized social network”, offering its users the possibility of creating their own profiles and friend lists . Seven years later, in 2004, Google launched into the social media pool and launched Orkut , a network that was only very successful in the Brazilian market. 2004 was also the year of creation of Facebook , which was exclusively launched for students at the American University of Harvard . Two years later, in 2006, Twitter arrived and Facebook finally opened its doors to all users eager to try their social network.