Some of the earlier social networking sites are “Six degrees(1997)”, “Friendster(2002)”, “Myspace”. With the exception of Myspace none of the social networking platform have remained relevant till 2011.

In 2005 Myspace was acquired for $580million and by the end of 2006 boasted 56million unique US visitors, representing 36%of all US internet users.

Between 2003 and 2005 many social networking platforms were released by startups and well known companies like Google, Yahoo & MSN.

LinkedIn became the leader in professional networking.

Facebook Launch

In 2004, Facebook was started as a social networking site

It provided exclusivity to students by allowing registrations for email addresses ending in “.edu”. This ensured restricted profile visibility to the university circles encouraging the students to share more data

In 2005 with the addition of photo-sharing features and expansion to high school students allowed 5.5 million users to signup

In 2 years Zuckerberg obtained funding of about $40.7million with valuation upto $500million

In 2006, Facebook opened registration to public allowing everyone to sign-up with new features like messaging groups, events, video sharing and mobile access

By the end of 2007, Facebook has a total of 2.6 million users

Features and updates

Newsfeed: In 2006, Facebook introduced newsfeed which displayed recent activities of Users’ friends. Facebook used an algorithm “edgerank” which optimised the content that appeared.

This received backlash as people saw it as an invasion of privacy which led Facebook to come up with modifications to the algorithm

Timeline: In 2011, Facebook introduced timeline that organised users’ content chronologically over the span of a lifetime

This also received backlash as the timeline was asking for more details and promoted easy stalking

Facebook Ads: In 2007, Facebook ads was announced which allowed businesses to promote themselves, targeting the specific segments based on demographics by paying a standard fee 

Pages: Facebook rolled out Pages in 2007, allowing businesses, artists and public figures to create free, custom pages which can be Liked by users

Mobile: With the increase in mobile usage, Facebook released mobile advertising products in 2012

Targeting: In 2012, Facebook enabled more sophisticated data driven marketing by launching Facebook exchange- a real time bidding platform that enabled Facebook ads to be shown based on online browsing history. In addition to this, Facebook introduced custom audience targeting that enabled business to deliver ads only to existing customers 

Facebook platform: In 2007, Facebook introduced Facebook platform that enabled third party developers to develop applications. As many as 100000 developers were building Facebook applications which increased the number of visits by 225% a month, propelling total users to 100million

Facebook introduced other features like Facebook for websites and applications, Opengraph and Graphsearch to stay relevant

COMPETITORS:

Around 2006, a new social networking service called Twitter was launched that lets users update anything upto 140 characters which can be shared either as public or private

Google responded with its own platform called Orkut with features like friend connect to compete with Facebook for friends which was not as successful.It came up with Google+ that has all the features of Facebook and videochatting & circles as additional features

Snapchat: In 2011,a photo messaging app called picaboo(later renamed as snapchat) was introduced which lets users share photos privately