The Boom of Social Sites/The brief years of the new century have seen the vast rise of modern social media.

The Boom of Social Sites

By Focus Editors


The brief years of the new century have seen the vast rise of modern social media. Formerly restricted to college students, the colossus of Facebook hulks today over a diminished Myspace that once was the darling of venture capitalists. Orkut was started by Google with high hopes, but is popular now only in in Brazil and India. The early front-runner Friendster is nearly lost in the pack, although it still has a significant presence in the attention marketplace. QQ has a quite large customer base, but nearly all of them are in China. LinkedIn is quite popular with professionals, but seems unlikely to move beyond that niche. The very early Classmates had many members, but has shrunk considerably and shows no signs of recovering. Habbo has held on to its popularity with teenagers and is a strong competitor. Twitter is a rising concern within a specialty niche that has caught on fire in a texting-crazy world.

There have been many surprises in an increasingly cluttered marketplace as one company or another has surged to the fore. The social media marketplace has become relatively mature in a single decade, with many smaller companies clawing for attention or even for sheer survival.