Sixdegrees Case Study

1477 Words3 Pages

Overview
Ever since the development of the World Wide Web in 1990, millions of online websites have been created for consumer use. When the Internet was first created, very few individuals had access to computers. As the cost of computers decreased to a price that more families could afford, many individuals bought computers for their households. In the late 1990s, the very first social networking sites were created; THEGLOBE.com and AOL instant messenger. After those social networking sites were developed, a plethora of online websites were created to fulfill the desires of online users. In 2003, a newly developed social networking website known as MySpace.com was created to connect musicians with their fans. Eventually MySpace.com became …show more content…

Before the first major social networking site SixDegrees.com was released in 1997, very few sites were established solely for the purpose of social connection. SixDegrees.com was a pioneering website for the future development of social networking websites because this website was the first to allow users to create profiles and display their online friends on their profile (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Even though SixDegrees.com gained the support from millions of online users, the company eventually closed in 2000 because it failed to become a prosperous and stable business (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). After the closure of SixDegrees.com, a number of social networking sites were developed to reach a broad spectrum of online users. Online dating sites, business networking sites, educational networking sites, and social networking sites increased in popularity and demand because more people were gaining access to the …show more content…

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Myspace all rely on Linux software for their operating system (Vaughan-Nichols, 2010). Each social networking website has their own unique combination of open-source software and web servers. The social networking website Facebook relies on over 30,000 web servers to run the website and its applications efficiently. A typical web server that operates a social network tends to have 256GBs to 512GBs of RAM and are arranged in clusters, usually containing thousands of web servers (Vaughan-Nichols, 2010). Each social networking website has their own unique code, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stacks; which are the different forms of software and server applications the website is built upon (Vaughan-Nichols, 2010). While the exact LAMP of the social networking site is kept a secret, many social networking companies allow other developers to have access to their application programming interfaces so that they can create applications that will run properly on their network. The technologies behind social networking sites are constantly evolving due to the growing amount of online

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