Fast Growth of Social Networks

Believe it or not, social networks are changing our life. Not only the way how people surf the Internet, but also in the daily life. With smartphones and other mobile devices, people can update their Facebook statuses or send tweets at anytime and anywhere, shopping, traveling, having dinner... anything and any moment can be shared with the whole world and this is exactly what we do every day.

Thanks to David Fincher's movie "The Social Network" in 2010, now people are not only using social networking services but also talking about "social network" and Mark Zuckerberg's success story. From Harvard dormitory to the IPO launch at Nasdaq, a college student becomes a billionaire in just a few years. Facebook is amazing not just because it changes our daily life but also becuase it grows really fast, and this is not a single case.

Let's see the couterpart of Facebook in mainland China. I still remember it was in 2006, one of my high school classmates told me to join a website called Xiaonei (校内网, literally "on-campus network"). I remember this because the signing up process was rather complicated: Xiaonei was once a closed network which is only open for some selected universities in mainland China, they even checked users' IP addresses to ensure they are on campus while signing up. Apparently, at that time CUHK was not on the white list. So to get in to the network, I had to ask a friend at Tsinghua University to sign up for me. Anyway, I finally had an Xiaonei account and got in to the network. "It's quite interesting", this was my comment on Xiaonei when I first saw it. I think most people were not aware of the power of social networking at that time.

Today, 2012, just a couple years later from the launch of xiaonei.com. Xiaonei had it name changed to Renren (人人网, literally "everyone's network"). The closed network for college students has became an open social network for everyone, with over 30 million active monthly users and Alexa rank top 150. At the meantime, many other websites have successfully added their social networking features and lots of new social networking websites have been created. According to the network traffic chart on the course slides, only two sites are not social networking sites among the top 40 most visited websites on the world. Social networking is already part of our daily life now.

Social Networking is Different

Why social networks are growing so fast? Some characteristics of social netwokring we learnt from class may help on this question. Social networking has "a focus on building social relationships among people", it "builds online communities" and it has "interactive communication among participants", all of these indicate that social networking is quite different from other online services. When people are connected with each other in a social network, the size of the network scales exponentially. When the network scales up, the amount of information people get from the network also becomes huge and this has big impact on our daily life.

The Technologies Behind

According to the characteristics of social networks, they seem supposed to grow very fast. However, Facebook's success story happended in recent years, not 1990s the dot-com era. If we look at the technologies which are backing up the social networks, we may find one of the reasons: the technologies we have today make the social networks to grow so fast and make all of this ever possible to happen. For example, the mobile technologies, the smartphones and tablets with high speed cellular netwokring, 3G or even 4G LTE. People can access social network from anywhere and at anytime. If we don't have these mobile devices, social network can be rather limited and it's not going to grow so fast. Another example, cloud computing, this is also a quite hot term nowadays. Social networks grow fast, if we are building a website which grows very fast, we may want to use cloud computing, the reason is simpe: it scales. Starting with just a minimal number of servers on a cloud, thousands of servers can be provisioned and deployed in a few minutes on demand when our website grows. Therefore, cloud computing can meet the need of fast-growing social networking. In fact, many social netwokring sites, such as Twitter, Quora and Instagram(acquired by Facebook), are powered by cloud computing now.