drieux

In the middle ages, the most people could expect to socialize would be at church, beheadings for Atheism or what chatting they could manage while waiting for your turn at the leeches during the most recent plague. What a dark time it was, because not only were you looking at a lifespan of only about 28 years, but during that short time you'd never be able to let everybody know through a convenient website that you're totally into "Laguna Beach!"

Luckily technology has turned, and what was once a system of sharing research data, historical texts and rare documents is now a pipeline for you to post data about bands you like, movies you enjoy and pictures of yourself blind, stupid drunk on a trip to Cabo. You can also very quickly find police officers posing as magical 14-year-olds who enjoy being told "gonna split ur asshole with cock" and respond like no real 14-year-old ever has in the history of the world: "mmmm sounds hot".

This is the era we live in. But how did we get here? How did the magic of Social Networking come to be?

Step 1. BBS

Finally, a way for antisocial, detail-oriented miscreants to find other antisocial, detail-oriented miscreants! A text-only network that consisted of roughly 843,298 different types of commands that had to be inserted through a DOS interface, BBS created a home for the people who would joylessly sit through "War Games" to call Matthew Broderick a poser or to say things like "you couldn't just use a 16-pin scusi port to interface that machine with a LAN network of Tandy floppy drives. This is stupid."

Step 2. Compuserve/AOL

Nothing livens up a text-only interface like a few pictures to click on in between typing lines of HTML code, and Compuserve was ready to serve people who liked pictures in black-and-white, black-and-grey and, for really modern websites, black-and-grey-and-white! Compuserve even had specialized forums for users to discuss their favorite topics: Star Trek movies, what they'd do to a woman sexually if they ever had the opportunity, the best colors for 20-sided dice and which Dungeons and Dragons was supreme - the original or advanced version. Truly a step in the right direction for social networking, although still dealing with around a 98-percent male user base.

Then came AOL-the internet for people who didn't know anything about the internet! For the low, low price of $19.95 in '93, you could connect with friends and family at the bawdy rate of 14.4! Chocked full of exciting text ads, picture ads and text-and-picture ads, AOL allowed users to set up a profile that other users could click on, go to work, come home, eat dinner, put their kids to bed, go to the gym and then come back to the computer and (hopefully) the profile would be loaded and they could find out what Alice in Chains songs their friends liked best! Unfortunately, AOL was remarkably unfriendly to child molestors, porn enthusiasts and hardcore gay hookup sites - the bloodline of the internet - and AOL came to an untimely end, forcing many people to understand that they could just use a popular web browser to connect to the web.

Step 3: Classmates.com

Remember those people you hated in high school? The ones who called you a faggot because you had read a book once? Hey, wanna connect with them, and ONLY them, through a website? Finally, you can learn what Bobby Higginburger, that pimply kid who spent math classes in the back row drawing pictures of feral vaginas with teeth into his remedial science book, is doing with his life! (answer: jail) Classmates.com was perfect for ensuring that through every personal triumph and professional success, you could remind yourself that somebody, somewhere (probably the local tavern in your home town) thinks you're an uppity homo fuckwad because you never played football or bought them pot at a Pantera concert. And as you got to your 30's you could share the joy as they had a baby. Then another one. Then another one-with a different partner. Then maybe another one. And hey - how about another? Another different partner? Yeah, why not?! Really, it was like you could live high school your entire life, and who wouldn't want that?

Step 4: Friendster

The early 2000's were a tumultuous time. We'd just elected a retarded cowboy to have a four-year pizza party for rich oil barons in the White House, and our karmic revenge was a crew of people armed with plastic swords hijacking our airplanes and crashing them into important buildings. Obviously, this meant our government needed to start spying on Americans, and what better time to start a social networking website! Enter: Friendster! Far more advanced than classmates.com, you could stay connected to people you knew in high school AND college! And in a new, advanced interface, you could also begin stalking people you intended to drunkenly sleep with, and eventually deleting them from your friends list became part of the Shame Ritual: get drunk, hook up, wake up naked in strange bed, dress in dark silence, sneak out, wander home, delete from friends list, hate self.

Friendster also attempted to connect like-minded individuals through a "Circle of Friends." Much like Kevin Bacon is mysteriously linked to Gene Simmons through movies made with Cher, you could discover that both you and your friend Jerry's cousin's coworker's maid's Dominatrix were big fans of "Grease 2," thus allowing you to become best friends through your fondness for people named Zmed.

Step 5: Myspace

If Friendster was missing anything, it was an interface that ensured that 80 percent of your clicking was greeted with messages like:

"An unexpected error has occurred! The problem has been forwarded to our engineers!"

"Oops! Yet another error has occurred! Hey, try clicking it again...oh, huh, another error, huh? Gosh, you'd think we'd have basic things like Bulletins and Mail figured out, wouldn't you?"

"Who are we kidding? This error is totally expected."

"What's that? Oh, another error? Well, fuck you! We're Myspace! We don't have to worry about ANYTHING! We're too big to ever be knocked from the top spot because of things like bad service, horrible glitchiness or rampant spam! In fact, every time you click on 'Edit Profile' from now on, you're going to Tila Tequila's profile, bitch! You'll use us and like it, because what other options do you have, fucktard?"

Alas for poor Myspace, its ease of signing-up was only matched by its ability to make logging in a torturous chore. In order to find out which of your friends had recently gotten drunk you were forced to wade through endless friend requests from Emo bands, ads for Emo concerts and pictures of Emo girls whose profiles detailed which Emo bands they were totally into because they "made their heart cry." Myspace did create a solid blogging feature, allowing a-hole narcissistic nerds to bash away at keyboards relentlessly until their fingertips were worn to the bone, writing thousands of blogs in a matter of years in only the most ridiculous, absurdedly nerdy cases, most of which can be accompanied by rampant weight gain, an overly proud sense of their own thoughts and beliefs and, worst of all, an attempt to perform comedy in front of actual people.

Step 6: Facebook

Begun at Harvard to connect students, as this social network became more popular the creators soon realized that money can be made from one thing in particular: old perverts who really, REALLY want to talk to college girls! Facebook was opened to the public just a few years ago and has since blossomed into a juggernaut for people all over the world who have no desire to insert weird code into their profiles so images of cakes or the members of Good Charlotte can dance up and down and instead everybody'S profile looks uniformly the same, allowing us to believe all people are the mediocre, similar creatures we all really are anyway. Facebook also popularized the enormously fun "applications" feature, allowing friends to bombard you with things like:

"Which Golden Girl Are You? Take This Quiz!"
"Dan wants to add you as 'A Person He's Given A Handjob!' Allow?"
"Alfred Perrywhinkle has invited you to join his group, 'Scientology-It Just Makes Sense.' Sign up now!"

Most of all, Facebook allows people everywhere to cyber-stalk and judge the lives of others, which is what Social Networking is really all about anyway.

Step 7: Twitter

The Social Network for people who you'd like to just shut the hell up. Quickly embraced by aging media whores because it's the only social network they've ever really understood anyway. And somehow, even though all entries are a maximum of 140 characters the Twitter network is somehow overloaded constantly. The magic of the internet continues!