Danah Boyd has begun a series of wiki pages on timelines for major classes of social networking software. Social networks are driving The YASN (for Yet Another Social Network) timelines are important for watching the evolution of this and for knowing how we’ve come to where we are now. She began with one timeline focused solely on social networks a couple of days ago, but it has now expanded to four.
yasns – a timeline of events for social networking sites. This is the most built out of all of them. It currently starts with AOL Buddy Profiles in 1988. She has defined them to be: A “social network site” is a category of websites with profiles, semi-persistent public commentary on the profile, and a traversable publicly articulated social network displayed in relation to the profile.
yasns-blogs – a timeline of events for blogging networks and software
yasns-dating – a timeline of events for social networking sites with a dating focus (this timeline is the least developed)
social-software – a timeline of events for social software
It’s amazing how quickly dates and milestones are forgotten; if you know some contribute.
For a bonus, undirectly-related timeline take a look at the MS-Google-Yahoo! acquisition timeline . If you know of any other relevant timelines or timeline projects add them to the comments; I’ll send the submitter of the best one a book from the O’Reilly bookstore. PS – The new historical maps in Google Earth don’t count.