After seeing in a previous post what social networks are and some of the social reasons behind their success, let us now look at some of the technological reasons for their enormous spread.

3 Technological reasons behind the success of social networks

The needs described above could find at least partial satisfaction also, and above all, thanks to a technological evolution unprecedented in human history, which made the spread of SNs possible through:

  • Appealing and easy-to-use graphical interfaces. This is an extremely broad topic, so I will limit myself to a few points, such as the explosion of Web 2.0. In short, it is a set of interfaces and mechanisms that make the browsing experience highly interactive and personalized. This is made possible through intensive use of technologies and standards such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Beyond aesthetically pleasing elements, they also integrate features such as georeferencing in order to deliver content that is more suitable for the user, assembling it with external and third-party content that may be of interest. These new technologies include asynchronous protocols that reduce the user’s perceived waiting time by loading one web element at a time, instead of forcing the user to wait for the complete loading of all content before seeing anything. They also create the distinctive feeling of “taking part in an experience” rather than simply “consulting content”. Graphical interfaces, which now massively include animations, transitions, and dynamic changes in content appearance, for example through the new CSS3 specifications, further strengthen this experiential dimension.
  • Support for large amounts of data. To schematize it with a pseudo-equation, we could write many users = many data. The paradigm according to which data had to be centralized on a single machine is proving insufficient for SN applications, which have expanded enormously thanks also to distributed databases that support high transaction throughput and replication, even at the expense of real-time consistency, which has not proved essential for many SN applications. These databases are often based on non-relational, or NoSQL, paradigms, such as CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and others3.
  • Increased bandwidth. Another element that promoted the spread of SNs is the increase in communication bandwidth, which enables the transfer of ever larger amounts of data and a high number of transactions per second. In concrete, everyday terms, this allows users to stay continuously connected and to share their lives on SNs through photos, messages, location updates, and so on.

In a few days, we will analyze what the new wealth of the social world is and what opportunities it offers to science. Stay tuned.

For any questions, leave a comment below.

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3 For consistency and non-relational databases, see “CAP theorem” on Wikipedia or in CouchDB: The Definitive Guide.

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