Page 297 - Electronic Commerce

Chapter 6

among the authors and readers of the Whole Earth Review. The WELL was home to many
of the researchers who created the Internet and the Web along with a number of noted
writers and artists. In 1999, Salon.com bought the WELL and continues to operate it as a
monthly subscription service.
As the Web emerged in the mid-1990s, its potential for creating new virtual
communities was quickly exploited. In 1995, Beverly Hills Internet opened a virtual
community site that featured two Webcams aimed down Hollywood streets along
with links to entertainment Web sites and free space for member-created Web pages.
272 The Webcams did not attract members, but the offer of free Web space did. As the
site grew, it changed its name to GeoCities and earned revenue by selling advertising
that appeared on members’ Web pages and pop-up pages that opened whenever a
visitor accessed a member’s site. GeoCities grew rapidly and was purchased in 1999
by Yahoo! for $5 billion. Yahoo! also ran advertising on the individual GeoCities
members’ Web sites, but failed to engage the members in a functional virtual
community and eventually closed GeoCities in 2009. During the 1995–2001 time
period, other companies such as Tripod and Theglobe.com operated similar advertising-
supported virtual communities that included free Web pages, chat rooms, and
discussion areas.
These virtual communities evolved into the social networking sites that emerged in
the late 1990s as part of the second wave of electronic commerce, as you will learn in the
next section.

Social Networking Emerges
Virtual communities provided an important service to the small number of people who
regularly used the Internet in its early days. As the Internet and Web grew, many of
these communities found that their original purpose as a place for sharing the new
experiences of online communication began to fade. In the second wave of electronic
commerce, a new phenomenon in online communication began. People who were using
the Internet no longer found a single common bond in the very fact that they were
using the Internet. Instead, they were finding that a variety of common interests—for
example, gardening, specific medical issues, or parenting—created the basis for online
interaction.
For these later Internet communities, the Internet was simply a tool that
enabled communication among virtual community members. This intra-community
interaction among members is now called social networking.Websitesthat
facilitate those interactions are called social networking sites. Most social networking
sites allow individuals who are members of the social network (or virtual community)
to create and publish a profile, create a list of other users with whom they share a
connection (or connections), control that list, and monitor similar lists made by
other users. In this section, you will learn about the evolution of social networking
sites.
One of the first sites, Six Degrees, started in 1997. Six Degrees was based on the
idea that no more than six persons separated anyone in the world from any other

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