In the early days, there were many interactive support services on the Internet, such as BBS and newsgroups. The service websites of early social networks were all in the form of online communities. Users often communicate through chat rooms. With the emergence of new network communication tools such as blog, users can share their favorite information through their personal homepage on the website. From 2002 to 2004, the three most popular social networking service websites in the world were Friendster, MySpace and Bebo. In 2005, MySpace became the largest social networking service website in the world. It is said that its page traffic surpassed Google and became a famous search engine at that time. In 2006, the third party was allowed to develop the application of Facebook-based website API, which made Facebook the fastest growing website in the world. So many websites began to follow the example of API to develop their own websites.

The development of social service websites has verified the "six-degree separation", that is, "under the background of interpersonal relationships, you can definitely indirectly know any man or woman in the world through no more than six intermediaries". Personal social circles will continue to expand and overlap, eventually forming a huge social network. In this online social network developed by realizing the principle of "friends of friends are friends", Friendster is representative to some extent.

The first commercial profit of social service websites was Yahoo 360 launched in March 2005. In June 2005, News Corporation successfully acquired MySpace. Then, in June, 5438+February, 2005, British ITV purchased Friends and reunited. Since then, social networking service websites in different languages have sprung up all over the world.