2000 to 2009: The Rise of Social Networks and Economic Crises - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 264

Chapter 9. 2000 to 2009: The Rise of Social
Networks and Economic Crises
From 2000 to 2009, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter would enroll
most of the planet's population to create the largest human online networks in his-
tory. By the end of this decade, many people would have more virtual friends on
social networks than real friends in their daily lives. They would also spend more
time communicating with virtual friends via social networks and smartphone tex-
ting than in actual face-to-face or even phone conversations. This was also a major
decade for computer games with the emergence of more than 50 game companies.
One interesting new form of research was created in this decade. The advent
of the Wikipedia encyclopedia demonstrated the value of crowdsourcing, or hav-
ing thousands of minds address common topics. To my surprise and perhaps to the
surprise of readers, Wikipedia has become the largest and most widely used en-
cyclopedia in history.
Wikipedia has more than 25 million articles written by 39 million contributors.
No other “book” in history has had so many coauthors. It is used by more than 80
million people each month in the United States alone.
Two major economic crises disturbed the growth of technology companies in
this decade. The first was the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, which sent
many startup companies into bankruptcy and essentially stopped the flow of soft-
ware venture capital for a few years.
The second was the Great Recession of 2008, which saw the bursting of the
housing bubble and the need for government bailouts of numerous banks. This
was a major setback for many companies, and software personnel were laid off
in a number of industries, which is unusual because software personnel had been
growing steadily for four decades.
In spite of the dot-com bubble bursting and the Great Recession, software star-
tups continued at a surprisingly fast pace through both crises. But instead of wildly
speculative internet companies, many of these startups had serious business plans
and were aiming at unexploited niche markets. Two examples are Zillow, which
provides national real estate data, and PerfectMatch, which used computer models
to create a web-based dating service.