In 1998, riffraff Cai's novel "the first intimate contact" swept the Internet, about online love. In that year, China's first online dating website, China dating Center online, was born. China's first free dating platform attracted a large number of marriageable users, with 2.8 million registered members in 2005, before it was acquired and renamed Zhenai.

In the following decade, Jiayuan, Baihe, Zhenai and other online love and marriage platforms were set up one after another, forming a serious dating service with the characteristics of the times, which has become the memory of a generation. In 2010, message in a bottle, an anonymous social application based on QQ Mail, launched a new kind of anonymous social networking.

The way "message in a bottle" is played is that users have three opportunities a day to get message in a bottle, which contains all kinds of information, from "Sea". They can also respond to each other and interact with them if they like, meeting the needs of modern people for talking and sense of security. meanwhile,Due to the unknown and uncertainty of the reply, people are full of expectations and romantic psychological cues.. Some people write full of thoughts in message in a bottle, some people use it to ask strangers questions, people gain bosom friends through this app, and some people find love as a result.

Only three days after its launch, the number of users of "message in a bottle" exceeded 1 million, reaching 10 million half a year later. QQ Mail therefore surpassed NetEase, Inc's mailbox to become the first.

"at first, I didn't expect to do a related application in the mailbox in the future. Zhang Xiaolong later recalled that at first, the team was just trying to provide users with something "more interesting". At that time, there was an empty wall in the office of QQ Mail's team in the R & D center of Guangzhou. The employees painted a wide sea and various message in a bottle on the wall for decoration. This became not only the background of the later application of "message in a bottle", but also the embryonic form of creativity.

If the first generation of strangers socializing is just an interesting app and another social choice, then after 2010, smartphones began to become popular in China, coupled with the stimulation of Foursquare of the United States, more than 30 LBS (Location Based Services) companies emerged in China in a year.The time for the birth of App for strangers to make friends can be said to be really ripe.。

Although there were LBS check-in apps such as "street side" at that time, there were no products to apply this technology to the social field. In 2011, when Tang Yan, who was also editor-in-chief of NetEase, Inc, thought that people sharing their geographical location would certainly lead to more social relationships, Momo Inc appeared.

As the country's first social product based on strangers, "Momo Inc" surged to No. 6 on the App Store social free list three weeks after the launch of iOS, and No. 3 in the fourth week. A year later, Momo Inc had more than 10 million users. In the following three years, "Momo Inc" successively obtained financing from Matrix Partners China, BABA, DST, Sequoia Capital and other management, and went public in a short period of three years.

Momo Inc's success has made more and more people see the market potential of social software. during the decade from 2011 to 2021, all kinds of stranger social applications began to emerge like bamboo shoots after a spring rain: exploration, Soul, voice social, game social. During this period, the commercial value of the social market began to highlight.

When the space of commercialization is fully opened and becomes the goal of pursuit, the application of this period is born with a stronger purpose. Lonely people become data assets.

In order to improve the matching efficiency, many App will score each user through the algorithm scoring mechanism. The very popular foreign dating App "Tinder" has used the Elo algorithm to score users'"attractiveness". This algorithm was originally applied to Facebook Inc's predecessor, FaceMash, to score girls' looks: at the beginning, everyone has the same score, and users need to choose a better-looking one between the two randomly obtained pictures. After a period of grading operation, the score of the photo will change.

Tinder ranks users according to "attractiveness". Each right stroke (selected) equals a bonus, otherwise it reduces the score, and those with the same score match each other. In 2019, Tinder abandoned the Elo algorithm to use a more complex and flexible algorithm, its principles and mechanisms have not been disclosed. It is worth noting that the Elo algorithm was originally used to score a variety of competitive behaviors. It can be seen that in this kind of social application, the matching between people is like a competition and game.

The "game" always revolves around "resources", while "resources" need to be paid by someone.

In many dating App, matching payment, chat payment, video payment and other payment functions are very common. "Exploration", which was originally defined as "female-dominated", set a limit on the number of right strokes in a day, while buying members can break the right-stroke limit and "super like" five times a day. You can check "who likes me" and "super exposure" as long as you pay for it-giving priority to more than 10 times the number of people in half an hour. According to public data, most of these payers are male users, which means that even if they are positioned as "female-dominated", male users can still break through the "principles" of the platform to some extent through paying members.

Soul, which does not upload real photos and focuses on internal social networking, has also gradually begun to be commercialized, with voice matching limited to 10 times a day and video matching limited to 30 times a day, and users can enjoy more privileges by recharging Soul coins. Compared with similar products, the commercialization of "Soul" has been relatively restrained.

The early social app seems to be doomed.

Take Momo Inc as an example. At that time, a funny video of a foreigner named Mike Sui playing 12 roles went viral on the Internet. In the video, Momo Inc was called a "artifact of about P" by Mike Sui and recommended it to foreigners who want to meet Chinese girls. Hundreds of thousands of retweets gave Momo Inc a reputation to compete with Wechat overnight, but since then, the negative tag has been firmly affixed to the stranger. Bad money drives out good, more and more users for the purpose of sexual socialization poured into Momo Inc, but the users with real social needs left one after another, and the ecology of the product began to change.

In recent years, a series of underground industries such as scams, chatting and enticing users to pay have been exposed by the media. Many products begin to pay attention to the protection of the platform environment. After the exploration of getting off the shelves and then on the shelves, he has tried to do a series of actions to regulate users, such as setting forbidden words, permanently banning violators, increasing the audit of manual information, and so on. In August this year, Momo Inc's legal name was changed from "MoMo Inc." to "Hello Group Inc." the new name may mean that Momo Inc will make some new changes in the social track in the future, and there may be other more surprising products in the future.

Soul, which has few users since its launch, experienced explosive growth in 2018, from less than 4 million downloads to more than 50 million. This year, the last batch of post-90s and the earliest batch of post-00s have reached or are about to reach adulthood.

According to the "Generation Z Social report" released by Soul, more than 70% of Generation Z think their social circle is narrow, and nearly 90% of people want to expand their circle of friends through social software, indicating that the market is still there.

With the increasing material accumulation and social inclusiveness, Generation Z, born after 1995, has more distinct and independent self-awareness, more independent opinions, and more willing to choose a lifestyle that suits them. As Generation Z has become the main user in the social market, the iteration and continuous segmentation of social products has become inevitable.

Because of the difficulty of social realization, business innovation on this road is not easy to go. For app, which is facing the pressure of survival, it is difficult but always expected to stick to its original intention and provide people with a better and better way of socializing while commercializing.