Social media are Internet sites where people interact freely,
sharing and discussing information about each other and their lives, using a
multimedia mix of personal words, pictures, videos and audio.
At these
Web sites, individuals and groups create and exchange content and engage in
person-to-person conversations.
They appear in many forms including
blogs and microblogs, forums and message boards, social networks, wikis, virtual
worlds, social bookmarking, tagging and news, writing communities, digital
storytelling and scrapbooking, and data, content, image and video sharing,
podcast portals, and collective intelligence.
There are lots of
well-known sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr,
WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Wetpaint, Wikidot, Second
Life, Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Lulu and many others.
BEFORE THE DAWN
1969
CompuServe was the first major commercial
Internet service provider for the public in the United States. Using a technology
known then as dial-up, it dominated the field through the 1980s and remained a
major player until the mid-1990s.
1971
The first email was delivered.
1978
Two Chicago computer hobbyists invented the
bulletin board system (BBS) to inform friends of meetings, make announcements
and share information through postings. It was the rudimentary beginning of a
small virtual community. Trolling and flame wars began.
1979
Usenet was an early bulletin board that
connected Duke University and the University of North Carolina.
1984
The Prodigy online service was introduced.
Later, it grew to become the second-largest online service provider in 1990,
with 465,000 subscribers compared with CompuServe's 600,000. In 1994, Prodigy
pioneered sales of dial-up connections to the World Wide Web and hosting
services for Web publishers. Subsequently, it was resold repeatedly and now is
part of AT&T.
1985
The America Online (AOL) service opened.
1989
British engineer Tim Berners-Lee began work at
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland), on what was
to become the World Wide Web.
1992
Tripod opened as a community online for
college students and young adults.
1993
CERN donated the WWW technology to the world.
Students at NCSA (National Center for
Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
displayed the first graphical browser, Mosaic, and Web pages as we know them
today were born.
More than 200 Web servers were online.
THE DAWNING
1994
Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) started
Geocities, which allowed users to create their own websites modeled after types
of urban areas. GeoCities would cross the one million member mark by 1997.
There were 38 million user Web pages on GeoCities before it was shut down for
United States users in 2009. Yahoo, which opened as a major Internet search
engine and index in 1994, owns GeoCities today and offers it only as a web
hosting service for Japan.
More than 1,500 Web servers were online in
1994 and people were referring to the Internet as the Information Superhighway.
EarthLink started up as an online service
provider.
1995
Newsweek headlines an article: The Internet?
Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana. read it here »
1997
The Web had one million sites.
Blogging begins.
SixDegrees.com lets users create profiles and
list friends.
AOL Instant Messenger lets users chat.
Blackboard is founded as an online course
management system for educators and learners.
1998
Google opens as a major Internet search engine
and index.
1999
Friends Reunited, remembered as the first
online social network to achieve prominence, was founded in Great Britain to
relocate past school pals.
2000
In the world of business and commerce, the
dot.com bubble burst and the future online seemed bleak as the millennium
turned.
Seventy million computers were connected to
the Internet.
2001
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and world's
largest wiki, was started.
Apple started selling iPods.
2002
Friendster, a social networking website, was
opened to the public in the U.S. and grew to 3 million users in three months.
AOL had 34 million members.
2003
MySpace. another social networking website,
was launched as a clone of Friendster.
Linden Lab opened the virtual world Second
Life on the Internet.
LinkedIn was started as a business-oriented
social networking site for professionals.
There were more than 3 billion Web pages.
Apple introduced the online music service
iTunes.
2004
Facebook, another social networking website,
was started for students at Harvard College. It was referred to at the time as
a college version of Friendster.
MySpace surpassed Friendster in page views.
Podcasting began on the Internet.
Flickr image hosting website opened.
Digg was founded as a social news website
where people shared stories found across the Internet.
AFTER THE DAWN
2005
Bebo, an acronym for Blog Early, Blog Often,
was started as another social networking website.
News Corporation, a global media company
founded by Rupert Murdoch, with holdings in film, television, cable, magazines,
newspapers and book publishing, purchased MySpace.
Facebook launched a version for high school
students.
Friends Reunited, now with 15 million members,
was sold to the British television company ITV.
YouTube began storing and retrieving videos.
There were more than 8 billion Web pages.
2006
MySpace was the most popular social networking
site in the U.S. However, based on monthly unique visitors, Facebook would take
away that lead later, in 2008.
Twitter was launched as a social networking
and microblogging site, enabling members to send and receive 140-character
messages called tweets.
Facebook membership was expanded and opened to
anyone over age 13.
Google had indexed more than 25 billion web
pages, 400 million queries per day, 1.3 billion images, and more than a billion
Usenet messages.
2007
Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook.
Facebook initiated Facebook Platform which let
third-party developers create applications (apps) for the site.
Facebook launched its Beacon advertising
system, which exposed user purchasing activity. Beacon sent data from external
websites to Facebook so targeted advertisements could be presented. The civic
action group MoveOn.org and many others protested it as an invasion of privacy.
Beacon was shut down in 2009.
Apple released the iPhone multimedia and
Internet smartphone.
2008
Facebook surpassed MySpace in the total number
of monthly unique visitors. Meanwhile, Facebook tried unsuccessfully to buy
Twitter.
Bebo was purchased by AOL. Later, AOL would
re-sell the relatively-unsuccessful social media site.
2009
Facebook ranked as the most-used social
network worldwide with more than 200 million. The site's traffic was twice that
of MySpace.
Citizen journalists everywhere were
electrified when Twitter broke a hard news story about a plane crash in the
Hudson River. The New York Times later reported a user on a ferry had sent a
tweet, "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the
people. Crazy."
Unfriend was the New Oxford American
Dictionary word of the year.
Microsoft's Bing joined Yahoo and Google as
major search engines on the Internet.
ITV sold the relatively-unsuccessful Friends
Reunited social media site to Brightsolid Limited.
It's estimated that a quarter of Earth's
population used the Internet.
Google saw one trillion unique URLs – after
eliminating duplicate entries.
The Internet had at least 27 billion web pages
and could have had as many as 58 billion web pages. They changed so many times
a day it was nearly impossible to count.
2010
Facebook's rapid growth moved it above 400
million users, while MySpace users declined to 57 million users, down from a
peak of about 75 million.
To compete with Facebook and Twitter, Google
launched Buzz, a social networking site integrated with the company's Gmail. It
was reported that in the first week, millions of Gmail users created 9 million
posts.
Apple released the iPad tablet computer with
advanced multimedia and Internet capabilities.
AOL sold the relatively-unsuccessful Bebo
social media site to Criterion Capital Partners.
The Democratic National Committee advertised
for a social networks manager to oversee President Barack Obama's accounts on
Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.
It was estimated the population of Internet
users was 1.97 billion. That was almost 30 percent of the global population.
The Internet had surpassed newspapers as a
primary way for Americans to get news, according to the Pew Internet and
American Life Project. The Internet was the third most popular news platform,
with many users looking to social media and personalized feeds for news. National
and local TV stations were strong, but the Internet was ahead of national and
local newspapers.
2011
Social media were accessible from virtually
anywhere and had become an integral part of our daily lives with more than 550
million people on Facebook, 65 million tweets sent through Twitter each day,
and 2 billion video views every day on YouTube. LinkedIn has 90 million
professional users.
Social media commerce was on the rise along
with mobile social media via smartphones and tablet computers.
Public sharing of so much personal information
via social media sites raised concern over privacy.
Apple introduced the Ping social network for
music and integrated with iTunes.
Both MySpace and Bebo were redesigned and
updated to compete with the far more successful social networks Facebook and
Twitter.
It was estimated Internet users would double
by 2015 to a global total of some four billion users, or nearly 60 percent of
Earth's population.
2012
Ever more people are connecting to the Internet
for longer periods of time. Some 2 billion people around the world use the
Internet and social media, while 213 million Americans use the Internet via
computers while 52 million use the Web via smartphone and 55 million use it via
tablets. People also connect to the Internet via handheld music players, game
consoles, Internet-enabled TVs and e-readers.
It is estimated Internet users would double by
2015 to a global total of some four billion users, or nearly 60 percent of
Earth's population.
Social media has come of age with more people
using smartphones and tables to access social networks. New sites emerge and
catch on. The top ten social networks are Facebook, Blogger, Twitter,
Wordpress, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, MySpace and Wikia.
More than half of adults 25-34 use social
media at the office. Almost a third of young adults 18-24 use social media in
the bathroom. All use social networks to stay connected with acquaintances, be
informed and be amused.
Advertisers look to social "likes"
to enhance brand visibility.
Facebook reached a billion users in 2012.
YouTube has more than 800 million users each
month with more than 1 trillion views per year or around 140 views for every
person on Earth. Seventy percent of YouTube traffic comes from outside the U.S.
YouTube is local in 43 countries and uses 60 languages. Some 72 hours of video
are uploaded to YouTube every minute with more than 4 billion hours of video
watched each month on YouTube.
Apple closed the Ping social network in 2012
and improved iTunes.
Public sharing of so much personal information
via social media continues to elevate privacy concerns
