Historical development of social media

What is social media

Social media is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Websites and applications dedicated to forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis are among the different types of social media.


Social Media Timeline

Primitive social media

·         1979 - Usenet : posts news to newsgroups              below is an example of  UseNet
 

·         1979 – Bulletin Board System (BBS): first site with login option for interaction

·         1980 – CompuServe : first chat introduced

·         1984 – Prodigy Communications Corporations : pioneered online portals and online news

The medieval era of social media

·         1988 -  IRC (internet relay chat) :
         allowed file sharing link sharing
              and keeping in touch

·         1996 – ICQ : multi user messaging ,
multiplayer games, made emoticons &
abbreviations such as “lol” and “brb”
became famous

·         1997 – six degrees : Glimpses of first
       social media aspects like todays ( creating
       a profile and adding friends )                                                                                Above is an image of an IRC system

·         1999 – Live Journal : first to introduce dynamic content on the blogs and forum, create groups and interact

The golden era of social media

·         2001 – Wikipedia : the online free encyclopaedia was launched

·         2002 – Friendster : operated allowing people to meet new people and increase their network

·         2003 – Hi 5 : included photo sharing, user groups, social gaming and status updates

·         2003 – MySpace : private messaging public comments published to a user’s profile and bulletins sent to friends

·         2004 – Facebook : opened only for the Harvard university students

·         2004 – Orkut : owned by Google , meet old and new friends , rate friends, change themes etc

·         2004 – Flickr : photo sharing platform

·         2005 – Youtube : first organised video streaming and video sharing platform

·         2005 – Reddit : entertainment and social networking platform

·         2006 – Facebook : best performing social media platform to date with 1.44 billion active users

·         2006 – Twitter : a micro blogging platform with a question and answer format

·         2007 – Tumblr : live streaming and micro blogging platform

·         2009 – Whatsapp : ios android and windows based app for personal and group chats

·         2012 – snapchat : new platform for chatting by posting pictures

·         2012 – Tinder : a social discovery app for android and ios

·         2013 – Vine  : a multi-platform video sharing social application

·         2014 - Pheed : a social media platform with live broadcast option

Source of timeline: http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/the-evolution-of-social-media-infographic/620911

 

Source:The history of social media Youtube

The Surge In Social Media Usage

The recent surge in social media use is due to a lot of different reasons a few of these could be

• switching from dial up to broadband allowed greater speeds and a more efficient rate to productively use
• the introduction of portable technology EG. laptops tablets and mobiles have underwent a massive technological leap in the last 10 years
• with broadband being made more available it has also dropped the price substantially making it a lot more accessible to many homes who couldn't have had access before.

Mobile Technology

mobile technology has played a major role in social media becoming more of an everyday thing for most of us the fact that almost everyone has either a laptop, tablet or mobile that can allow us to access our social media profiles on the go instead of sitting waiting on dial up on an old desktop the best advancements of mobile technology are in our pockets with us almost everyday and it appears to be natural progression within this sector as we understand the capabilities of this kind of tech more and more every year

 

Social Media

Social media has grown massively in such a short time period it went from basic login system and bulletin board systems to a well-oiled social machine allowing users from all over the world to connect , trade goods ( eBay, Gumtree ), Game and share gaming experiences (twitch ,Youtube) and many others the recent rise has made it easier than before to stay connected whether it be for business or pleasure one thing is for certain the history of social media however brief it may be has changed the world we know today .
Andrew tonner