Page 4 - index
P. 4
RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS
The social media history at a glance
Social networks permeate our lives - whether personal 2004 - Facebook, Flickr: The world's largest social
or professional – making it worth the effort of looking at network of today went online in 2004. At the begin-
their history. ning, the distribution took place mainly through uni-
versities. With Flickr appears a service that simpli-
fied uploading and sharing images, paving the way
for the success of visual social media trends.
2005 –YouTube: Google bought the video sharing
platform just a year later.
2006 – Twitter: The company revolutionized the
social web with 140-character restriction and real-
time communication.
2007 - Tumblr: The blogging platform was later
bought by Yahoo.
Social Media Review
2009 - Likes and Unfriend: Facebook created the
1978 - Bulletin Board System: In the late 1970s, Like button, at the same time "Unfriend" is becom-
Randy Suess and Ward Christensen developed the ing the word of the year of the New Oxford Ameri-
Bulletin Board System (BBS) that allowed users to can Dictionary.
post data, news and other information, on public 2010 - Pinterest, Google Buzz and Instagram:
boards. However, due to the high costs, it was of- The Social Network Share focused on images.
ten mainly about regional communities at BBS, Google tried to gain ground in social media with
nevertheless it can be identified impeccably as the Google Buzz, an extension for Gmail. Instagram
birth of the social web. has been launched as video and photo sharing app
1995 - Classmates: A website goes online, which and was bought by Facebook in 2012.
already carries the ingredients of today's social net- 2011 - Google+ and Snapchat: After the failure of
works in itself. On Classmates.com, old school Buzz, Google released Google+. With Snapchat a
friends can find each other, highlighting the social proprietary instant messaging application entered
component of the web successfully for the first the market that deletes messages after displaying
time. them briefly.
1996/97 - ICQ and AOL Messenger: With the re- 2012 - Vine: The video-sharing service Vine was
lease of ICQ, another building block of social net- acquired by Twitter right before its official launch.
works is becoming accessible to a wide audience.
That the Internet is a communication tool is made 2013 - Graph Search & Social Media Study: The
clear in the early days by not only ICQ but also University of Florida offers the first Master's pro-
AOL Messenger and other tools of this kind. gram in social media with the name "Online Master
of Arts in Mass Communication - Social Media". In
1999 - Blogs: The blogger service Blogger.com addition, Facebook introduced Graph Search, al-
opened its doors. Although there have been al- lowing social media to dash forward in the field of
ready many blogs around, Blogger.com enabled search.
every user to maintain a blog relatively easy, and
was bought just a few years later in 2003 by
Google. Social media can look back at a great success
story as the figures confirm:
2000 - Friendster: The social network Friendster
could attracted millions of users just after a few Facebook: 1.39 billion active users.
months in operation. Twitter: Over 1 billion registered users,
284 million active users.
2003 - LinkedIn, Myspace and WordPress:
LinkedIn has been the first platform that explicitly Google+: 1.6 billion registered users,
targeted professionals (Xing started in the German- 540 million active users.
speaking countries the same year). MySpace YouTube: More than 1 billion users.
pulled off one of the most brilliant performances in Instagram: More than 300 million active users.
social media history - the network could win up to
230,000 members per day in early times. With the LinkedIn: More than 300 million registered users,
release of WordPress, a software that makes blog- 187 million active users.
ging easier and more powerful was launched. With Pinterest: More than 70 million registered users,
facemash.com, the direct predecessor of Facebook 40 million active users.
was going online in 2003, too. Snapchat: More than 60 million registered users,
30 million active users. ◊
4 Asian eMarketing April 2015 - Social Media By Daniela La Marca
