The History of Social Media
In this essay, you will be able to find a brief history of social media from its beginning, which is dated from 1971 up until the present times. The timeline below covers only the most significant events/platforms, so feel free to explore this topic even further on your own.
1971 – Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer, had sent a simple test message to himself. It has taken place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where email was sent from one computer to another one, sitting right beside it. It was the first email sent ever.
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1978 – The first Bulletin Board System (BBS), called the Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) was created by Randy Suess and Ward Christensen. It was the first computerized system used to exchange public messages or files.
1985 – The network called “Relay” was developed by Jeff Kell of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga using the REXX programming language. Its predated Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and other online chat systems. It was set up over BITNET nodes, originally named BITNET Relay.
1988 – Internet Relay Chat was born at the University of Oulu, Finland, where Jarkko Oikarinen, an employee of its Department of Information Processing Science, has written the first IRC client and server.
1997 – Six Degrees launches as the very first social networking site. It was founded by Andrew Weinreich in May 1996 and combined popular features like profiles, friends lists, and school affiliations – all in one service. However, the lack of people connected to the Internet limited this network's growth.
2002 – Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chin launches Friendster. It offered such features as showing how you were connected to strangers, which made meeting people less intimidating and highly addictive.
2003 – Start of LinkedIn with the goal of connecting to your network for better job opportunities. In the first week, it had only 2,700 members, while today it operates globally with more than 350m members.
2004 – Facebook was founded by Harvard University students: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Initially, it was a “Facemash”, an online service for students to judge the attractiveness of their fellow students. In 2012, Facebook become the largest social network in the world, with more than one billion users.
2005 – YouTube was founded by PayPal employees, Steven Chen and Chad Hurley. YouTube domain birthday is Valentine’s Day, however, its official launch date was on December 2005. The first YouTube video was posted on April 23rd, 2005 by Jawed Karim and was entitled “Me at Zoo”.
2006 – Jack Dorsey creates Twitter. He is also the author of the very first tweet ever, which says: “just setting up my Twitter”. Twitter officially launches to the public in July, shortly after Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, explains in a YouTube video what Twitter is all about.
2009 – Former employees of Yahoo, Jan Koum and Brian Acton founded WhatsApp. After leaving Yahoo, both of them were rejected for the job at Facebook, but instead of looking for a new job, they began working on their own project. That’s how WhatsApp was born.
2010 – Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger founded Instagram. Just two months after its launch, Instagram had over 1,000,000 accounts. Seeing potential in this social media platform, Facebook decided to buy it in 2012, only 2 years after its launch, and own it until today.
2011 – Three Stanford University students: Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown create an image and video messaging application called “Snapchat”. Initially, it was launched as an app called “Picaboo”, however, was rebranded as Snapchat just a few months later.
2012 – Sean Rad, Jonathan Badeen, Justin Mateen, Joe Munoz, Dinesh Moorjani, and Whitney Wolfe founded a dating app, which was launched on September 12. First, it come out only on iOS and then later was added also for Android users. Tinder uses location to match members and they had popularized swiping which allows users on profile photos to swipe right to like someone or left to dislike someone.
2015 – Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein Periscope founded Periscope in 2014. They had raised a seed round from angel investors, including Adobe executive Scott Belsky. In January 2015, Periscope was sold to Twitter, before its official launch, which was on 26 March.
2016 – TikTok or “Douyin” as it is known in China, is a Chinese video and social platform launched in September 2016 by ByteDance. Due to its huge popularity in its hometown country, TikTok expanded to other Asian countries such as Indonesia and Thailand in 2017. Then after a merge with another Chinese-based video app, “Musical.ly”, TikTok entered both the Americas and Europe.
In conclusion, since 1978 when the history of social media started, up until now, a lot has happened. Many social networks have launched, some of them have failed, some have changed owners, and some have simply transformed into a new one. While it's hard to say, which one will survive the test of time, we can be sure that a new one will be developed and launched over the forthcoming years.
Bibliography
- First Network Email sent by Ray Tomlinson
- Computerized Bulletin-board system (CBBS)
- Bulletin-board system (BBS)
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