The roots of social media

Just as the Internet has changed the way Canadians buy music, plan vacations, and research school projects, it has also affected how they interact socially. Through the use of social media, people can exchange photos and videos, share news stories, post their thoughts on blogs, and participate in online discussions. Social media also allows individuals, companies, organizations, governments, and parliamentarians to interact with large numbers of people. The great thing about the internet is that it is full of really smart people sharing great information, all for free. The downfall is that the internet is constantly in evolution, and can be hard to keep up with. 

What's your first memory of social media? Twitter, perhaps? Maybe Facebook? If you're of a certain age, you'll most likely remember the days when MySpace was the most popular among all social medias. Go back a few years, and you could have been one of the few who were the pioneers of modern social networking on Friendster. Crazy enough, the history of social media actually goes back much more further, and its roots can be found in blogging, Google, AOL, ICQ, the beginnings of the world wide web, and even CompuServe. 

1969 - CompuServe was the first major Internet service provider, using technology known then as dial up, it dominated through the 1980's until the mid 1990's. 

1970 - The first email was delivered

1978 - Two Chicago computer hobbyists invented the bulletin board system (BBS) to inform friends of meetings, announcements and information through postings. It was the beginning of a small virtual community. 

1979 - Usenet was a bulletin board that connected Duke University and the University of North Carolina 

1984 - The Prodigy online service was invented. It grew to become the second-largest online service provider in 1990, with 465,000 subscribers. Prodigy is now part of AT&T in the United States

1985 - The American Online (AOL) service opened



1989 - British engineer Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland), on what was to become the World Wide Web

1991 - World Wide Web goes public 

1994 - Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) started GeoCities, which allowed users to create their own websites. There were 38 million user Web pages on GeoCities before being shut down for North American users in 2009. Yahoo, which opened as a major Internet search engine in 1994 as well, owns GeoCities today, and only offers it as a web hosting service in Japan. People were referring to the Internet as the Information Superhighway. 

1996 - ICQ, a free Instant Messaging software goes public



1997 - Microsoft Hotmail is launched
         - The Web reaches one million sites        
      - Blogging begins


      - AOL becomes AOL Instant Messenger and lets users chat






1998 - Google opens as a major Internet search engine 




1999 - Blogger was launched





2000  - 70 million computers connected to 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 and grew to 3 million users in 3 months




2003 - Myspace, another social networking website was launched
         - There were more than 3 billion Web pages



                 
                    - Apple introduced the online music service iTunes




                              - Skype was launched




2004 - Facebook, another social networking website, was started.
         - Podcasting began on the Internet


        - Flickr image hosting website opened


2005 - Youtube began storing and retrieving videos
         - There were more than 8 billion Web pages


2006 - Twitter was launched as a social networking site
           - MySpace was the most popular social networking site
           - Google indexed more than 25 billion Web pages, and 1.3 million images  with over 400 million searches per day



2007 - Tumblr was launched, a blogging site




2008 - Apple released the first iPhone



2009 - Microsoft's Bing joined Yahoo and Google as major search engines
         - Facebook ranked as the most-used social network worldwide
         - It's estimated that a quarter of Earth's population used the Internet
        - Unfriend was the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year


2010 - Pinterest was opened
         - Facebook had over 400 million users
         - The Internet had surpassed newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news


     


  - Apple released the iPad tablet with advanced multimedia and Internet capabilities






2011 - Social media was accessible from virtually anywhere, and had become a 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 everyday on YouTube. But, public sharing of so much personal information via social medias raised concern over privacy.

2012 - More people got connected to the Internet for longer periods of time. It was estimated that Internet users would double by 2015, to a global total of nearly 60% of Earth's population. Advertisers looked to social media for '"likes" to enhance marketing. Facebook reached 1 billion users.

2013 -  YouTube topped 4 billion views per day. Facebook user total climbed to 1.11 billion. Twitter has 500 million registered users, and even astronauts aboard the International Space Station regularly tweet live from space. Apple's customers have downloaded over 50 billion apps. Yahoo purchased Tumblr blogging-social, with 100 million blogs. Instagram topped Flickr with 100 million users storing 4 billion photos. Pinterest has 48.7 million users. However, privacy concerns continued over public sharing of personal information on social networks.

All in all, I chose to write a blog about social media and how its evolved because it's such a popular topic. The social networking sites are so important in peoples lives, and are used quite frequently; for research, education, travel, companies, events, or even to play games, but nobody is aware of the history behind them. So my blog is going to discuss the roots and rankings behind all of the popular social medias today!

http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites
http://webdeliciousness.blogspot.ca/2010/11/social-media-timeline.html
http://www.ssj.org.uk/blog/social-media-third-sector/