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LinkedIn and the Business Connection
LinkedIn was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant. LinkedIn's primary goal was to provide a business- and employee-oriented networking service that allowed people to look for jobs. LinkedIn was the first social media platform to develop its program for job searching. LinkedIn allowed members to create profiles and connected its users to each other in an online social network. -
MySpace and the Social Media Outburst
MySpace was founded in late 2003 by Chris DeWolfe, Brad Greenspan, Tom Anderson, and Josh Berman. All four started with the company called eUniverse. The four were astonished by Friendster, a social gaming site, and realized there was great potential with the website, later triggering the creation of Myspace. Myspace had the ability to enhance and customize a user's homepage, listen/discover different forms of music, blog, post pictures, and comment on other user's profiles. -
Facebook and the Start of the Modern Generation
Facebook was launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, along with his fellow peers at Harvard, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Originally, the website combined elements of a standard House face book with multiple profile features that allowed students to search for others in their classes, social groups, and Houses. At the beginning, Facebook was not created with the intention of gaining profit. All started to connect the students at Harvard. -
Flickr and the Evolution of Sharing Media
Created by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake at the company Ludicorp in 2004 and was designed to be a video and photo hosting service. Most widely used by bloggers and photo researchers to share images that they inserted into personal blogs and on other social media platforms. Early in its development, it focused on live chatrooms, but as time passed, it became more about tagging and marketing photos. -
YouTube and the First Video Sharing Platform
YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, while they were working at PayPal. YouTube allowed users to share videos of any sort and publish them to the public. Users could also view other videos posted by the public. YouTube's website domain was first activated on February 14, 2005 at 9:13 p.m. The first video posted to YouTube was on April 23, 2005 by co-founder Jawed Karim. -
Twitter and the Short Word Count
Founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. Twitter was created to share news and interact with other people via "Tweets," which are limited to a 140 word count (originally 120). Twitter was one of the first main social media platforms to create a timeline for when user's share posts. Twitter's small posts allows for users to be concise and not extrapolate long posts. -
SlideShare and the Presentation Movement
SlideShare was founded by Rashmi Sinha in late 2006. The website was supposed to be used for businesses to share slides among its employees easier, but it expanded to a website far beyond that, being compared to YouTube, but for slides. Users can upload files privately or publicly with the following formats: PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenDocument. The website mainly deals with slides, but also supports PDFs, documents, and videos. The first social media platform to integrate sharing slides. -
Tumblr and the Beginning of Microblogging
Tumblr was developed by David Karp in early 2007. This social media platform was one of the first to use a "dashboard" for the main page of any Tumblr user's webpage. Tumbler also allowed others to share their thoughts or media via a short blog. Tumblr helped create modern blogging as the world knows it today. -
Pinterest and the Present-Day "Blog"
Founded in March 2010 by Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp, and Ben Silbermann, Pinterest was created not as a blog, but as a way for people to catalog their ideas. Pinterest allows its users to save pictures and organize them on different boards, meaning that people can find what they like, pin it, and can easily access it for a later date. Pinterest established the idea of "pinning" a post and coming back to it later. -
Instagram and the Modern Picture Movement
Founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in 2010, Instagram was first used via cell phones and allowed users to take a picture and post it to their profile. Started the concept of mobile media sharing and the concept has exploded ever since. Instagram was only available for Apple products for 2 years, until it was finally created for Android. -
Snapchat and the Snapshot Heard Around the World
Snapchat was created in 2011 by a group of classmates Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown at Stanford University. Originally launched under the name "Picaboo," the idea for this social media platform was allow users to use their mobile device and take a picture of what they were doing at that very moment and share it with their friends for 10 seconds. It was the idea of messaging each other via pictures or "snapshots." Now the mobile application has more features including video. -
Vine and Short Lived Videos
Developed by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll, Vine was the first social media platform to limit the length of video posted to its timeline, and the length of each Vine was only allowed to be 6 seconds long. Vine was also acquired in 2012, before its official launch, by Twitter. Vine reportedly had over 200 million active users and was discontinued in January 2017.
