History of Web, Internet, and Social Media - Megan Mitchell

Harvard Mark I

1944

One of the first computers, which took up the whole room (Morin, Presentation: History of Social Media).

First ARPANET login

Oct 29, 1969

A message login was successfully sent from UCLA to Standford at 10:30pm with the efforts of Charley Kline and Leonard Kleinrock. This marked the beginning of ARPANET (Standage, 2013, p. 217).

Email System Incorporated

1971

First email system was invented and tested first by Ray Tomlinson. This became a social medium (Standage, 2013, p. 219).

First Group Messaging

1979

Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott inspired the creation of a system called Netnews (later Usenet) between university computers that could host group messages on forums/certain subjects (Standage, 2013, p. 221).

Computers Entered Common Places

Period: 1980 to 1989

Computers made its way into homes and offices for personal uses. Connections were made through dial-up (Standage, 2013, p. 221)

213 Computers Connected to ARPANET

1981

213 Computers Attached to ARPANET, and was soon called the Internet not long after this (Standage, 2013, p. 219).

Service Providers for Internet

Period: 1990 to 1999

Service providers in the 90's made it possible to access the internet without dial-up.

World Wide Web + Mosaic

1993

This system, based on hypertext via browsers emerged in the early 90's by Tim Berners-Lee. He and Eric Bina created Mosaic, a web browser able to run WWW on PC and Macintosh. This medium is particularly unique because it allows for user-generated personal web publishing and user created content (Standage, 2013, pp. 222-225). Allowed you to code images, sound, and text in browers easily (Presentation).

First Online Social Networking Site

1997

Six Degrees was the first online social networking site, which ran from 1997 to 2000 allowing its one million users to create lists of friends and message other users (Standage, 2013, p. 229).

Blogger Began

1999

Blogs acted as an online journal/diary and worked in reverse chronological order. Most businesses and newspapers with websites began to work in this way and allowed feedback and comments from visitors to the site. Blogger.com was launched in 1999 (Standage, 2013, pp. 225-226).

MySpace

2003

After Six Degrees, Friendster (another social networking site) came out as an online dating website connecting mutual friends. In reaction to this, MySpace came out and grew exponentially in popularity. Overtime, it's value was questioned and it lost popularity to Facebook (Standage, 2013, p. 230).

YouTube

2005

YouTube made its appearance in 2005, allowing users to create and upload long streamed videos in a blog-like setting.

Facebook Gave Open Access

2006

Facebook, which started out as a university social networking site, expanded to anyone who was over 13 in 2006. Facebook incorporated the "like" button and newsfeed which allowed users to see all of their friends updates in one place rather than searching for individual friends' updates. Facebook adopted Twitter's feature of "tweets" and added a "status" feature. Facebook now has over one billion users (Standage, 2013, pp. 230-232).

Twitter Made the Scene

2007

Twitter's feature of 160 character "tweets" provides a unique structure to sending information: it has to be concise. Information received via social media sites such as Twitter made content more reliable and accessible--no more lost or filtered information. It also makes for quick and lively discussion on any topic, with use of #hashtags, and options to follow certain users allowing for a customized information feed. Twitter started about 2006-2007 (Standage, 2013, pp. 232-233).

Instagram

2010

This platform allows users to share photos, like, and comment on other users' photos. This is another blog-like platform with focus on photo sharing.

Vine

2012

This social media site was one of the more creative sites, allowing users to make the most of the allotted 6 second videos. Several comedians have been in the spotlight because of this platform.