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TCP, or Transmission Control Protocol, is used to ensure reliable efficient data transmission between devices. While an IP or Internet Protocol is essentially an address for data to be sent from or to. These two protocols pave the way for the introduction of the modern day internet. This day is also coined as the birthday of the internet. -
The internet was already officially around before this date, but this is the day the internet went global and was introduced for public use. This would change everything on a global scale, connecting the entire world in an instant. -
The first online social media platform, Six Degrees launches and is the first platform to allow users to have personalized profiles after sign-up, and furthermore allowing users to connect and "friend" their friends in the app. The app peaked at a grand 3.5 million users, but unfortunately closed in 2002. -
Friendster emerged in 2002, with very similar "social media" aspects to the former Six Degrees, allowing users to connect and add friends. Friendster started to develop it further and introduced the "media" aspect of social media; Allowing user to share, save, and send photos, videos, messages, and additionally comments. This was a huge step into what we know as modern day social media, the large-scale interaction with followed users, through the form of pictures, videos, and comments. -
MySpace, following what we know as standard social media norms today, became at it's time the largest and paved the way for the social media titans we see today. MySpace quickly connected millions of users across the world, and made a hefty profit to support that, but didn't expand enough on the "Social Media" concept and would eventually be drowned out by Facebook in 2008. -
Perhaps, the most influential Social Media platform even to this day, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, and completely changed how social media worked. Initially a social media platform for Harvard, and eventually other ivy league schools, quickly went on to surpass MySpace, and would be evaluated as a $104 billion dollar platform. Facebook would truly cement the concept of "Social Media," fleshing out the concept of friends/followers, likes, reactions, suggested users, and so much more. -
In 2006, the U.S. patent office received a filing for “an automatically generated display that contains information relevant to a user about another user of a social network.” The author was Mark Zuckererg, and this AI would go on to change Facebook, and truly reshape all future social medias. -
Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams founded and launched Twitter, having it's unique distinction be it's limited characters feature of 140 characters. Twitter until launching in 2013, develops their features of following, a "Tweet", likes, and all now somewhat standard social media features, including a personalized AI. Twitter officially launched in 2013 and was valued at $14.2 Billion. -
By 2010, Facebook had gone all in on their AI idea, and their machine-learning robots were collecting trillions of responses and user-data a day. Which would give rise to the popular claim "Facebook knows everything about you," or that "Facebook knows your entire life." Which wasn't exactly true, the robot, was taking this data to give it's users personalized search results. -
Launched on October 6, 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. With its unique distinction being the iconic "square picture." In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram and has since become a sub-company. -
Snapchat was launched by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown in September 2011. Snapchat had a unique form of social media, really becoming a teenagers social media platform, primarily used for communication in the form of pictures or videos that would disappear after being sent. -
The advancement of features such as MySpace's tagging, general commenting features, advancement of following/friends, etc has paid off, and Facebook has just hit 1 Billion users.