Social Media History

Six Degrees

1997

Six Degrees was one of the first social media sites to come about. It lasted from 1997 to 2001. It developed the idea of social circles, allowing users to list who their family and friends are. People could then post things on bulletin boards as well as send messages and find connections through the site.

Friendster

2002

This website took off after the fall of Six Degrees. It focused on making connections with people, almost similar to a dating website. Although popular for awhile, since 2011 it today only exists as an online gaming website.

LinkedIn

2003

LinkedIn launched with the intent of wanting to take a more serious approach to social media. It was focused on helping business people make connections. Today the site is still active and has close to 300 million users.

MySpace

2003

MySpace aimed to target young adults with a more fun filled environment and overall had a cooler vibe than Friendster did. After sites like Facebook took off, Myspace has now become a popular website for bands and musicians.

Facebook

2004

Facebook was created in 2004 but was not fully released to the general public until 2006. It was created by University students and it existed only at Harvard to start. It has over 1 billion users today.

Youtube

2005

Youtube was created by a group of people who worked for PayPal. They wanted to create a website where people could view and upload videos. In the Summer of 2006, it was one of the fastest growing sites on the web. By 2013, the number of monthly users on the site had reached 1 billion users

Twitter

2006

Twitter was created with the idea of people being able to see what their friends were up to by people uploading statuses onto the site. It developed overtime once they started the idea of using the @ to tag another person in a post and later on hashtags became a trend as well.

Google+

2007

Google+ was created in 2007 after realizing the success of sites like Facebook. It was created more as just another part of having a google account, but it did become popular by introducing live video chatting, which Facebook had not yet done at the time. In 2014 there were around 540 million active users.

Instagram

2010

Instagram launched in 2010 and was an immediate success. It had around 1 million users after just 2 months and today it has over 700 million users. The idea was to create a platform where people could publicly or privately share pictures and later on videos, as well as being able to explore a large variety of accounts and the ability to tag locations.

Pinterest

2010

Pinterest was founded with the idea of people being able to gather images and post them on different boards that could be private or public. It allows you to find things from people that have similar tastes as you. They grew only small scale at first, but releasing the iPhone app in 2011 brought in more users. Pinterest is especially popular for people searching for crafting and food.

GroupMe

2010

GroupMe launched in 2010 and is owned by Microsoft. It allows people to make larger group messages that is easier to navigate than creating large group text messages. You can share photos, videos, locations, as well as "like" people's messages. As of 2013, there were over 12 million registered users.

Snapchat

2011

Snapchat wanted people to be able to send pictures to one another that only lasted for a short time and then disappeared, which was the main unique feature to the app. It started as just person to person contact, later adding on the ability to share to your story and have everyone view it. They also added on video messaging and the ability to explore different online accounts as well.