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PLATO was the first generalized computer system that was developed at the University of Illinois. It offered early forms of social media with Notes, message forum application, instant messaging, an online chat room, news report and blog. -
Amazon was founded July 5th, 1994 by Jeff Bezos. Amazon is a multinational technology company which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. -
The first social media site was born May 1997. Six Degrees was founded by Andrew Weinreich in 1996 and combined popular social media features: profiles, friends lists and school affiliations. -
Various social media sites are developed like Myspace and Facebook and blogging becomes popular. -
Hot or Not was an online site that had users submit pictures of themselves and had others rate them and their attractiveness. It has been rumored that this site influenced the creators of Facebook and YouTube. It also influenced a trend of insecurities of millions of people. -
As a response to "Hot or Not" in 2000, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facesmash in 2003. "The Facebook" was developed in 2004 and ended up dropping the "The" at the beginning and just becoming "Facebook" in 2005. -
Skype is a telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies (a division of Microsoft) known for videoconferencing and voice calls. Skype was created by Niklas Zennstrom, Janus Friis and four estonian developers and first released in August 2003. In 2005 eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion and in May 2011 Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion and used it to replace their Windows Live Messenger. -
LinkedIn took over the business world on May 5th, 2003. LinkedIn is a business employment priented online service that is mostly used for professional networking and career development and allows people seeking jobs to post their CV's and for employers to post job openings in their career field. -
A social networking service that launched August 1st, 2003. MySpace was the first social network to reach a global audience and had a significant influence on pop culture and music. From 2005 to 2009, MySpace was the largest social networking site in the world. -
YouTube launched in 2005 and was launched by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. YouTube is a website for publishing and sharing video files. The first YouTube video is called "Me at the zoo" and was uploaded to YouTube on April 23rd, 2005 by one of the co-founders Jawed Karim -
Originally known as "Twttr, it was an experimental app that the company has used to publicly prototype new features. Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched July of 2006. -
The use of hashtags was first proposed by an American blogger Chris Messina in 2007 in a tweet. This symbol has helped political organizers and average citizens mobilize, promote and create awareness for social issues of all kinds. Hashtags have also inspired social movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Twitter didn't truly embrace the hashtag until 2009. -
Described as "Twitter meets YouTube and WordPress", Tumblr (founded by David Karp) allowed users to create pictures, videos, and text and reblog their friends posts. This spawned the trend of "Microblogging" which allowed users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images or video links. -
Grindr was developed in 2009 and was the first geosocial networking app for dating and geared towards gay and bisexual men. Grindr paved the way for other sites that embraced gay hook-up culture such as Scruff, Hornet, and Chappy. -
WhatsApp was originally founded in 2004 by former Yahoo! employees Brian Acton and Jan Koum. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls and share documents, images, user locations and other content. -
Emoji's as we know them today started in Japan and can be translated to "image character". By the mid-2000s, emoji started appearing internationally on Apple and Google platforms -
Once called "digital crack for women", Pinterest is a visual discovery tool that was created for people to share ideas and inspiration for various interests, topics, and projects. The site was founded by Ben Silbermann (former Google employee) and Paul Sciarra. The site launched in March 2010 -
Between 2010 and 2019, influencer marketing became popular and grew in number and popularity. Brands began to invest in influencers as a part of their marketing strategy. The market grew from $1.7 billion to $9.7 billion in a matter of a couple years.
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The Instagram app launched on October 6th, 2010 and gained 25,000 users in one day. At the end of the first week Instagram had been downloaded by 100,000 users. Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom who was apart of the startup Odeo which later became Twitter. -
Kik Interactive was founded in 2009 by a group of students from the University of Waterloo in Canada. Kik Messenger is the first app developed by Kik Interactive and was released on October 19, 2010. Kik Messenger is a messaging application which is similar to WhatsApp and used for communicating with friends in group chats or direct messages. -
Snapchat is an app and service that has pictures and messages that are usually only available for a short amount of time before they become inaccessible to their recipients. Snapchat was created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown who were former students at Stanford University. The app was originally launched as "Picaboo" on the iOS operating system on July 8th, 2011then relaunched as Snapchat in September 2011. -
Facebook acquired Instagram for $1.0 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion (the largest acquisition to date) -
"Vine" was founded June 2012 by Rus Yusupov, Dom Hofmann, and Colin Kroll. Vine was one of the first social media apps to make the short form video both mainstream and accessible to users around the world. Users could share 7-second long looping video clips. Twitter acquired it in October 2012 before its official release date January 24, 2013. -
Musical.ly was a Chinese social media service on which users created and shared short lip-sync videos., Through the app, users could create 15-second to 1-minute lip-syncing videos and choose sound tracks to accompany them while using different speed options and adding pre-set filters/effects. -
Facebook rolls out streaming features on its platform in 2016 and ensured success with partnerships with mainstream media like Buzzfeed, the Guardian and New York Times. -
2016 was not a good year for social media and politics. It was the year that social media was being used to spread misinformation like false claims and conspiracy theories in the midst of a presidential election. -
TikTok was launched in 2016 by the Chinese startup company ByteDance founded by Zhang Yiming -
Instagram launched "Stories" in 2016 which allowed users to post videos and photos that disappear within 24 hours (which now can be archived). They provided a creative way to customize your instagram page with filters, stickers, polls, hashtags, and gifs. -
In an effort to attract more users, Twitter decided to lengthen the amount of characters allowed in a tweet (from 140 to 280) -
IGTV short for Instagram TV was a standalone video application by Instagram that allows longer videos compared to instagram feeds. Launched and introduced by former Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom. -
In 2018, marketers produced more social media ads than ever before and increased their budgets by 32%. Facebook accounts for 23% of total U.S digital ad spending. -
TikTok acquired Musical.ly on November 10, 2017 and merged it into TikTok on August 2nd, 2018. At the same time, Musical.ly Inc changed its name to TikTok Inc. -
In 2019, Instagram trailed the removal of likes entirely for select users in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand. This was an initiative to make Instagram "a safer place on the internet" -
Facebook, twitter and YouTube all dealt with the spread of misinformation online particularly surrounding the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. Facebook dealt with some of the election misinformation issues initially by banning political ads for the week prior to the election. Twitter had banned political ads permanently in 2019 -
Instagram launched Reels on Instagram in 2020 and on Facebook in 2021 in response to TikTok's rising popularity. It incorporates the same idea that TikTok is based around: short-videos for entertainment -
The Social media influencer market skyrockets in 2021 to a $13.8 billion industry indicating steady growth.
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta as a rebranding effort, claiming that the renaming was to signal that the company was branching out and was linked to more than one product. -
Livestream shopping is a growing trend. The ongoing pandemic only fueled its growth since in-person shopping wasn't available at the time. In China, livestream shopping is incredibly popular with the gross merchandising value of ecommerce live-streaming went from 4.5% in 2017 to 20.3% in 2022