The Evolution Of Social Media

By Tyreese West

  • The first Social Networking site was introduced.

    The side was named Six degrees and lasted from 1997 to 2000. it allowed users to list friends on the site, invite external contacts to their circle of friends, and introduced instant messaging. The site was founded in New York by it`s CEO Andrew Weinreich. The site had about 3.5 million registered members. Six Degrees carved a path for many other Social networking platforms to follow.

  • Online Communities Take form

    2003 MySpace site was created, opening the door for people to connect with each other in chat rooms, make a personal file, share music and photos, etc. Founded by Josh Berman MySpace was one of the first sites to implement social networking features. It garnered over 6 million users by 2004. Following it was many other Social media platforms who seemed to mimic its structure.

  • More Platforms arise

    By the year 2000, around 100 million people had access to the internet. Many people were socializing online through instant messaging, blogging, and micro-blogging. by 2003 Mark Zuckerberg had founded Facebook which debuted as Facemash intended to be a college wide game for students that later flourished into a networking platform. By 2005 Facebook had over 6 million users. Today, 650 million people worldwide use Facebook.

  • Video & Image Sharing

    In 2005 YouTube was created to compensate with the fact that there was not one particular place where videos could be shared with the public. Jawed Karim started YouTube for professional and personal videos to be shared to the public by news outlets. Soon enough people started uploading personal videos to the site and the rest is HISTORY. Today, YouTube is one of the most visited sites on the web ever with over 1.3 billion people use this site everyday.

  • Social Networking becomes a Trend

    In 2006 Twitter had began its development as a SMS based platform by its co-founder, Jack Dorsey. The first tweet that was sent to the site on March 21st, 2006 9:50 PM. Twitter then began to grow with the use of interactive symbols and jargon as a way of using the service to integrate a more user-driven space.

  • Photo and Instant Uploading

    Soon enough more platforms included ways of instantaneous widespread sharing of personal blogs and images. Tumblr, Photobucket, and Pinterest were established in 2007 and 2008. For the first time users could share photos on a platform with relative ease. This sparked the desire for faster and faster ways to share and connect with other users.

  • The Digital Age

    The 2010s marked an age where instant photo and instant video apps and websites were in high demand for their popularity. One after the other developers started coming up with more innovative structured for their sites. Instagram, Vine, Musicaly, Snapchat etc became new fads for users to follow and the more they were used the more popular they got. To this day many people connect with each other on these platforms on a daily basis, and this is only the beginning.