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CompuServe was the first major commercial Internet service provider for the public in the United States. Used the technological breakthrough, dial up.
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Brief History of Social Media and Networking.
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Two Chicago computer hobbyists invented the bulletin board system (BBS) to inform friends of meetings, make announcements and share information through postings. It was the rudimentary beginning of a small virtual community. Trolling and flame wars began.
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The America Online (AOL) service opened.
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CERN Describes the Intent HereBritish engineer Tim Berners-Lee began work at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland), on what was to become the World Wide Web.
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CERN donated the WWW technology to the world.
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Students at NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) displayed the first graphical browser, Mosaic, and Web pages as we know them today were born.
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Blogging Begins.
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SixDegrees.com lets users create profiles and list friends.
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AOL Instant Messenger lets users chat.
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Blackboard is founded as an online course management system for educators and learners.
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Google opens as a major Internet search engine and index.
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Friends Reunited, remembered as the first online social network to achieve prominence, was founded in Great Britain to relocate past school pals.
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Friendster, a social networking website, was opened to the public in the U.S. and grew to 3 million users in three months.
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MySpace. another social networking website, was launched as a clone of Friendster.
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LinkedIn was started as a business-oriented social networking site for professionals.
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Facebook, another social networking website, was started for students at Harvard College. It was referred to at the time as a college version of Friendster.
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Podcasting began on the Internet.
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Bebo, an acronym for Blog Early, Blog Often, was started as another social networking website.
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Facebook launched a version for high school students.
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YouTube began storing and retrieving videos.
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Twitter was launched as a social networking and microblogging site, enabling members to send and receive 140-character messages called tweets.
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Apple released the iPhone multimedia and Internet smartphone.
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Citizen journalists everywhere were electrified when Twitter broke a hard news story about a plane crash in the Hudson River. The New York Times later reported a user on a ferry had sent a tweet, "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."
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To compete with Facebook and Twitter, Google launched Buzz, a social networking site integrated with the company's Gmail. It was reported that in the first week, millions of Gmail users created 9 million posts.
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The Internet had surpassed newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The Internet was the third most popular news platform, with many users looking to social media and personalized feeds for news. National and local TV stations were strong, but the Internet was ahead of national and local newspapers.
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Public sharing of so much personal information via social media sites raised concern over privacy.
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It was estimated Internet users would double by 2015 to a global total of some four billion users, or nearly 60 percent of Earth's population
