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The Beginning
Samuel Morse made the first steps towards some resemblance of social media when he sent a telegraph from Washington D.C to Baltimire. Morse's first message read "What have God wrought? -
Military's First Social Media Attempt
ARPAN (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) wanted to connect universities on a proto-internet. It worked great, if transmiting two letters "LO" weren't the complete "LOGIN" that they had planned to send over. -
Start of Social Sites
Six Degrees had a peak of about 3.5 million members who were able to create profiles and "friend" each other. -
Creativity and Status Blogs
LiveJournal was a platform where users could blog as form of keeping friends updated with their lives, a format later used by Facebook for their status. -
A Challenger Emerges
Friendster, one of the first social media sites, is created and launched by Peter Chin, Jonathan Abrams, and Dave Lee. Within the next year, they reject $3 million dollars from Google, widely considered one of the blunders of Silicon Valley. -
Link Up With Businesses
Taking social networks into a professional arena, Reid Hoffman co-found LinkedIn in his living room. They now have 706M users in 200 countries. -
Gmail Received
Google creates its own email service, Gmail, in January. In the UK Gmail was branded as Google Mail, due to a trademark dispute, until 2009 when they changed the branding back after the dispute was over. -
Facebook Begins
19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard roomates created Facebook originally for their college. The global social media platform now has 2.7B monthly active users -
Birth of YouTube
YouTube, a plataform on which users can upload and share videos was made public in February 2005. The first video to hit one million views also came within this year thanks to a Nike advert featuring Ronaldinho. The platform now has over 2M monthly active users. -
Bebo
Bebo become the most widely used network in the UK, but they were unable to keep up with Facebook. Eventually it was purchased by AOL in what was dubbed as "one of the worst deals ever made in the dotcom era" -
MySpace is Booming
MySpace became the most popular social network in the US during 2006! That's just 3 years after it was founded. -
Twitter
A new network offered the users a chance to follow each other and post 140 character updates. The hashtag was adopted as a symbol to help organize tweets. -
Going Viral
As users rushed to share it via social media networks, "Charlie bit my finger" became one of the first viral videos. The 55-second YouTube upload has since received over 876 million views. -
The Million Mark
Ashton Kutcher went head to head with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper to see who would become the first to reach 1M Twitter followers . Kutcher won. -
750 Tweets Per Second!
65 million tweets a day are being sent out on Twitter, that's around 750 tweets every second. -
Instagram
Instagram was launched as a photo-sharing app with CEO and co-founder Kevin Systrom uploading the first post - his dog sitting at a taco stand captioned "Test". -
Launch of Snapchat
Disappearing messages, images and videos was Snapchat's USP when it arrived in 2011, although stories could be viewed for 24 hours. -
Short Videos, Mega Views
Vine, a video hosting service specializing in short videos, goes public in June, Twitter acquires Vine for $30 million in the October of that year. -
Selfie Mania
Oxford Dictionary names "selfie" as the word of the year. The following year Ellen DeGeneres "Oscar Selfie" becomes the most retweeted photo ever. -
UK's Insta Ads
Instagram brings sponsored Ads to target the UK in September following their inclusion on the app in America. -
Sharing For A Cause
Everyone from Bill Gates to Brack Obama took part in the social craze "ALS Ice Bucket Challenge", to raise awareness and money for research towards Lou Gehrig's Disease. -
Life Of A Starman
NASA's #AYearInSpace started, giving Twitter followers updates on Scott Kelly as astronaut who lived in space for a year! -
The Selfie 2.0
From puppy ears to sunglasses, selfie taking got a whole lot more creative when Snapchat launched lenses which could alters user's appearance. -
Story Time
Getting in on the "disappearing after 24 hours" action, Instagram launched their new feature, Stories. It was widely credited for slowing the growth of Snapchat. -
Virtual Influence
Computer generated users of social media begin to gain popularity. "Virtual influencer" Lil Miquela reaches 1M followers in April. -
Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality, live videos, and 360-degree videos reigned all video content on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. -
TikTok Goes Viral
TikTok is the most downloaded app on the App Store, with over 33M download. Popular users with million of followers are titled as "TikTok Famous" and some create video trends that users create. -
Instagram Reels
To compete with TikTok, Instagram releases its own short-form video feature, Reels. Reels lets users create and share up to 30-seconds video clips, using editing tools and music.
