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550 BCE
Postal Service
The ability to connect through written letter back and forth -
Telegraph
The ability to connect through letter, faster. -
Pneumatic Post
Letters traveling fast through air sealed tubes underground. -
Telephone
A way to connect through voice -
CompuServe
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Primitive forms of Email
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ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network)
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PLATO
Offers early forms of social media with Notes. -
Talkomatic
It is an instant sensation among users in the PLATO System's online community. -
TERM-Talk
An instant-messaging application enabling any two users on the PLATO system to conduct a live, character-by-character typed conversation on the bottom of the screen of their PLATO terminals. -
UseNet
Allowed users to connect through a virtual newsletter -
LISTSERV
Took the administration of BBSs and the threads of Usenet and combined them to form electronic mailing lists -
IRC's (Internet Relay Chat's)
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Geocities
Web hosting service. -
Six Degree's
Allowed users to upload Profiles and make friends with other users. -
AOL Instant Messanger
Online chat groups -
LiveJournal
blogging site -
Blogging Sites
Creating a social media sensation that’s still popular today. -
Xanga
Repository for film and book reviews. -
Friendster
Features like Friendster College, a newsfeed, and more -
Napster
Napster, created by Shawn and John Fanning and Sean Parker, married a user-friendly interface with mp3-specific peer-to-peer sharing to instantly become an enormous electronic music distribution platform. -
MySpace
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LinkedIn
Connecting members for business, rather than social, reasons. -
Second Life
Former Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale changed the game of social networking by building a space for users to interact with one another’s avatars in a virtual world. -
Digg
Digg has existed as a news aggregation site, but upon its launch in fall 2004, the community aspect was more pronounced. Users could submit links to sites for other users to vote that content up or down the homepage boards. -
Facebook
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Flickr
Registered users can connect with one another, follow friends’ activities and upload, form groups, and communicate in private groups and messages. -
Reddit
American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. -
YouTube
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Twitter
Twitter is an online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages, "tweets", restricted to 140 characters. -
Tumblr
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Klout
Relies on your presence on other platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, and others) to assign each user a score and corresponding rank according to their social influence. -
Foursquare and Swarm
Allowed users to share their location with friends by checking into venues, restaurants, and the like. -
Instagram
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Pinterest
Pinterest users can scroll through a feed of their friends’ images or curate their own via direct upload or a browser bookmarklet. The site experienced popularity early—especially on the topics of crafting, wedding planning, and decorating. -
Google Buzz
Sought to combine Twitter-esque posts and Facebook’s status updates into a Google-integrated product. -
Snapchat (Pictaboo)
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YouNow
YouNow is a video platform like many others, but with videos sorted by popular hashtags and with the added component of tipping from viewers. -
Google Plus
It mirrored many of the best-known features of Facebook: a public profile, connections with friends, and the Like, replaced here with a +1. Google sought to differentiate its product by having its users connect in friendship circles, for ease of use and filtering who shares what with whom. -
Vine
The shortform video platform designed for posting six-second loops. -
ello
Sparked by resistance to Facebook’s so-called “real names policy,” Paul Budnitz launched his invite-only, ad-free “anti-Facebook” called ello in 2014. It became a popular destination for LGBTQ Facebook users frustrated by the policies in place, with impressive early adoption numbers. -
Yik Yak
“Anonymous, hyper-local social app” Yik Yak launched in March of 2014 to unprecedented success among high school and college kids. Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, college roommates and the app’s creators, designed the platform’s messages to only be visible to other users in a 1.5-mile radius, and it quickly became a hit on campuses across the nation. -
Meerkat
Initially, users could start broadcasting and have a tweet appear on their timelines to let users tune in. -
Periscope
Periscope, Twitter’s entry in the livestreaming horse race, was dreamed up by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein after Beykpour wanted to supplement his breaking news source—Twitter—with live video during protests in Istanbul in 2013.