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Talkomatic is created by Dave Wooly and Douglas Brown at the University of Illinois. It was a multi-user chat room with limited features.
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The first true social media site, SixDegrees.com, you could set up a profile page, create lists of connections, and send messages. -
Jerry Yang and David Filo established Yahoo! Messenger. An Internet portal that incorporates a search engine and a directory of World Wide Web sites organized in a hierarchy of topic categories. -
AmIHotorNot.com —the site that invited users to submit photos of themselves so others could rate their attractiveness. The site is rumored to have influenced the creators of Facebook and YouTube—and nurtured millions of insecurities. -
Friendster is born; a place for gaming and social networking. it’s the brainchild of Jonathan Abrams. -
Myspace is created, the Friendster rival that quickly became the go-to site for millions of hip teens. Its customizable public profiles (which often featured music, videos and badly shot, half-nude selfies) were visible to anyone, and were a welcome contrast to Friendster’s private profiles which were available only to registered users. -
Mark Zuckerberg starts the legendary Facebook. a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg launches The Facebook, a social media website he had built in order to connect Harvard students with one another. By the next day, over a thousand people had registered, and that was only the beginning. -
"Me at the zoo" is the first video uploaded to YouTube, on April 23, 2005, 8:31:52 p.m. PDT, or April 24, 2005, at 03:31:52 UTC. The 19-second video features YouTube's co-founder Jawed Karim, who was 25 years old at the time, in front of two elephants at the San Diego Zoo in California, noting their long trunks. -
The first tweet ever, posted by co-founder @Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006, read: “just setting up my twttr.” So glad they changed the name, because “twttr” scks! -
In sharp contrast to other networks, LinkedIn—once known as “Myspace for adults”—was the first to offer users paid premium packages. Its Jobs and Subscriptions area, the site’s first premium business line, helped bring in revenue in the early days. -
Tumblr, a popular microblogging and social networking website, launches. Tumblr was founded by David Karp and launched in New York City, in February of 2007. (Facebook began in 2004 and Twitter in 2006.) It was built to be a simple, social blogging platform, but its multimedia approach set it apart. -
But Twitter’s significance in the digital age was really defined by the hashtag, a symbol that has helped political organizers and average citizens mobilize, promote, and create awareness for critical (and not so critical) social issues. -
Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social media application that was launched in 2010 by Kevin Systrom. The first prototype of Instagram was a web app called Burbn, which was inspired by Systrom's love of fine whiskeys and bourbons. -
Pinterest, a photo-sharing website, launches. This service allows users to submit images or "pins", then other users can "pin" them on personalized "pinboards". Users can then comment on each other's content and interact with it. -
The company was founded on September 16, 2011, by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy upon the relaunch of the photo sharing app Picaboo as Snapchat. On December 31, 2013, the application was hacked and 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers were leaked to the Internet. -
Just eight years after launching in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room, Facebook announced its user base had reached a significant milestone—and now shared a population nearly the size of India. -
Tinder is an online dating and geosocial networking application. In Tinder, users "swipe right" to like or "swipe left" to dislike other users' profiles, which include their photos, a short bio, and a list of their interests. -
Twitter proclaimed 2014 as the “Year of the Selfie” following Ellen DeGeneres’s Oscar photo. You know the one. Or, you should. Because that selfie has been retweeted more than three million times—setting a Twitter record and winning Twitter’s award for “Golden tweet” of the year. -
Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang invent a lip-syncing app called musical.ly. -
Discord was started to solve a big problem: how to communicate with friends around the world while playing games online. -
Facebook was slow to slide into the live stream game, first rolling out live streaming features on its platform in 2016. -
Taking a page from Snapchat’s playbook, Instagram introduced “Stories” allowing users to post photo and video sequences that disappear within 24 hours. -
In an effort to attract more users, Twitter doubled its signature character limit from 140 to 280 characters. The move was widely panned by more than a few users -
If you thought Boomerang was the only video app Instagram had up its sleeve you would be wrong. Instagram is now ready to compete with YouTube: the company increased its one-minute video limit to one-hour and launched a whole new app, IGTV, dedicated to long-form video. -
A run-off of musical.ly, TikTok, was created in 2016. But it gained major popularity in 2019. Lip-syncing and many "TikTok creators" are obsessed with this platform
