Social Media Timeline

  • Plato System

    Plato System
    Malachi Stewart
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    Plato's System

    1960s-1970s - Plato system: Created by Dave Woodley and Douglas Brown was a message forum application like terms to talk, instant messaging for users in the online community and also the University of Illinois and Control Data Corporation took part in creating
  • AOL

    AOL
    Sava Mirkovic
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    AOL

    AOL (American Online) started in 1983 and was called Control Video Corporation, which was made for the sole purpose of providing online services called GameLine for the Atari 2600. Come 1988, the company would take on the name we now know as AOL and would launch later in 1991 for Geoworks interfaces and Windows shortly after. AOL would offer any and all modem owners to try their services for free via free software and online membership.
  • Habbo Hotel

    Habbo Hotel
    Sava Mirkovic
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    Habbo Hotel

    Habbo Hotel launched the site is considered a game and does have optional purchases, but the site works as a “hotel” where you can visit other peoples rooms, public rooms and hangout spots and chat with people online. Each user makes their own character and can customize them as many times as they want, however they want. The site continues to be up to this day as October 2020 the site accumulated 316 million avatars in the game and reports 800 thousand monthly active users as of January 2021.
  • MySpace

    MySpace
    Malachi Stewart
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    MySpace

    Myspace launched August 1, 2003 Co-Founded by Chris Dewolfe, Tom Anderson it was the main social media network where people write to friends, show photos, and play music. It shut down in 2009
  • Facebook

    Facebook
    Malachi Stewart
  • Period: to

    Facebook

    Facebook: launched February 2004 founded by Mark Zuckerberg it was a way to connect Harvard students with one another.
  • YouTube

    YouTube
    Malachi Stewart
  • Reddit

    Reddit
    Sava Mirkovic
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    Reddit

    Reddit was founded in 2005 by a few roommates in Virginia. The site works by having various communities about various topics & subjects that could be about anything, with members having the option to upvote, downvote, comment or share the post. If any post gets enough likes within any community it can be featured on the front page of Reddit. Reddit was the most used user-generating content sites as in 2019 Reddit reported approximately 430 million monthly users.
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    YouTube

    Youtube launched February 14, 2005 Found it by Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley. Google bought it for $1.65 billion which expanded the site into a business model.
  • KIK

    KIK
    Sava Mirkovic
  • Period: to

    KIK

    In October of 2010, a new messenger app was released to iOS and Android systems called Kik Messenger but was commonly referred to as Kik. The app used the users wifi to send messages to other Kik users that could contain anything like messages, images and videos. You didn’t need a phone number or valid email to use the app so it allowed many users to make accounts with ease. Within the first 15 days of the app launching as a messenger app over 1 million accounts were made.
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    Instagram

    Instagram launched on October 6, 2010 founded by Kevin Systrom the first prototype was a web called Burbn which was inspired by his love of whiskey and bourbons.
  • Twitch

    Twitch
    Joseph Fox
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    Twitch

    June 2011Twitch is officially launched. Twitch is an increasingly popular live-streaming service that focuses mostly on Gaming. It’s the successor of Justin.tv, a similar type of service made by Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt in 2007 to allow anyone to broadcast videos online mainly about peoples’ lives, 24/7, which for a long while was called “lifecasting”.
  • Instagram

    Instagram
    Malachi Stewart
  • Patreon

    Patreon
    Joseph Fox
  • Yahoo

    Yahoo
    Joseph Fox
  • Vine

    Vine
    Sava Mirkovic
  • Period: to

    Yahoo

    May 20, 2013 Tumblr is purchased by Yahoo! Inc. for approximately $1.1 Billion. Tumblr, one of the older, notable multimedia blog-posting platforms since it was founded by David Karp in 2007, had agreed to be acquired by Yahoo in order to improve the platform and any more advertising campaigns to pull off like one with Adidas a year prior. Many users of Tumblr were actually very disappointed in this decision, there were petitions made about this issue.
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    Vine

    In January of 2013 an app (that is way better in every way than Tik Tok) launched and was called Vine. The idea of the app was to make a video that lasted 6 seconds and share it with people on the app. People were engaged with the short from content that vine offered and made it successful with over 200 million users by the end of 2015. Sadly, the app was shut down by Twitter but had an archive up that was then closed in April of 2019.
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    Patreon

    May 2, 2013 Patreon officially launches. Patreon is a subscription member-based platform that utilizes generous donations sent in to help artists, content creators, or other people who work digitally make some income by offering rewards or perks to the loyal fans or subscribers willing to pay a small, supportive, monthly fee. The platform was co-founded by Sam Yang and a musician named Jack Conte, who both just wanted another way to make profits or benefits for doing YouTube videos.
  • Amazon Buys Twitch

    Amazon Buys Twitch
    Joseph Fox
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    Amazon Buys Twitch

    August 25, 2014 Amazon buys and acquires Twitch for around $970 Million. On August 2014, many sources started getting leaks of a rumored deal that due to antitrust issues and its ownership of Twitch’s main competition YouTube, Google had fallen through the deal and let Amazon make a bid for the ownership of Twitch. By literally next month, this was revealed to be true. In an all-cash deal of $970 Million, Amazon added Twitch and Twitch Interactive to their list of subsidiaries.
  • Discord

    Discord
    Joseph Fox
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    Discord

    Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, had an idea. The idea was to and create a brand new, intricate, but very efficient chat service with a focus on user friendliness with minimal impact to performance, so nobody would face that much difficulty when gaming online, with mobile or otherwise again. This was the birth of Discord. It earned its name from its main purpose that Citron and Vishnevskiy wanted for it: To solve the “Discord” of the Gaming Community as much as possible.