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ARPANET evolves into the Internet
Dozens of pioneering scientists, programmers, and engineers worked together to develop the internet. Invented after the first workable prototype of the internet called “Arpanet” or Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Arpanet allowed multiple computers to communicate using a single network. Researchers began to assemble the network of networks which then became the modern form of the internet. Used as a tool for socializing among friends and peers. Bria McAfee -
Bulletin Board System Launch
Also referred to as Computer Bulletin Board Service. BBS is a computer server that allows people to connect using a terminal program. Users were able to upload, and download data, read news/ bulletins, and share messages both publicly and privately. BBS also provided games for users to compete amongst one another. These Bulletin Board systems were a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web as well as social networks and many other aspects of the internet. Bria McAfee -
SixDegrees.com Launches
Created by Andrew Weinreich in 1997, this was the first online business that tried to identify a map of relationships between people using their real names. Six Degrees was named after the six degrees of separation concept which allowed users to list their friends, family, and acquaintances on the site and off. Unfortunately, Six Degrees was launched far too early. Though it attracted millions of users from all over the world, the site did not catch on and was shut down in 2000. Bria McAfee -
Open Diary Launches
This online diary community was an early example of social networking software. This site was owned by Bruce Ableson and Susan Ableson who were known on the site as DiaryMaster and DiaryMistress. More than 5 million diaries have been shared on Open Diary since it was founded. Users were able to comment and chat about their own, or other people’s diaries. Though Open Diary shut down in 2014, it relaunched in 2018 and is still operating today. Bria McAfee -
SixDegrees.com Shutsdown
After a lot of success on SixDegrees, the company was bought by YouthStream Media Networks in 1999. The site sold for $125 million. SixDegrees later shut down in 2001 but was brought back up a few years later. Unfortunately, SixDegrees was ahead of its time and was not able to reach its full potential with the limitations of the Internet. Bria McAfee -
Friendster Launches
Based in Mountain View California, Friendster was a social networking service founded by Jonathan Abrams. Users were allowed to contact each other, maintain contacts, and share their own content online. The website was also used for dating and discovering new things. Users had their own profiles to share posts as well as see others. The company was redesigned in 2003 and was made into a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur. Bria McAfee -
LinkedIn Launches
First founded in Reid Hoffman's living room in 2002, LinkedIn officially launched in 2003 allowing a diversified business with revenues from membership subscription, advertising sales, and recruitment solution under the leadership of Ryan Roslansky. In 2016 LinkedIn successfully brought together the worlds leading professional cloud as well as the worlds leading professional network. Bria McAfee -
MySpace Launches
Founded by internet employees from the EUniverse. Included in it was Chris Dewolfe, Josh Berman, Brad Greenspan, Tom Anderson. It is known for band pages, custom profiles, and the stalking culture. By 2006 it was the number one website. In 2007 its value was 12 billion dollars. Jeffrey William LAnier -
Skype Launches
Founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis Skype was known originally as Skyper. These two founders of Skype also founded Kazaa the first music sharing site. Skype stands for “Sky peer to peer” the application was developed to offer 2-way communication to people all around world through audio and video. In 2005 Skype had the peak of its popularity as it released its Beta 2.0 version, in which eBay decided to acquire Skype in $2.5 billion dollar deal. Steven Foster -
Facebook Launched
Facebook is launched by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook allows users to create their own profile, post pictures, and add friends. Weronika Gorecka -
Flickr Launches
Launched by Ludicorp a Vancouver-based company. Early Flickr focused on chat rooms and real-time photo exchange capabilities. Key features of this site are tags, marking photos as favorites, group photo pools, and interestingness for which a patent is pending. The service was then widely used by photo researchers and bloggers to host images. Bria McAfee -
Reddit Launches
Branded as a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website Reddit members contribute to the website by posting links, text posts, and images that are voted up and down by members. These posts are organized into subjects for user-created boards referred to as communities. Reddit was ranked as the 17th most visited site in the US. However, Reddit's users come from all over the world. Bria McAfee -
YouTube Launches
Registered on a limited beta basis on February 14, 2005, the site had attracted nearly 30,000 viewers a day by May of that year. Officially launched in December 2005 as a video sharing platform Youtube was bringing in 2 million views per day. The initial appeal of the app was that users could share their home videos for others to enjoy. Stephen Ketchum -
Twitter Launches
Previously known as Twttr, the site began with a 140 character limit for messages that were sent the site was classified under SMS(short messaging service) for people to release messages to the public. Users would send a short message to “40404” to be shared with a group of their choice. Within a year the service had around 60,000 tweets being sent a day. Stephen Ketchum -
Tumblr Launches
Tumblr's 3 main concepts included Express yourself, Be yourself, and connect with your people. This platform was described as being the user's personal canvas to post text, photos, gifs, videos, live videos, or anything else you wanted. Founder, David Karp, created the site because sites like WordPress had long formats and he wanted somewhere new and fresh to post projects he had been working on. The site attracted popular bloggers, musicians, photographers, and writers. Stephen Ketchum -
Justin.tv Launches
Created by Justin Kan, Emmit Shear, Micheal Seibel and Kyle Vogt. This streaming site allowed users to broadcast video online. Account users used channels like the concept used by YouTube, users were encouraged to stream live videos on site. The company began in San Francisco, California. Justin Kan began the site with a channel where he streamed his everyday life which grew into Justin.TV as users joined him. Steven Foster -
The Hashtag
Originally brought to Twitter, Chris Messina noticed similar uses for the pound symbol on other sites and decided to create his own version of it for the platform. He saw Flickr tags and it gave him the inspiration to try and implement the “hashtag” into the platform. The hashtag is used for contextualization and content filtering. Stephen Ketchum -
Facebook Mobile
A mobile Facebook app is introduced for Apple and Android allowing users to access social media on the go. Weronika Gorecka -
Facebook Introduces "Like" Button
This feature allows users to react to other people's posts letting them know that they "like" their content. This feature added interaction amongst users expanding the social media platforms. Weronika Gorecka -
Pinterest Launches
The platform gained 10,000 users after being up for only 9 months. Made for users to go out and do things they wanted to accomplish the platform images, blog posts, videos, and more were published to enable saving money. The Discovery of information and ideas were the main reasons to use the site through pinning and creating boards users were able to save ideas they liked and have a visual of what they wanted to accomplish. Stephen Ketchum -
Instagram Launches
At first, the site was to be launched asBurbn, an app that allowed users to check-in, post their plans, and share photos surrounding their love for bourbon and whiskey. After being assessed the platform pivoted to become a photo-sharing application. The app was specifically designed to be a site where mobile phone users could share the images they took. Now the site has become the#1 photo-sharing social media platform. Stephen Ketchum -
Facebook Messenger
Facebook acquired the messaging app Beluga, and later in that year uses it as a base for their feature, Facebook Messenger. This allows users to communicate in private messaging rooms instead of publically on their news feeds. Weronika Gorecka -
Twitch.tv Launches
Live streaming platform Twitch works as a spinoff of the original Justin.TV which allowed users to broadcast video online. The Twitch application founded by the founders of Justin.TV Justin Kan; Emmett Shear was created with the purpose of becoming a lead video game steaming platform also focusing on esports competition as well. Now Twitch is known for its live music broadcast and “in real lifestreams”. Steven Foster -
Snapchat Launches
Co-founder Reggie Brown created the idea for an ephemeral messaging platform. It first launched in July under the name Picaboo as an IOS app only. In its early success, it would allow users to post stories that would vanish after 24 hours. Picaboo was rebranded into Snapchat that followed by a lawsuit by a photobook company with the same name. Jeffrey William LAnier -
MySpace Shutdown
losing its fire to Facebook, Myspace did not exist as a legit company. They were a part of a market type company and not the whole thing. It was on the decline and in terms of profiles, those were on the decline as compared to Facebook. Jeffrey William LAnier -
Google+ Launches
the social network operated by the widely known informational database Google was created to compete with other social media platforms. The perks of being a Google+ user is the ability to link other Google apps like Drive, Docs, YouTube, and blogger through the network. Steven Foster -
Tinder Launches
Tinder is a geo networking, online dating app. The app allows users to locate different users that are in a certain mile radius and allows them to swipe to like or dislike their photos. Users hope to spark some type of social networking flames, hoping to match and potentially instant message to set up a chance at a date outside of the app. Steven Foster -
Instagram Video Introduced
launching video sharing, this allowed users to easily instant message videos to other users. This feature made Instagram a more reliable app for posting images or videos. Jeffrey William LAnier -
Vine Launches
Made for IOS devices this free app was marketed as a short-form video sharing site. In a couple of months, it became the most used video-sharing app on the market. Founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Collin Krov in 2012. The company was acquired by Twitter, giving Vine it's fame. Jeffrey William LAnier -
MySpace Relaunch
With a redesigned site the new app includes myradio streaming and music services. The relaunch of Myspace had brought a 20 million dollar ad campaign across all streaming media. The rebranded Myspace has a long way to go to get it back to how it was previously. Currently, its global monthly user count sits at approximately 30 million. Jeffrey William LAnier -
Musical.ly Launches
Headquartered in Shanghai, Musical.ly was used for Lip-synching and dance videos. The Site had over 90 million users in June 2016 before migrating its platform and merging with TikTok. Jeffrey William LAnier -
Facebook Business Manager
This new tool added to Facebook allowed marketers and agencies to manage multiple pages and promote paid ad campaigns through a single interface. Weronika Gorecka -
Periscope Launches
Launch of twitter’s live video streaming supplement, Periscope. This marks an important step for the integration of live streaming as a form of user-generated content for social media. Nick Mcfadden -
Friendster Shutsdown
Friendster suspends social networking services due to the “evolving landscape in our challenging industry”. This was a significant shutdown of one of the earlier social media sites. Nick Mcfadden -
Vine Shutsdown
This is the end of a platform that popularized the sharing of short-form video content as a way of social media. This end was most likely brought about due to other social media platforms integrating similar types of content sharing methods. Nick Mcfadden -
Facebook Hits 2 Billion Users
Doubling its monthly user count since 2012, Facebook reached 2 billion monthly users in June 2017. This number is roughly equivalent to 51 times the population of California. Weronika Gorecka -
TikTok Launches
TikTok is launched on the international market. Tiktok is a massive video sharing platform that has seen massive popularity among teens. Nick Mcfadden -
Facebook-Cambridge Analytical Data Scandal Uncovered
In this social media scandal, millions of users' personal data were obtained without consent for the use of political campaigning. This adds to growing concerns about online privacy on social media. Nick Mcfadden -
Musical.ly Migrates to TikTok
After the launch of TikTok, Musical.ly migrates its users over to the platform merging the two social media, adding to its already skyrocketing base of teenage users. Nick Mcfadden -
Potential TikTok Ban
U.S. President Donald Trump signs executive order banning TikTok until it is sold by a Chinese parent company. This was done out of fear that the Chinese company may be collecting unauthorized data from users. Nick Mcfadden -
A Call for Censorship
CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google are called before the senate for a hearing about business practices and censorship. Nick Mcfadden -
President Trump Banned And Restricted
Due to the violence and false conspiracies associated with President Trump and the 2020 Election outcome, President Trump and posts associated with him were removed from a multitude of social media. (Reddit, Twitch, Shopify, Twitter, Google pulled Parlor, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Apple, Discord, Pinterest, Amazon AWS, Stripe, Okta, Twilio) This demonstrates the power that these companies have over their services. Nick Mcfadden
