Social media marketing industrial blog

The Evolution of Social Media

By kvizcaino

  • 1844

    1844
    In a sense, social media began on May 24, 1844, with a series of electronic dots and dashes tapped out by hand on a telegraph machine.

  • 1969

    1969
    While the roots of digital communication run deep, most contemporary accounts of the modern origins of today’s internet and social media point to the emergence in 1969 of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network — the ARPANET.

  • 1980-90's

    1980-90's
    In the 1980s and ’90s, according to “The History of Social Networking” on the technology news site Digital Trends, the internet’s growth enabled the introduction of online communication services such as CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy. They introduced users to digital communication through email, bulletin board messaging, and real-time online chatting.

  • 1987

    1987
    In 1987, the direct precursor to today’s internet came into being when the National Science Foundation launched a more robust, nationwide digital network known as the NSFNET. A decade later, in 1997, the first true social media platform was launched.

  • 1999

    1999
    Weblogs, or blogs, another early form of digital social communication, began to gain popularity with the 1999 launch of the LiveJournal publishing site.

  • 2001

    2001
    This service was followed in 2001 by Friendster. These rudimentary platforms attracted millions of users and enabled email address registration and basic online networking.

  • 2002

    2002
    In 2002, LinkedIn was founded as a networking site for career-minded professionals. By 2020, it had grown to more than 675 million users worldwide. It remains the social media site of choice for job seekers as well as human resources managers searching for qualified candidates.

  • 2003

    2003
    This coincided with the launch of the Blogger publishing platform by the tech company Pyra Labs, which was purchased by Google in 2003.

  • 2008

    2008
    By 2008, it was eclipsed by Facebook. In 2011, Myspace was purchased by musician Justin Timberlake for $35 million, but it has since become a social media afterthought.

  • 2012

    2012
    Google’s attempt to elbow its way into the social media landscape, Google+, launched in 2012.

  • 2018

    2018
    A rocky existence came to an end in 2018, after the private information of nearly 500,000 Google+ users was compromised by a data security breach.