The History of Social Media Platforms - Maddy Wise

The Developing of CompuServe

1969

First major online service provider in the U.S. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe)

America Online- AOL's Instant Messenger

1991

Web portal and online service provider; originally provided a dial-up service, web portal, instant messaging, e-mail. Later purchased Netscape, and followed by purchasing Time Warner. Rapidly declined after this by 2009. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL)

ICQ

1996

The internet starts moving into blogging and instant messaging; ICQ, from phrase "I Seek You" was the first stand-alone instant messenger and the first online instant messenger service.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ)

Six Degrees

1997

Named after the 'Six Degrees of Separation' theory; allowed users to created a profile and friend other users. This lasted until 2001.
(http://historycooperative.org/the-history-of-social-media/)

Myspace

2003

Original social media profile website; "offered an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace). Largest social networking site in the world from 2005-2008. Overtaken by Facebook in the number of world-wide visitors in April 2008. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace)

LinkedIn

May 5, 2003

Geared toward professionals who want to network toward each other (http://historycooperative.org/the-history-of-social-media/); has topped 315 million users globally, today, "which statistically is the majority of professionals" (https://thelinkedinman.com/history-linkedin/)

Facebook

2004

Launched by Mark Zuckerberg; Originally launched just for Harvard students, but, Facebook was said to "soon become the social media giant that would set the bar for all other social media services" (http://historycooperative.org/the-history-of-social-media/), so he released the service to the world. Currently the number one social media website today, with over a billion users.

Youtube

Feb 14, 2005

Created as a video-sharing website by PayPal employees where users could upload, share, and view content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube); founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in stock on November 13, 2006. The interface of Youtube is available in 76 different language versions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube).

Twitter

2006

Inspired by the popularity of text messaging or SMS, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Noah Glass, and Evan Williams created Twitter. This allowed a user with a service where he/she could send "tweets" of 140 characters or less. (http://historycooperative.org/the-history-of-social-media/) This limit was doubled on November 17, 2017 for all languages except for Japanese, Korean and Chinese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter).

Spotify

Apr 23, 2006

"Spotify is a music, podcast, and video streaming service that was officially launched on October 7, 2008"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify). Spotify, founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, is a freemium service, but features without ads or limitations while listening require a subscription. Provides access to 30 million+ songs, with more than 140 million monthly active users as of June 2017. "As of 2017, Spotify is not yet a profitable company"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify).

Pinterest

2010

Pinterest is "a web and mobile application company that operates a software system designed to discover information on the World Wide Web, using images, GIFs and videos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest). Founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp; described as a "catalogue of ideas" that inspire action of those ideas. Reached 175 million monthly active users in 2017 (https://business.pinterest.com/en/blog/175-million-people-discovering-new-possibilities-on-pinterest).

Snapchat

2011

Former students at Stanford University, Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown created this image messaging and multimedia application. Researchers thought this out to be an app of sexual content and sexting. Snapchat started out as person-to-person photo sharing, and now allows users to upload "Stories" which show 24-hour media content and a "Discover" option for advertising entertainment. Snapchat has 166 million daily active users, as of May 2017.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapchat)