Evolution Of Social Media

Evolution Of Social Media

Social media has been in the works since the late 70’s for primitive days of newsgroups listervs and introduction of chat rooms. It has changed the way we communicate as well as gathering and sharing information. The “Golden Era” started in 2001 by this time there was many chat rooms and blogs.  Starting in 2001 there was a constant stream of social innovation that started with the first crowd sourced encyclopedia, (Wikipedia) this was followed by Friendster, Myspace and Facebook in 2004, twitter was then created in 2006. While twitter and Facebook are the top two social media platforms today, Myspace was popular until twitter overtook it since then Myspace has died down. Today your common smart phone has social apps such as Snapchat and WhatsApp. This makes it a lot easier to interact on the go, other app have been developed such as messenger for Facebook and even new social Medias with Tumblr, Tinder and vine. 

The first social media site that most people used was called Six Degrees. It was named after the ‘six degrees of separation’ theory and lasted for 1997 till 2001. It allowed users to make a profile and friend other users. It even allowed those who didn’t register as users to confirm friendships and connect to people. From Six Degrees the internet moved onto instant messaging and blogging. Blogging doesn’t seem like social media however people communicate with other blog members.

By the year 2000, around 100 million people had access to the internet, it became common for people to engage socially online. More and more people used chat rooms to make friends, dating and discus topics that they wanted to talk about. 2003 arrived and the first social media surge hit, MySpace was created and it was the original social media profile website. Leading into inspiring websites like Facebook.