A brief Timeline - Social Media

let us start at the beginning

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1997

The first "social media" is born

Six Degrees is commonly agreed to be the very first modern social media among those around long enough to remember it. it was originally launched in the year 1997 and was shut down in early 2001 to be reopened less than a year later, The site is still online today a whopping 21 years after its initial release and is still home to a rather large user base.

2003

The first surge of social media

In the early 2000's MySpace popped up out of nowhere, having many of the features of SixDegrees but with some key differences, mainly that it was not invite only but free to use and open to the world. MySpace very quickly became one of the most popular websites on the internet and was regularly visited more than 2 million times a day. in fact it was so popular that from 2005 to 2009 it was the most popular website on the internet

2004

Facebook is born

Facebook is the one social media site to beat them all, originally launched on the 4th of February 2004 as thefacebook.com and was later renamed to Facebook, it was quickly surround by controversy as Mr Zuckerberg was accused of stealing the idea from a group of three Harvard senior students.

Despite the allegations against them, Facebook.com inc. quickly rose to be one of the most used websites in history with over 15 million monthly visitors and more than 100 million active users

2006

Twitter appears from nowhere

In the year 2006, the very least people were expecting was another social media giant to appear from nowhere, in fact, that is one of the things that made it so successful.

Launching on March 21st 2006 Twitter Inc. is one of the giants of social media alongside famous faces such as istagram and snapchat, but it wasnt always that way, in fact Twitter was and still is making a net loss of over $100 million on a yearly basis. With a value of over $15.7 billion Twitter is far from the most valuable company on earth but it is a wonderful example of what social media should be, simple to use, quick to pickup and use. it provides a sense of usefulness to the user rather than making them feel more alone.

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2010 - Present Day

The Second Social Media Flood

In the years since the success stories of Facebook and Twitter, many other small scale (and not so successful) social media platforms have been created and lost to the endless depths of the internet, never to bee seen again unless they are glorified in the form of Memes. Some such platforms are Google +, and Itunes Ping. There were some success stories though, keep reading to find them.

2010

Instagram

Instagram was one of the few successful social media platforms that came out The Second SM flood, and was one of the first to have things like direct messaging and private messaging, it was later taken over by Facebook Inc.

2011

Snap Chat

Snap Chat is the current most used social media platform among the social media generation, it has gone from a mere 46 million active daily users in Q1 of 2014 to a whopping 191 million as of Q1 2018, not only is this more than a 100 million increase, it puts it into a position to change the way we chat, share images, and share videos. with some fantastic and unheard of features such as stories, photo filters and picture editing built into the platform, it has gone from relatively unknown, to one of the most recognizable social media platforms in the UK within the space of four years.

2015

Discord

Discord is a cross platform VOIP communications service which by the definition of social media counts enough to be on this list, with a steadily growing user base of more than 14 million people, it is small but mighty, it has been able to grab more than $30 million in investments as a promising startup and doesn't seem to be going away any time soon, in fact it keeps on growing. With more than 350 million messages sent on the platform per day and open source developers able to rake in money in the thousands per month from selling premium services on this platform, there is no doubt in our mind that Discord is going to stick around for the foreseeable future. it has features that were only recently added to other services such as video calls and screen sharing (you wont find that in your book of faces will you Mr. Zuckerberg) and an open source api allowing people to automate tasks within their group chats (servers), with a wonderful and welcoming community Discord is the platform that is keeping projects like Vue.js and even a few cyrptocurrencies, in fact, Discord is home to over 140 open source projects and that number rises daily