The development of social media - Since our early days, the way we communicate has changed drastically. For hundreds of thousands of years, we have put a lot of effort to get information from place to place as quickly and efficiently as possible. The time of the barriers, posting pigeons and telegrams has long gone and when TV and radio have dropped unexpectedly in recent years, we have gradually adopted another form of communication, which is to use social media.
We no longer have to buy birthday cards for our friends and family. All we have to do is post Happy Birthday! Go to the timeline and they'll know we thought of them. While keeping objects looks nicer than sending messages to one another, the reality is that a large number of gift card shops have closed around the world as social media became more popular.
What we call social networks continues to grow with each passing day and has had its own fair development over the past 10-15 years. Today, Facebook and YouTube have found their way to every corner of the globe. For many of us, these social networking phenomena and new terms have found their way into our lives in a booming way. Many of us do not even have the time or effort to keep up with what is happening on the Internet.
It's smart or at least interesting to dive deeper into the history of social media, even though it's short. In order to fully appreciate its origin, we must look back at the point where the Internet is not famous and well developed today.
Out of the embers, the magnificent flame began to burn with the confusing fire.
We will take you through the most important steps that social media take with the growth of the Internet in these years. You will be able to see every stage of development that the social network has gone through, along with certain technological advances leading to it.
We will not go back to the Stone Age, instead of starting in the '90s, where the' high-speed 'Internet connection we already know and love today still doesn't exist.
The first phase (1997-2004)
Even in the late 90s, high-speed Internet still didn't touch the sun. We used dial-up modems or nothing else, so websites in this age are built with these extremely slow connection speeds.
Websites mostly consist of text and links and don't really have YouTube's design layout. Only later versions of HTML allowed more difficult design, but even these were extremely basic. They mainly include tags for titles, links and paragraphs. Visual elements like images, typography, and future navigation.
At the moment, there are more than 17 million computers connected to the Internet, which offers many opportunities for social networking.
Function and first social networking website
During this time, we were able to chat on the Internet, share links, files and basically stay in touch online when we wanted to. ICQ, popular talk shows, multiplayer games and popular abbreviations like BRB and LOL have also become popular.
Among the precursors of social media is the Usernet System. It was created in 1979 by Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott, as a system that allowed users to post articles to newsgroups. It has given way to the development of customers reading news and reading RSS feeds, which is a popular way to follow today's news website. Big websites like Google and Yahoo! Use a lot of what has been set up in the Usernet system.
As we became more adept at creating different web-based websites and services for different purposes, we soon launched the first social media website in 1997. Its name is Six Degrees, named after the theory ".six degrees of separation". It lived a short life, from 1997 to 2001.
Six Degrees has given guests the ability to create their profile and connect with other customers. Even those who are not registered can confirm friendship. Many people have connected in this way and it has given way to the idea of social networking and more ideas.
In 2002, social media made great strides with Friendster, MySpace, and LinkedIn Facebook to attack the Internet. It's time for social media to grow, so many websites offer the ability to have a circle of friends on their network and create a rich online community.
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A great example is Friendster, a company that had more than three million users in its first year of launch, also attracted a lot of return on investment. The number increases exponentially and reaches over 100 million users in its peak. Sadly, Friendster soon saw its decline as MySpace dominated page views. This makes Friendster disappear in the fog of the Internet quite quickly.
MySpace is Friendster's copy, which was published shortly thereafter and revolutionized social media and the music industry. Users are allowed to edit their profile, have space for ads and bands to showcase their music and engage fans with groundbreaking marketing.
Year 2003, many other social sites have seen sunlight such as LinkedIn (network for professionals), Flickr (photo hosting website) and various podcasts.
2004, the most popular social network today, Facebook is launched.
Facebook was created at Harvard University and is called their own Friendster. Although it is only for Harvard students, its creator, Mark Zuckerberg saw its potential and opened Facebook to the world in 2006. Shortly after that, Twitter was released and social networks gradually spread and grow faster.
The leap of social networking (2006-2010)
Facebook and Twitter have become the most popular social networking websites these years.
Facebook has become the largest social networking site for good reason. It's not just about Zuckerberg's time, because Facebook has brought so many innovative features to their platform that we haven't seen before. These features have created success.
Its open API makes it possible for developers to create different applications that can be launched within Facebook itself. Soon, hundreds and thousands of applications were integrated into Facebook, so this was the prime time to launch the Facebook App Store. That is where all applications are organized and displayed. During this period, Twitter also created its own API and also achieved success on a large scale.
The ubiquitous 'Like' button is also a major contributor to the success of the website and it quickly became known on the Internet and even outside the Internet. Today you can 'like' or 'tweet' anything you find on the Internet.
When social networking hit, Google launched its own Google+ social networking platform in 2007. It's different from Twitter and Facebook because it's not an independent social networking site. It has added social functions to the already famous Google services, creating a social layer on them.
Google has its own unique Hangouts feature, which has attracted attention and it has led to Facebook also launching its own video chat feature.
When Google+ had more than 25 million page views and more than 540 active users per month in 2014, Facebook still had much greater success.
Seeing the importance and benefits of social media, businesses quickly accept and share their ads on their social media sites and social media addresses on their own websites. surname. Soon, social media icons were seen everywhere on the Internet and businesses also shared the content of their websites on social media. This is the beginning of a completely different kind of marketing method, called social media marketing. Social media has established itself as the main component of any good marketing strategy.
Other social media platforms like YouTube, Tumblr, Vine and Pheed are worth mentioning, but there are thousands of specific social media websites today.
The rise of mobile devices
When smartphones and tablets come into our lives, the way we communicate has changed drastically. They allow us to have the functionality in hand only on our desktop a few years ago. The growth of mobile computing also benefits the popular social media platforms we have used, as they take full advantage of the capabilities of our smartphones.
These capabilities soon gave way to photo and video sharing platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. Instagram alone has collected 20 billion photos since its launch in October 2010.
Such mobile-based platforms have a completely different approach on social media than we have used on web-based applications. Each of these apps specializes in specific types of services and interactions, for simple purposes. For example: Instagram and Snapchat specialize in photo sharing, Tinder specializes in matchmaking, etc.
Social media today
There are thousands of niche specific social media platforms that are basically the same as those mentioned above, but with slightly different purposes. Some are more popular than others, but even smaller websites are being used by specific populations or groups. What kind of social media people like varies from person to person. Each of these platforms focuses on different things, like Instagram, which focuses on which photo is best.
With so many social media platforms available, accounts are linked to each other and cross-posting, putting content on multiple websites at once. Their designs are also more modern and we can see the popularity of minimalism among them. Flat graphics and a simple interface dominate the most popular platforms that attract more audiences.
Finally, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have integrated video streaming. Users are allowed to have their own live broadcasts at any time. You may have the only benefit of sharing everything, in this moment with other users.
Social media still holds unprecedented capabilities for people around the world and continues to grow even as we speak.
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The future of social media
At this point, it's hard to find the Future that holds for social media but it's clear it will continue.
With the development of virtual reality and the Oculus rift, social media will launch to a whole new level pretty soon. Facebook VR will be released very soon and users are allowed to interact, play games and access famous websites in a virtual environment. It will certainly bring social media closer to an experience like science fiction.
In brief
This concludes our story of the development of social media. We will soon see the kind of twists and thrills that it will bring in the future.
I hope that you enjoyed reading through this article and we will see you soon in the upcoming articles. Remember to stay tuned for more cool things related to technology!
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