By Erin Quinlan
We’re all familiar with social media today, but do you remember the early days of it?
We’re all familiar with social media today, but do you remember the early days of it?
Who
remembers Classmates.com?
Early
users couldn’t create profiles, but they could locate long-lost grade
schoolmates. It was a hit almost immediately, and even today the service boasts
some 57 million registered accounts.
In
2002, social networking hit really its stride with the launch of Friendster.
Friendster used a degree of separation concept similar to that of the
now-defunct SixDegrees.com, refined it into a routine dubbed the “Circle of
Friends,” and promoted the idea that a rich online community can exist only
between people who truly have common bonds.
Within
a year after its launch, Friendster boasted more than three million registered
users and a ton of investment interest.
Introduced
in 2003, LinkedIn took a more serious, sober approach to social networking.
Rather than being a mere playground for former classmates and teenagers,
LinkedIn was, and still is, a networking resource for business people who want
to connect with other professionals. Today, LinkedIn boasts more than 297
million members.
MySpace
also launched in 2003. Though it no longer the top social media platform in
many English-speaking countries, MySpace was once the perennial favorite. It
did so by tempting the key young adult demographic with music, music videos,
and a fun, feature-filled environment.
Facebook
now leads the global social networking pack. Facebook launched in 2004 as a
Harvard-only exercise and remained a campus-oriented site for two years before
finally opening to the general public in 2006. The site currently boasts more
than 1.3 billion active users.
One
key to Facebook’s success was the “Like” button. Now you can “like” or “tweet”
just about everything even when you’re not on Facebook or Twitter.
Realizing
the power of social networking, Google decided to launch its own social network
(Google+) in 2007. It differed from Facebook and Twitter in that it wasn’t
necessarily a full-featured networking site, but rather a social “layer” of the
overall Google experience. Within just four weeks, Google+ had garnered 25
million unique visitors, with as much as 540 million active monthly users as of
June 2014.
Over
the course of the past two years, smartphones, tablets, etc. have changed
social networking and the way we communicate with one another entirely. Given
the abrupt rise in mobile computing, it’s not surprising the most popular
social media platforms of the past several years hinge on the capabilities of
smartphones.
Photo
and video-sharing applications such as Snapchat and Instagram, the latter of
which has now garnered 20 billion images since the app’s initial inception in
October 2010, exist almost entirely on mobile.
The
same goes with platforms such as Foursquare, an application in which users use
their smartphones to check in to various locations around the globe, and
various matchmaking services.
Tinder
currently boasts more than 10 million daily users, each of which swipes for
potential partners based on their approximately in relation to their
smartphone.
Mobile-based
platforms also approach social networking in an entirely different fashion than
their web-based counterparts. Rather than offering a comprehensive social
networking experience like Myspace and Google+, they instead specialize in a
specific kind of interaction service that involves the sharing of public images
(Instagram), the private sharing of images sharing (Snapchat), augmented
reality (Foursquare), and location-based matchmaking (Tinder).
People
now exist on multiple platforms, and instead of fighting against this trend,
companies are tapping into this new environment.
It
appears that many people have high hopes that virtual reality will become the
next blockbuster computing platform. The technology already exists, and with
the consumer version of the Oculus Rift VR headset slated to go on sale in late
2014 for under $300, the potential for widespread adoption of virtual reality
has never been greater.
Need
help wrapping your head around all the social media trends?
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Erin Quinlan is the Content Marketing Manager of The Silent Partner Marketing, a boutique marketing firm focused on helping businesses grow in an age of exploding technology. You can find The Silent Partner Marketing on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.
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