What was the first social networking website

In fact, these days most news channels get theirs from Twitter and the likewise social media platforms. Tumblr is the perfect mix of a microblogging platform and a social network.

David Karp founded it in It allowed users to create personal blogs and post multimedia content or texts on it. It quickly became the meeting place for people from different fandoms. Fandoms are mini online societies, that consist of fans of different pop culture phenomenon, such as Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Taylor Swift, etc.

On Tumblr, they can share fan art, fanfiction stories, fan clips — and express their opinions and theories freely. The platform attracts people from all walks of life. Because of the vast amount and variety of erotic content on Tumblr, the platform has been banned in China, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and Iran. Quite the record in the history of social media. After Verizon Media acquired Tumblr in , they have started a censorship campaign, banning explicit sexual images and GIFs. Social media really does offer everything , huh?

But Instagram managed to achieve that. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger created it and it launched in Ever since its popularity has been growing steadily. It has now become one of the Big Three of social networks history — standing proudly alongside Facebook and Twitter. Although Facebook bought it in , no one really sees them as one whole.

Users share photos and videos on their personal profiles. Nothing new here so far. They can, however, can edit content with various filters.

People organize photos via locations and hashtags. You can then use those hashtags to find similar content as well. Instagram has also taken care of the basics. Instagram also launched stories, which allow users to post photos and videos, that disappear after 24 hours.

They show up for a short period of time, before disappearing forever. It also has filters, the most famous one being the one with the dog ears. Seeing the craze around social media, Google decided to take matters in their own hands.

People expected it to be the next big thing in social media. The history of social media has also witnessed failures and this was one of them.

Maybe the problem was it was too similar to Facebook. Maybe it was the lack of a mobile app. Both Facebook and Twitter have apps that allow a smooth mobile experience. Or maybe it was the fact that no one actually used it. People already had Facebook and they had it for free, why would they go for a rip-off? It also failed to accomplish the goals the company had set for it.

From BBS to Facebook, quite a lot has changed. This timeline shows that, undeniably, social media has slowly become a fundamental part of our lives. They are like diaries anyone can access. People share their dilemmas, take photos of their lunches and post videos of their cats almost every day.

They constantly chat with their friends and families. Social networks have also turned into news channels. The younger generation especially gets most of their information from social media. Social media has even become the heart of marketing strategies for many marketers. Influencers are the people with large social media following, that everyone else likes and trusts.

Their recommendation provides brands with a lot of exposure and more sales. Apparently, people also tend to research products and services on social media, before investing in them.

People like following brands on social media and a pleasant social media experience can convince them to become clients. Social networks have become a gold mine for gaining exposure and reach — as well as raising awareness. Social media has evolved a lot for the relatively short time that it has existed.

Most of us are first-hand witnesses of social networks history being written. In this time, social networks have gone through some huge transformations. From emailing to real-time chats.

Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Before Facebook FB became popular, there were a number of social networking sites that captured the attention of users, at least for a time.

Lack of strategic planning, poor timing, or just plain bad luck contributed to the failure of these social media sites to achieve staying power.

Three, in particular, remain in memory as fantastic upstarts that existed before Facebook came along and swept them all away as the dominant player in social media.

In this article, we'll discuss what made Friendster, Myspace, and Second Life popular, and what eventually happened to each site. At one point, Friendster was considered the premier social media site. Within just a few months of its launch, the company had more than three million monthly active users. Instead, Abrams chose to take on venture capital investment and try to grow the company.

The company ended up falling apart. It was unable to manage the pace of new subscribers. Web pages routinely didn't load on time or at all. And a site redesign didn't seem worth bothering about. Friendster pretty much died in , though with a strong following in some of the Asian markets it managed to survive a few more years.

In , it resurrected as a gaming site and remained live until Research published by Cornell University says the main reason for Friendster's demise is that even though the site had millions of users in , the links were not resilient enough between the networks people created to sustain their connection.

MySpace focused on sound infrastructure and scalability. It became a place for users to build a personal community and house personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos.

By that time, the social network had more than 20 million monthly users. But, post, Myspace experienced a fall from grace in the social media space , losing millions of users monthly to the rising site Facebook.

Some reasons that have been discussed widely were an oversaturation of advertising, slow load times, and a loss of innovation where features were concerned. Notably, entertainer Justin Timberlake took an ownership stake in the company.

The new MySpace was focused on music where users could access millions of musical tracks and videos. MySpace still exists today. Time, Inc. While not a traditional social media networking site, Second Life was at one point, one of the most popular ways to meet and interact with friends on the Internet. The website launched in by Linden Lab as a virtual world based on 3D modeling. The site aimed to empower users with the ability to interact with other people virtually, participate in jobs, and engage in other activities online through the use of an avatar.

This service was followed in by Friendster. These rudimentary platforms attracted millions of users and enabled email address registration and basic online networking. Weblogs, or blogs, another early form of digital social communication, began to gain popularity with the launch of the LiveJournal publishing site. This coincided with the launch of the Blogger publishing platform by the tech company Pyra Labs, which was purchased by Google in In , LinkedIn was founded as a networking site for career-minded professionals.

By , it had grown to more than million users worldwide. It remains the social media site of choice for job seekers as well as human resources managers searching for qualified candidates. Two other major forays into social media collapsed after a burst of initial success. In , Myspace launched. By , it was eclipsed by Facebook.

Here is an overview of the most prominent social media networks of Launched in by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, it has nearly 1. Founded in by Stanford graduate Kevin Systrom as a photo-sharing site and purchased by Facebook in , Instagram has more than 1 billion users worldwide. Founded in by Chinese tech company ByteDance, this short-form video-sharing site was merged with the U. As of early , it had more than million users worldwide. With the advent of social media apps that could run on smartphones, end users could take their communities with them wherever they went.

Businesses took advantage of this new consumer mobility by serving their customers new, simpler methods of interacting — and new ways of buying goods and services. At first, social media existed to help end users connect digitally with friends, colleagues, family members, and like-minded individuals they might never have met in person. Desktop access to bulletin board services such as CompuServe and Prodigy made it easier to grow free online communities without ever leaving the house.

The invention of the smartphone liberated social media from the desktop and laptop computer. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media services thrived in the mobile app environment. Technological improvements — specifically, powerful in-phone cameras — shifted the focus of mobile apps to video and images. In addition to written messages, end users could now broadcast in real time. Instagram, in particular, became the app of choice for social media users interested in travel, entertainment, fashion, and other visually oriented topics.

As social media companies grew their user bases into the hundreds of millions, the business applications of Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms began to take shape. Social media companies had access to some of the richest trackable user data ever conceived.

Facebook began to place ads on its platform as early as Twitter enabled ads in LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok all have attempted to monetize their services through various forms of sponsored advertising. In addition to placing ads on social media platforms, companies discovered the potential utility of cultivating an active, engaged social media presence.

Whereas social media advertising must be paid for, the act of creating and sharing informative or entertaining content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms is an attempt by brands to grow an audience organically, in other words, without paying for it directly. The combination of advertising, or paid social media marketing, and organic social media outreach evolved into the digital marketing specialty known as social media marketing.

As the ability to reach consumers expanded thanks to social media, marketing professionals quickly adapted.