Many people cannot believe that it has been only 11 years since Facebook was founded. Many people cannot imagine life without social media and wonder how people were able to communicate before it was created. In this first blog, I am going to examine the development and evolution of social media and also provide some interesting statistics.
As Wikipedia suggest, Facebook is an online social networking service that was launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates. It was initially created to facilitate communication between Harvard students. Since 2006, the site has become accessible by anyone who is at least 13 years old. According to Forbes, the real time net worth of Facebook is $36.1 Billion. It is definitely the most preferred and used social networking site ever created. Now it has more than 1.23 billion users and I believe that this number speaks for itself. Of course, there were other instant message programs developed prior to Facebook like ICQ which was released in 1996 and was quite popular for its time.
The beginning of the 21st century brought big development in social media as in 2002 the site Friendster was launched. It allowed people to register and create their own profile, add friends, create and share online content and media as well. By that time it had over 90 million registered users and 90% of its traffic came from Asia. Today, the site has been redesign and transformed into a social gamming site.
Moving forward in time, 2003 was the year when both LinkedIn and MySpace were released. Besides that, Skype as a telecommunications application software product was launched in the same year having great success. It has 300 million users and almost 5 million daily active ones.
2 years later, or exactly 10 years ago, the video platform Youtube was introduced to the public. According to the site it has more than 1 billion users and 300 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute. This site is huge and it is not only used for sharing video content, but for advertising as well. Statistics suggests that more than a million advertisers are using Google ad platforms.
Lastly, I will mention the development of Twitter in 2006. The mission of this site is “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” And without a doubt, the site manages to do that for all of its 288 million monthly active users who send 500 million Tweets per day.
Now, having read this entire information, people may question their perception of time because it really has been only slightly over 10 years since all these sites were launched. Communication has evolved enormously over that period. Nowadays, people will stare at someone who doesn’t have a Facebook account and that may even decrease this person’s chances for further communication. The truth is that social media has taken over human lives in any aspect- they feel the need to update their status every day, upload new videos and pictures of themselves, what they are eating and places they visit. Next blogs will refer to people’s motivation of going online and how the social media has changed the way we converse with family, friends, colleagues and total strangers. Moreover, some of the risks of going online will be examined and solutions for avoiding them will be provided.
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Alone with everybody 