While social media has been around for a while, it wasn't until the launch of Facebook that the field exploded. That means thousands of people have been using social media platforms for many years before Facebook even existed. As such, there's a lot to learn from these early adopters and how they used social media before Facebook was even a thing.
In 2003, Friendster was the leading social media site and once had three million monthly active users. After 2007, the site fell out of favor on social media, losing millions of users a month through the rise of sites like Facebook. In 2008, Facebook overtook the music-orientated social networking site Myspace in popularity, and Rupert Murdoch sold News Corp, the site in 2011, for $35 million to a certain media group, Justin Timberlake.
As Facebook became more popular, several social networks attracted users "attention, at least for a while. In the second half of the 2010s, an alternative social media site appeared due to growing fears that many major social media sites were editing the content on their sites to suppress certain demographic factors. There are still some huge social media sites on this list, but they are slowly dying out as users switch to other social media platforms.
When Google realized the power of social networks, it decided in 2007 to create its social network, Google +. Google+ differed from Facebook and Twitter in that it was not a full networking site but a social level to the general Google experience. Six Degrees' first recognizable social media site, which allowed users to upload a profile and become friends with other users.
Today, WeChat, owned by Chinese technology giant Tencent, offers WeChat users basic social media and the ability to conduct financial transactions such as buying and booking flights and hotels. Nowadays, social media platforms are also used by private users and companies to promote themselves and act as advertising platforms. Facebook was not, in fact, the first modern social media platform or social networking site.
While Myspace helped shape the digital marketing age and catalyzed the success of Facebook, the social media platform has ceded its title as the most popular social media network to Facebook. After a difficult 2018 year, Facebook remains the leading social network in the United States, with 16.976 million mobile users accessing the Facebook app in September 2019.
In May 2011, the service gave up user-profiles and became a social entertainment site. Friendster developed into a social gaming site in 2011 and is now touted with more than 115 million users in the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. Facebook was established among many social networks of university students who shared their products with other university students in 2004. It was introduced to Harvard in 2004 to remain for two full years a campus-oriented site before it opened to the general public in 2006.
With Six Degree, where users could share photos, videos and messages with many people, social media went a step further. Six Degree did what it could with its millions of registered users, but the shortage of people connected to an Internet network was limited.
Six Degrees allowed users to create their own personal and unique profiles and communicate through the platform with users around the world. With an obvious focus on music, Apple's social network was lucky to launch in 2010 with more than a million users. MySpace, the rival of Friendster, quickly became a focal point for millions of hip teenagers. Its customizable public profiles, including music videos, photos, and half-naked selfies, were accessible to everyone - a welcome contrast to the company's private profiles only available to registered users.
Early social networks such as Geocities, Six Degrees, and niche sites such as AsianAvenues, BlackPlanet, and LiveJournal showed significant differences. Still, they were all direct precursors of the modern social networks we understand. Three of them are remembered as fantastic Upstarts that existed long before Facebook (FB) swept away a series of social networking sites that captured the users "attention and were at least the dominant player on social media for a while. One way of bringing the social dimension to bear is facilitating communication and exchanges between users via the Internet.
Image Courtesy: Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
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