The Full History of Social Media Innovations

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The Full History of Social Media Innovations
1997-2019

• By
• www.buzzybrandaing.com

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• We tend to think of Facebook, or maybe Myspace,
  as launching social media into the mainstream.
• And from there the social network was a fully
  formed concept that weve all used for the last
  10-15 years to stay in touch with friends and
  make new connections.
• To swim in the feed of content. Every day.
• In reality, we owe the modern social network to
  several small innovations along the way, going
  back to the mid 1990s.
• Myspace and Facebook did a lot to define the
  modern social network.
• But what social platforms look like today was a
  huge collaboration. Competition among many social
  platforms has been the key.
• The last few years have been full of negative
  stories for social networks privacy stories,
  political stories, mental health stories.

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• The future of social networks needs to be filled
  with innovations that help us combat bad actors
  and bad habits. Reduce abuse, fake news, spam.
• And we see the beginnings of that. Facebook and
  Twitter are both committed to platform health
  and creating more positive discussions in a a way
  weve never quite seen. Its not enough yet, but
  its a start.
• I look forward to seeing which social networks
  lead these platform health innovations for the
  future of social media.
• But it has me thinking. How did we get here? I
  recently wrote about a few suggestions for
  Snapchat to help them snap our of their user
  growth plateau. And most of those suggestions are
  for Snapchat to simply start incorporating some
  basic social network discovery and sharing
  features.
• Each of these modern, basic features of the
  modern social network came in the form of
  innovations in the past 20 years. I outlined each
  of these innovations below in chronological
  order.
• 1997 Profiles and Friends (Six Degrees)
• Six Degrees, named for the famous Kevin Bacon
  connection theory, as the original social network
  as we would think of them today. They were the
  first to have profile pages and the ability for
  profile to connect with one another, aka
  Friends.
• 1999 Updates, Followers, Groups (Livejournal)
• With LiveJournal we see the beginning of what
  would ultimately become the feed of content.
  LiveJournal was an early blogging platform with a
  social layer. Users could post updates and
  express themselves, allowing their connections to
  keep up with them.

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• 2002 Friend Discoverability, Profile Comments
  (Friendster)
• Friendster was the first to allow profile
  comments and made it easier to find and connect
  with more people.
• 2003 Profile Privacy (Hi5)
• We wont see many privacy innovations on this
  list, but Hi5 was the first to allow you to have
  a public profile or restrict your profile only to
  your friends.
• 2003 First Business Social Network (LinkedIn)
• You might not realize it but LinkedIn is the
  oldest modern social network. Founded before
  Myspace even.
• 2003 Scale (MySpace)
• MySpace did not bring a lot of new features that
  I would call innovations. They had the Top 8
  friends list. A music focus. And maybe went a bit
  too bar in letting users customize their
  profiles.
• Most of what they did is perfect the concept of a
  social network to the extent that it took off and
  went mainstream for the first time. They launched
  in 2003 and were sold to NewsCorp in 2006. Later
  in 2006 they became the most popular website in
  the world at the time, with 75 million unique
  visitors each month.

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• 2004 The Wall (Facebook)
• When Facebook launched, many of their innovations
  were not apart of their original success. The
  Wall, a profile with updates from you, from your
  activity, and from your friends, was the life
  blood of the platform. It was an evolution of
  posts and comments from past social networks and
  the pre-cursor to the modern feed most modern
  social networks thrive on.
• 2005 Upvotes (Reddit/Digg)
• Digg and Reddit both launched as news
  aggregators. Reddit slowly turned into more of a
  social network and discussion platform, and still
  is today. From the beginning, one of the big
  contributions from both platforms to social media
  was their upvote and downvote buttons. The
  original engagement click, sending a signal
  back to an algorithm about what content was
  popular. This predated the Facebook Like by
  several years.
• 2006 Microblogging (Twitter)
• They brought us the 140 characters that we all
  love and hate. And of course, its now 280
  characters. Plus links, photos, video, live
  video, Medium posts, etc. But still,
  microblogging gave us mobile access to social
  media for the first time. You could text to and
  from 40404 and access most of the features of the
  site. It was very advanced at the time.
• I remember live Tweeting a Barack Obama rally in
  2007. Without Twitter there was no way to share
  or cover that event live. There was no iPhone
  yet.

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• 2006 The Feed (Twitter)
• Facebook launched the News Feed in late 2006, but
  Twitter was there first. Twitter really launched
  the original social media feed of content. They
  had a public content and a feed of content from
  all the friends you followed on the site. It was
  so successful, that Facebook quickly followed
  suit. Every social network today has some type of
  content feed. Its strange to think that we ever
  had social media without it.
• 2006 _at_ Replies/Tags (Twitter)
• The _at_ symbol was used before Twitter to signify
  that you were speaking to a person, but Twitter
  was the first social network to perfect it as an
  official feature. This organic innovation from
  Twitter users is the first step of what lead
  Twitter to become a platform focused on
  discussion, rather than just stand alone eating
  lunch status updates.
• 2007 Social Ads (Facebook)
• Myspace and Facebook both had ads before this.
  But when Facebook launched their ad platform as a
  stand alone product in 2007, it cemented their
  dominance. It made them into the ad giant they
  are today and has forever changed the advertising
  industry (and privacy).
• 2007 Hashtags (Twitter)
• As with many of the innovations on Twitter, users
  first started using hashtags organically to tag
  group discussions or events. Hashtags are now
  used on almost every major social network
  (Snapchat and Reddit are still holding out for
  some reason).

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• 2007 Retweet (Twitter)
• Once again, Twitter users innovated, looking for
  a way to reshare and amplify content. First with
  Retweet and then the shorter RT. It took
  until 2009 for Twitter to make the Retweet button
  an official feature on the platform. Even today
  some users prefer to type out RT.
• 2009 Like Button (Facebook)
• The famous Facebook thumbs up launched in 2009
  and never looked back. Likes, favorites, and
  reactions have become increasingly important to
  social algorithms and increasingly complex.
• 2010 Mobile Social Network (Instagram)
• In 2010, Instagram launched on iOS as the first
  mobile only social network. Since their success,
  all social networks have been primarily if not
  exclusively access on smart phones.
• 2011 Ephemeral Content (Snapchat)
• When Snapchat originally launched as a privacy
  focused messaging app, we had our first privacy
  innovation in social media since Hi5. This time
  limit on content would carry over to their
  Stories innovation as well.

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• 2013 Stories (Snapchat)
• Snapchat Stories were the biggest innovation to
  how we use social networks since the feed first
  started with Twitter. Still today, stories are
  driving tons of growth and new content trends
  across the industry.
• 2013 Short Video (Vine)
• Vine launched short video editing from
  smartphones. Even though Instagram overtook Vine
  and Twitter would eventually acquire and shutter
  the product, some of the biggest trends in social
  media today, from stories to IGTV to TikTok, can
  be traced back to what Vine started.
• 2015 Live Video (Meerkat)
• Meerkat had a short but influential run. They
  created the live video trend from mobile. They
  made live vertical video mainstream.
• 2015/2016 Video Social Network
  (TikTok/Musical.ly)
• There is a lot to consider when it comes to
  innovation from TikTok. But I think the most
  important innovation to look at is that TikTok
  has become the first real social network that is
  video only. And no, YouTube does not count.
• We may very well look back and see TikToks use
  of challenges, collaborations, and video editing
  tools as additional innovations.
• But today, what stands out to me, is theyve
  created a true video social network with a clean
  user experience for discoverability, profiles,
  following, sharing, commenting, and groups.

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