The history and development of social media
Social media has become an integral part of modern society.
There are such social networks where registered users are more than the population of many countries.
There are sites for uploading photos, video files, status change services, sites for meeting new people and for finding old friends.
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It seems there are social solutions for every need.
In this article we will look at the history and development of social media , from their modest beginnings to the present day.
Electronic bulletin boards
The first electronic bulletin boards appeared in the late 70s. Initially, they were on personal computers and users had to connect to them via the modem of the receiving computer. Such electronic bulletin boards allowed only one connection.
Although there were legal bulletin boards, most of them were at least partially involved in illegal or other shady businesses. Such bulletin boards usually contained pornography, virus codes, information and instructions for hackers and phreakers.
But bulletin boards were the first type of site that allowed users to log in and communicate with each other, albeit very slowly compared to what we are doing today.
Online Services
After the electronic bulletin boards came “online services”, such as CompuServe and Prodigy. They were the first truly “corporate” attempts to access the Internet.
CompuServe was the first company to incorporate chat into its list of services. Prodigy is responsible for creating more affordable online services (CompuServe was a fairly expensive service for most people, since it cost $ 6 per hour and in some remote areas the price went up to $ 30 per hour or more).
AOL also started its activities as an online service and has achieved great success in creating affordable Internet in the United States.
IRC, ICQ and instant messaging systems
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was created in 1988 and was used to transfer files, links and to communicate.
He is the progenitor of all of our instant messaging systems. However, IRC was basically a UNIX system, which restricted access to it.
ICQ was created in the mid-90s and was the first instant messaging system for the PC. ICQ was partly responsible for introducing avatars, abbreviations (LOL, BRB) and emoticons. He was soon followed by other instant messaging clients.
Dating websites
Dating sites are sometimes considered the first social networks. The first dating sites began to appear almost immediately as people began to use the Internet. They allowed users to create accounts (usually with photos) and communicate with other users.
Early social networks
Although many people consider dating sites or sites like Classmates.com to be the first social networks, in reality such sites do not fit this definition.
Dating sites rarely allowed you to have a list of friends, in your early years it was not possible either on Classmates.com (and the number of profiles there was too limited). The following sites are the first real social networks.
Six Degrees
The site “Six Degrees” was launched in 1997 and was the first modern social network. He allowed users to create a profile and make friends with other users of the site.
Although the site no longer exists, at one time it was quite popular and had somewhere a million users.
In 2000, it was bought for $ 125 million and in 2001 it was closed.
AsianAvenue, MiGente, BlackPlanet
These sites came into being after the launch of the Six Degrees site, between 1997 and 2001.
They allowed users to create profiles and add friends (mostly without requiring confirmation of who you are adding as friends). Users could create professional, personal and dating profiles on these sites.
These sites had some innovations, although they were the very first social networks.
Livejournal
LiveJournal was launched in 1999 and used a different approach to the concept of social networks.
While Six Degrees allowed users to create mostly static profiles, LiveJournal was built as a social network of constantly updated blogs.
LiveJournal has enabled users to communicate with each other by creating groups. This was the forerunner of frequent updates that we see in current social networks.
The early 2000s brought some huge changes in social networks and social media.
Friendster
Friendster is the first modern social network of general orientation. Founded in 2002, Friendster is still a fairly active social network with more than 90 million registered users and 60+ million unique visitors each month. Most of Friendster's traffic is Asian traffic (90%).
Friendster allowed people to find their friends, then friends of their friends, and so on, thereby expanding the network.
His goal was to provide a safer and faster place to meet than in real life. Partially, Friendster was a new kind of dating site.
Instead of finding pairs among people unfamiliar with each other on the basis of common interests, Friendster worked in a different way, assuming that people with common friends and acquaintances will have more chances to create pairs than those who do not have common friends.
Friendster was popular for its three user groups: gay, “Burning Man” visitors and bloggers.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn was founded in 2003 and was one of the first social networks dedicated to business.
At the beginning, LinkedIn allowed users to create a profile (regular resume) and communicate with each other through private messages. It also implied that you should be personally acquainted with the person with whom you are contacting the site.
Gradually, other features were also added, including groups, question and answer forums, and advanced profile features, including real-time status updates.
Myspace
MySpace was founded in 2003 and by 2006 it had already become the most popular social network in the world.
MySpace distinguished itself from its competitors by giving users the ability to fully customize the appearance of their profiles. Users could also upload songs to MySpace and add video files from other sites to their profiles.
Initially, MySpace allowed to communicate through personal messages, public comments left on the user profile and ads sent to all friends. Also, when registering, the user gets his own blog.
In 2006, MySpace introduced MySpace IM, an instant messaging client that allowed users to chat with their friends.
Other recent additions to MySpace features include the addition of a real-time status update and a news feed that shows friends’s activities on the site.
Facebook
Although Facebook was founded in 2004 as a social network for Harvard students, it quickly spread to other universities, schools, businesses, and ultimately to all (2006).
In 2008, Facebook became the most popular social network surpassing MySpace and still continues to grow.
Facebook does not allow the same profile appearance settings as MySpace does. However, Facebook allows users to post photos, video files and otherwise change the look of their profiles, if not design.
Over the past couple of years, Facebook has added several new features, including instant messaging / chat and applications (and its own developer platform).
Users have several different methods of communicating with each other. Private messages are available, you can also write on the wall of another user. Friends may see inscriptions on this wall, but these inscriptions are generally not accessible to other users. Users can easily change their privacy settings and allow different users to see different parts of their profiles, based on existing relationships (the main privacy settings are “only friends”, “friends of friends” and “all”).
Users can write notes that will be visible to all their friends. Users can also comment on the messages of their friends or most often mark the messages as “liked”.
As social networks evolved, niche sites for specific interest groups also appeared. There are niche sites for any interests, hobbies, industries and groups that you can imagine.
Ning
Ning is a platform for creating niche social networks. These social networks are hosted on Ning servers, but if you wish, you can pay and install on your server or pay and put your own instead of Ning brand.
New users can either create their own niche social networks or join one or more of the existing networks (there are currently more than 1.5 million networks).
Ning is the first widely used platform for creating social networks. Its biggest advantage is that it is extremely easy to use, which allows even technically inexperienced users to handle it.
While other social networking platforms require programming knowledge, Ning does not require such knowledge.
Social networks sponsored by companies
Corporations from various industries have created several niche social networking sites.
Authonomy is an example of such networks. This is a social network of writers that was created by the British branch of Harper Collins and connected thousands of writers from around the world. After that, many other companies have created the same network.
While these networks have active groups, many networks of such groups do not have and are closed due to lack of activity.
Hosting mefiafaylov
Social media is not limited to social networking sites. Hosting photos, video files and other multimedia content is also a popular social media activity.
Photobucket
Photobucket is the first large photo hosting site, founded in 2003.
Photobucket allows users to share photos in public or in password-protected albums. 500MB of disk space is available for users to store photos (until August 2009, 1GB of space was available).
PRO accounts receive 10GB of disk space (in July 2008, with 100GB decreased to 25GB and decreased to 10GB in August of 2009). Photobucket can also host video content.
In 2007, Photobucket was acquired by Fox Interactive Media (a subsidiary of News Corporation). It was rumored that Photobucket was sold for $ 250 million, although the terms of sale were never disclosed.
Flickr
Flickr in recent years has become a social network. Flickr claims that there are more than 3.6 billion photos on their servers, as of June 2009.
Flickr also has groups and allows users to create their own profiles, add friends and group photos and video files into albums.
One of the great advantages of Flickr is that it allows users to license their photos under “Creative Commons” and also allows them to retain all copyright to images.
Recently, Flickr also launched a collection called “The Commons”, which contains images from various museums and institutions under an “unlimited” license (meaning that the photos are in the public domain).
YouTube
YouTube is the first large video hosting site. It was launched in 2005.
Users can upload video files up to 10 minutes in size and share them via YouTube or pasting them to other sites (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.).
Now YouTube allows you to download HD video files and recently launched a service for the provision of television shows and films under the license of the copyright holders.
The main social functions of YouTube are video file ratings, comments, and the ability to subscribe to video feeds.
Revver
Revver took a different approach to video hosting.
Although YouTube, Metacafe, and most other video file hosting sites allowed users to add video files for free and didn’t pay a share of the content of their advertising revenue to their content creators, Revver shared revenue from the start.
Revver equally distributes the income generated by the video file with the creator of this video file. Some other video hosting sites are moving in the direction of revenue sharing, but Revver remains the first site to do this with all of its content.
Social news and bookmarks
Sharing photos and video files is not the only way to share information in social media.
The emergence of social news sites and bookmarks in the mid-2000s created new opportunities for distributing news and finding interesting content.
News has become more accessible through sites like Delicious, Digg and Reddit, which allowed users to share news or love other content that they find interesting with a wider audience than they could before.
Delicious
Delicious (aka, Del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking site that was founded in 2003. It allows users to bookmark any content they find on the Internet, tag this content and then share it with other users.
Users can search in bookmarks or browse them by tags. Delicious also allows you to view content that is popular with other users as well as view upcoming content.
Digg
Digg was founded in 2004 by Kevin Rose (Kevin Rose), Ron Gorodetsky (Ron Gorodetzky), Jay Adelson (Jay Adelson) and Owen Bjornom (Owen Byrne).
Digg users can exchange links to any content on the Internet, and other users can vote for this content — lift up (“dig”) or move down (“bury”). Users can also comment on content and have a list of friends.
Reddit
Reddit is another social news site that was launched in 2005. Reddit works on the same Digg principle, allowing users to vote for content, raising posts higher or lowering them below.
Users can view popular posts, new posts and “controversial” posts (presumably these are posts that have received many positive and negative ratings). Reddit also allows users to post comments on posts.
Real-time updates have become a new norm in social media. With the advent of Twitter in 2006, status updates have become a new norm in social networks. At the moment, almost all social networks have the function of status updates in real time.
Twitter
Twitter was founded in 2006 and gained great popularity during the SxSW conference (South by Souhtwest) in 2007.
During the conference, Tweets multiplied three times from 20 thousand to 60. Twitter created a social network that now has many popular users (Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Soleil Moon Frye, MS) Hamer (MC Hammer), Oprah (Oprah), Martha Stewart (Martha Stewart) and many others).
Twitter has also spawned a number of third-party sites and applications, becoming more a platform than a simple service. There are client applications for updating Twitter accounts, services for tracking Twitter updates and services for posting photos and video files directly to Twitter.
Other services with real-time updates
As mentioned earlier, almost every social network now provides users with the ability to update their status. Facebook introduced the user status update feature a couple of years ago. MySpace introduced this feature more than a year ago. And recently, the same function was added to LinkedIn.
Real-time status updates allow users to be in contact with their friends and family on a regular basis and often improve the relationship between them.
When you always know what is happening with your friends and family, it will be easier to find common interests, actions and other information that you might never have learned when communicating in real life.
The role of the iPhone in real-time updates
The iPhone has a great merit in the growing popularity of updates in real time. Before the advent of the iPhone, mobile browsers were uncomfortable at best and nearly unusable at worst.
But the iPhone has made the process of viewing sites more convenient, I can even say pleasant. Applications have been added for almost every social network, which makes it possible to update entries or status on the go.
Other phones followed the example of the iPhone and at the moment there are several more phones available that allow users to easily update their status on social networks or add new entries (including videos and photos).
The role of the iPhone was so powerful in social media that at the moment social networks are available specifically for iPhone users. iRovr is a social networking application that is designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
It allows users to upload photos, make status updates, links (including YouTube videos), create polls, subscribe to RSS feeds, etc. It was launched in 2007 and its popularity continues to grow.
Lifestreaming and Lifecasting (online video broadcasting)
Real-time updates have caused many people to start broadcasting on-line everything they do. Although some prefer to broadcast by combining all their activities on the Internet in one place (for example, FriendFeed).
Ustream.tv
Ustream was founded in the summer of 2006 and became the choice of a portal for broadcasting videos of such stars as Ashton Kutcher and Soleil Moon Frye.
Although most Ustream users broadcast videos less frequently, there are channels that broadcast around the clock (in most cases, they are security cameras, animal cameras, traffic jams cameras and other channels).
Ustream allows users to leave comments and ask questions directly during the broadcast and users often like this interactivity more than watching already completed and completed video files.
Justin.tv
Justin.tv is a hosting of a broadcast online video, launched in 2006, which allows users and creators of online shows to broadcast their videos to millions of Internet users.
iJustine is the most popular Justin.tv user. She broadcasts practically all her life (lately she began to broadcast a little less than usual, but is still very active).
Justin.tv has almost 400 thousand channels with more than 41 million unique visitors per month.
Friendfeed
FriendFeed , which was founded in 2007 and recently purchased by Facebook, allows you to collect most of your online activities in one place (Twitter, RSS feeds and Flickr are among them).
It is also a social network, with the ability to create a list of friends, status updates and means for communication.
Other online broadcasting sites
There are many other online broadcast sites. Most of them can be integrated into your blog or website, to show your actions around the world.
There are also some dedicated plugins for online broadcasting on blogs. An example of such a WordPress plugin is WP Lifestream . This plugin allows you to integrate your profiles from Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm and Wordie. You can also add additional modules to integrate other systems.
Profilactic.com is another online video broadcasting application that allows you to integrate channels from 190 different sites including Blippr, Delicious, Digg, deviantART, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Pandora, Revver, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Tumblr etc Sweetcron is similar to Profilactic.com, but unlike it is an open source application and you will need to install it on your server.
All social
It seems now there are social sites about every activity that you can imagine. There are social shopping sites. Social financial planning sites. Sites reviews about books, movies, apps, etc. Sites to discuss your plans and meetings with people thinking like you. Sites for planning your travels and discussing them with others. Also sites that help you make a decision on almost everything .
Social media has become an integral part of millions of people around the world. Whether it is something very simple, such as finding a review about a movie or a performance, or when you need advice on an important life situation, you will find your own social network for everything.
Even on social networks of general orientation, such as Twitter, there are a thousand ways to get opinions about everything.
Instead of using Google-a search the next time you have a question about something, try asking the same question on Twitter. In most cases, you will get more information from Twitter users than losing time on page search results.
In addition to the growing popularity of social media, criticism has also increased.
The main ideas criticizing boiled down to several: social media can be used by criminals, social media can be used by kidnappers of children, social media open confidential information, thereby affecting security aspects.
While most social media sites may have problems with the first two items, many sites already have a tendency to maintain a privacy policy, so that users feel more secure.
Social media use by criminals
Facebook and other social media have come under attack from critics because of the fact that they have made the process of tracking their victims or even finding new victims easier for criminals. Such a charge is not completely unfounded.
Many users of social media sites do not take advantage of the privacy settings and leave their profiles available for public access. Although it is often a good idea for a professional profile where you want to connect with people you do not necessarily know, personal profiles can use the function of hiding some information from public view.
Social networks create privacy settings to help prevent fraudsters from receiving personal information or information about user status updates.
But they cannot be forced to use these settings, so in the end, most of the responsibility falls on individual users, and not on the networks themselves.
Social media use by kidnappers of children
MySpace is the most publicly criticized social network, accused of being a paradise for pedophiles and child pornography. But MySpace as well as other sites has achieved great success in protecting the personal data of minors who use the site.
Again, this is one of those situations where problems are related to the fact that many users do not use privacy settings making their profiles publicly available.
MySpace has taken a big step in preventing minors from receiving personal data by sending them a friend request to identify email addresses, etc.
They also require that profiles of adolescents up to the age of 16 are closed to public access and that they are visible only to users from the “friends” category. Other sites have taken similar steps.
Privacy issues
Recently, Facebook was attacked by the public due to changes in its privacy policy, which was formulated very ambitiously, allowing Facebook to use the personal information of users, both public and personal, for their personal purposes (for example, in advertising) even when they deleted their accounts from this site.
Although the company claims that its intentions have never been this way and that it was simply a misnomer, the reaction was so severe that Facebook changed its privacy policy to the old version and then asked users to make changes to this document. It was a good lesson that many users greatly value the information they provide on the Internet.
Considering that many people publish information about all aspects of their online lives mainly on social sites, it is not surprising that many people are concerned about what the company can do with this information.
Social networks and other sites should quickly respond to user concerns about privacy and security. With the information on the average social profile, it will be quite easy for hackers to obtain the necessary data about the user for illegal use or for other harm.
There were also security issues when the profiles of some users were hacked and their personal data was published everywhere.
Although before such things happened only with celebrities, recently it has begun to happen with regular users (such as this woman from Facebook).
Over the past couple of years, social media has become the main focus of online activities. In 2007, social media outpaced pornography as the most popular online activity in the United States (these two industries continue to struggle to this day, alternately gaining and losing positions on a monthly basis).
Celebrities use Twitter, Facebook and other social networks on a regular basis.And this is not the activity of their agents or employees, the stars themselves update their statuses and communicate with their fans on a regular basis.
T-shirts with Twitter symbols are not uncommon and there was at least one tattoo (I am sure there are more).
When Twitter and Facebook were subjected to DDoS attacks in August 2009, many users had a great loss feeling until the websites started working again.
Social media has become an integral part of how people communicate, learn about new events and other ways to connect with the world around.
The development of social media
Social media has come a long way from electronic bulletin boards and IRC chat. And they continue to develop on a daily basis.
With large social networks and sites in which changes are made almost every day, this industry, of course, will develop further in the coming years.
The only thing we can be quite sure about at the moment is that social media is not just a phase and will probably not disappear anytime soon ... at least until they come up with something better.
There are such social networks where registered users are more than the population of many countries.
There are sites for uploading photos, video files, status change services, sites for meeting new people and for finding old friends.
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It seems there are social solutions for every need.
In this article we will look at the history and development of social media , from their modest beginnings to the present day.
Social media predecessors
Electronic bulletin boards
The first electronic bulletin boards appeared in the late 70s. Initially, they were on personal computers and users had to connect to them via the modem of the receiving computer. Such electronic bulletin boards allowed only one connection.
Although there were legal bulletin boards, most of them were at least partially involved in illegal or other shady businesses. Such bulletin boards usually contained pornography, virus codes, information and instructions for hackers and phreakers.
But bulletin boards were the first type of site that allowed users to log in and communicate with each other, albeit very slowly compared to what we are doing today.
Online Services
After the electronic bulletin boards came “online services”, such as CompuServe and Prodigy. They were the first truly “corporate” attempts to access the Internet.
CompuServe was the first company to incorporate chat into its list of services. Prodigy is responsible for creating more affordable online services (CompuServe was a fairly expensive service for most people, since it cost $ 6 per hour and in some remote areas the price went up to $ 30 per hour or more).
AOL also started its activities as an online service and has achieved great success in creating affordable Internet in the United States.
IRC, ICQ and instant messaging systems
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was created in 1988 and was used to transfer files, links and to communicate.
He is the progenitor of all of our instant messaging systems. However, IRC was basically a UNIX system, which restricted access to it.
ICQ was created in the mid-90s and was the first instant messaging system for the PC. ICQ was partly responsible for introducing avatars, abbreviations (LOL, BRB) and emoticons. He was soon followed by other instant messaging clients.
Dating websites
Dating sites are sometimes considered the first social networks. The first dating sites began to appear almost immediately as people began to use the Internet. They allowed users to create accounts (usually with photos) and communicate with other users.
Early social networks
Although many people consider dating sites or sites like Classmates.com to be the first social networks, in reality such sites do not fit this definition.
Dating sites rarely allowed you to have a list of friends, in your early years it was not possible either on Classmates.com (and the number of profiles there was too limited). The following sites are the first real social networks.
Six Degrees
The site “Six Degrees” was launched in 1997 and was the first modern social network. He allowed users to create a profile and make friends with other users of the site.
Although the site no longer exists, at one time it was quite popular and had somewhere a million users.
In 2000, it was bought for $ 125 million and in 2001 it was closed.
AsianAvenue, MiGente, BlackPlanet
These sites came into being after the launch of the Six Degrees site, between 1997 and 2001.
They allowed users to create profiles and add friends (mostly without requiring confirmation of who you are adding as friends). Users could create professional, personal and dating profiles on these sites.
These sites had some innovations, although they were the very first social networks.
Livejournal
LiveJournal was launched in 1999 and used a different approach to the concept of social networks.
While Six Degrees allowed users to create mostly static profiles, LiveJournal was built as a social network of constantly updated blogs.
LiveJournal has enabled users to communicate with each other by creating groups. This was the forerunner of frequent updates that we see in current social networks.
Major advances in social networking
The early 2000s brought some huge changes in social networks and social media.
Friendster
Friendster is the first modern social network of general orientation. Founded in 2002, Friendster is still a fairly active social network with more than 90 million registered users and 60+ million unique visitors each month. Most of Friendster's traffic is Asian traffic (90%).
Friendster allowed people to find their friends, then friends of their friends, and so on, thereby expanding the network.
His goal was to provide a safer and faster place to meet than in real life. Partially, Friendster was a new kind of dating site.
Instead of finding pairs among people unfamiliar with each other on the basis of common interests, Friendster worked in a different way, assuming that people with common friends and acquaintances will have more chances to create pairs than those who do not have common friends.
Friendster was popular for its three user groups: gay, “Burning Man” visitors and bloggers.
LinkedIn was founded in 2003 and was one of the first social networks dedicated to business.
At the beginning, LinkedIn allowed users to create a profile (regular resume) and communicate with each other through private messages. It also implied that you should be personally acquainted with the person with whom you are contacting the site.
Gradually, other features were also added, including groups, question and answer forums, and advanced profile features, including real-time status updates.
Myspace
MySpace was founded in 2003 and by 2006 it had already become the most popular social network in the world.
MySpace distinguished itself from its competitors by giving users the ability to fully customize the appearance of their profiles. Users could also upload songs to MySpace and add video files from other sites to their profiles.
Initially, MySpace allowed to communicate through personal messages, public comments left on the user profile and ads sent to all friends. Also, when registering, the user gets his own blog.
In 2006, MySpace introduced MySpace IM, an instant messaging client that allowed users to chat with their friends.
Other recent additions to MySpace features include the addition of a real-time status update and a news feed that shows friends’s activities on the site.
Although Facebook was founded in 2004 as a social network for Harvard students, it quickly spread to other universities, schools, businesses, and ultimately to all (2006).
In 2008, Facebook became the most popular social network surpassing MySpace and still continues to grow.
Facebook does not allow the same profile appearance settings as MySpace does. However, Facebook allows users to post photos, video files and otherwise change the look of their profiles, if not design.
Over the past couple of years, Facebook has added several new features, including instant messaging / chat and applications (and its own developer platform).
Users have several different methods of communicating with each other. Private messages are available, you can also write on the wall of another user. Friends may see inscriptions on this wall, but these inscriptions are generally not accessible to other users. Users can easily change their privacy settings and allow different users to see different parts of their profiles, based on existing relationships (the main privacy settings are “only friends”, “friends of friends” and “all”).
Users can write notes that will be visible to all their friends. Users can also comment on the messages of their friends or most often mark the messages as “liked”.
Niche social networks
As social networks evolved, niche sites for specific interest groups also appeared. There are niche sites for any interests, hobbies, industries and groups that you can imagine.
Ning
Ning is a platform for creating niche social networks. These social networks are hosted on Ning servers, but if you wish, you can pay and install on your server or pay and put your own instead of Ning brand.
New users can either create their own niche social networks or join one or more of the existing networks (there are currently more than 1.5 million networks).
Ning is the first widely used platform for creating social networks. Its biggest advantage is that it is extremely easy to use, which allows even technically inexperienced users to handle it.
While other social networking platforms require programming knowledge, Ning does not require such knowledge.
Social networks sponsored by companies
Corporations from various industries have created several niche social networking sites.
Authonomy is an example of such networks. This is a social network of writers that was created by the British branch of Harper Collins and connected thousands of writers from around the world. After that, many other companies have created the same network.
While these networks have active groups, many networks of such groups do not have and are closed due to lack of activity.
Hosting mefiafaylov
Social media is not limited to social networking sites. Hosting photos, video files and other multimedia content is also a popular social media activity.
Photobucket
Photobucket is the first large photo hosting site, founded in 2003.
Photobucket allows users to share photos in public or in password-protected albums. 500MB of disk space is available for users to store photos (until August 2009, 1GB of space was available).
PRO accounts receive 10GB of disk space (in July 2008, with 100GB decreased to 25GB and decreased to 10GB in August of 2009). Photobucket can also host video content.
In 2007, Photobucket was acquired by Fox Interactive Media (a subsidiary of News Corporation). It was rumored that Photobucket was sold for $ 250 million, although the terms of sale were never disclosed.
Flickr
Flickr in recent years has become a social network. Flickr claims that there are more than 3.6 billion photos on their servers, as of June 2009.
Flickr also has groups and allows users to create their own profiles, add friends and group photos and video files into albums.
One of the great advantages of Flickr is that it allows users to license their photos under “Creative Commons” and also allows them to retain all copyright to images.
Recently, Flickr also launched a collection called “The Commons”, which contains images from various museums and institutions under an “unlimited” license (meaning that the photos are in the public domain).
YouTube
YouTube is the first large video hosting site. It was launched in 2005.
Users can upload video files up to 10 minutes in size and share them via YouTube or pasting them to other sites (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.).
Now YouTube allows you to download HD video files and recently launched a service for the provision of television shows and films under the license of the copyright holders.
The main social functions of YouTube are video file ratings, comments, and the ability to subscribe to video feeds.
Revver
Revver took a different approach to video hosting.
Although YouTube, Metacafe, and most other video file hosting sites allowed users to add video files for free and didn’t pay a share of the content of their advertising revenue to their content creators, Revver shared revenue from the start.
Revver equally distributes the income generated by the video file with the creator of this video file. Some other video hosting sites are moving in the direction of revenue sharing, but Revver remains the first site to do this with all of its content.
Social news and bookmarks
Sharing photos and video files is not the only way to share information in social media.
The emergence of social news sites and bookmarks in the mid-2000s created new opportunities for distributing news and finding interesting content.
News has become more accessible through sites like Delicious, Digg and Reddit, which allowed users to share news or love other content that they find interesting with a wider audience than they could before.
Delicious
Delicious (aka, Del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking site that was founded in 2003. It allows users to bookmark any content they find on the Internet, tag this content and then share it with other users.
Users can search in bookmarks or browse them by tags. Delicious also allows you to view content that is popular with other users as well as view upcoming content.
Digg
Digg was founded in 2004 by Kevin Rose (Kevin Rose), Ron Gorodetsky (Ron Gorodetzky), Jay Adelson (Jay Adelson) and Owen Bjornom (Owen Byrne).
Digg users can exchange links to any content on the Internet, and other users can vote for this content — lift up (“dig”) or move down (“bury”). Users can also comment on content and have a list of friends.
Reddit is another social news site that was launched in 2005. Reddit works on the same Digg principle, allowing users to vote for content, raising posts higher or lowering them below.
Users can view popular posts, new posts and “controversial” posts (presumably these are posts that have received many positive and negative ratings). Reddit also allows users to post comments on posts.
Real time updates
Real-time updates have become a new norm in social media. With the advent of Twitter in 2006, status updates have become a new norm in social networks. At the moment, almost all social networks have the function of status updates in real time.
Twitter was founded in 2006 and gained great popularity during the SxSW conference (South by Souhtwest) in 2007.
During the conference, Tweets multiplied three times from 20 thousand to 60. Twitter created a social network that now has many popular users (Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Soleil Moon Frye, MS) Hamer (MC Hammer), Oprah (Oprah), Martha Stewart (Martha Stewart) and many others).
Twitter has also spawned a number of third-party sites and applications, becoming more a platform than a simple service. There are client applications for updating Twitter accounts, services for tracking Twitter updates and services for posting photos and video files directly to Twitter.
Other services with real-time updates
As mentioned earlier, almost every social network now provides users with the ability to update their status. Facebook introduced the user status update feature a couple of years ago. MySpace introduced this feature more than a year ago. And recently, the same function was added to LinkedIn.
Real-time status updates allow users to be in contact with their friends and family on a regular basis and often improve the relationship between them.
When you always know what is happening with your friends and family, it will be easier to find common interests, actions and other information that you might never have learned when communicating in real life.
The role of the iPhone in real-time updates
The iPhone has a great merit in the growing popularity of updates in real time. Before the advent of the iPhone, mobile browsers were uncomfortable at best and nearly unusable at worst.
But the iPhone has made the process of viewing sites more convenient, I can even say pleasant. Applications have been added for almost every social network, which makes it possible to update entries or status on the go.
Other phones followed the example of the iPhone and at the moment there are several more phones available that allow users to easily update their status on social networks or add new entries (including videos and photos).
The role of the iPhone was so powerful in social media that at the moment social networks are available specifically for iPhone users. iRovr is a social networking application that is designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
It allows users to upload photos, make status updates, links (including YouTube videos), create polls, subscribe to RSS feeds, etc. It was launched in 2007 and its popularity continues to grow.
Lifestreaming and Lifecasting (online video broadcasting)
Real-time updates have caused many people to start broadcasting on-line everything they do. Although some prefer to broadcast by combining all their activities on the Internet in one place (for example, FriendFeed).
Ustream.tv
Ustream was founded in the summer of 2006 and became the choice of a portal for broadcasting videos of such stars as Ashton Kutcher and Soleil Moon Frye.
Although most Ustream users broadcast videos less frequently, there are channels that broadcast around the clock (in most cases, they are security cameras, animal cameras, traffic jams cameras and other channels).
Ustream allows users to leave comments and ask questions directly during the broadcast and users often like this interactivity more than watching already completed and completed video files.
Justin.tv
Justin.tv is a hosting of a broadcast online video, launched in 2006, which allows users and creators of online shows to broadcast their videos to millions of Internet users.
iJustine is the most popular Justin.tv user. She broadcasts practically all her life (lately she began to broadcast a little less than usual, but is still very active).
Justin.tv has almost 400 thousand channels with more than 41 million unique visitors per month.
Friendfeed
FriendFeed , which was founded in 2007 and recently purchased by Facebook, allows you to collect most of your online activities in one place (Twitter, RSS feeds and Flickr are among them).
It is also a social network, with the ability to create a list of friends, status updates and means for communication.
Other online broadcasting sites
There are many other online broadcast sites. Most of them can be integrated into your blog or website, to show your actions around the world.
There are also some dedicated plugins for online broadcasting on blogs. An example of such a WordPress plugin is WP Lifestream . This plugin allows you to integrate your profiles from Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm and Wordie. You can also add additional modules to integrate other systems.
Profilactic.com is another online video broadcasting application that allows you to integrate channels from 190 different sites including Blippr, Delicious, Digg, deviantART, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Pandora, Revver, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Tumblr etc Sweetcron is similar to Profilactic.com, but unlike it is an open source application and you will need to install it on your server.
All social
It seems now there are social sites about every activity that you can imagine. There are social shopping sites. Social financial planning sites. Sites reviews about books, movies, apps, etc. Sites to discuss your plans and meetings with people thinking like you. Sites for planning your travels and discussing them with others. Also sites that help you make a decision on almost everything .
Social media has become an integral part of millions of people around the world. Whether it is something very simple, such as finding a review about a movie or a performance, or when you need advice on an important life situation, you will find your own social network for everything.
Even on social networks of general orientation, such as Twitter, there are a thousand ways to get opinions about everything.
Instead of using Google-a search the next time you have a question about something, try asking the same question on Twitter. In most cases, you will get more information from Twitter users than losing time on page search results.
Criticism of social media and problems
In addition to the growing popularity of social media, criticism has also increased.
The main ideas criticizing boiled down to several: social media can be used by criminals, social media can be used by kidnappers of children, social media open confidential information, thereby affecting security aspects.
While most social media sites may have problems with the first two items, many sites already have a tendency to maintain a privacy policy, so that users feel more secure.
Social media use by criminals
Facebook and other social media have come under attack from critics because of the fact that they have made the process of tracking their victims or even finding new victims easier for criminals. Such a charge is not completely unfounded.
Many users of social media sites do not take advantage of the privacy settings and leave their profiles available for public access. Although it is often a good idea for a professional profile where you want to connect with people you do not necessarily know, personal profiles can use the function of hiding some information from public view.
Social networks create privacy settings to help prevent fraudsters from receiving personal information or information about user status updates.
But they cannot be forced to use these settings, so in the end, most of the responsibility falls on individual users, and not on the networks themselves.
Social media use by kidnappers of children
MySpace is the most publicly criticized social network, accused of being a paradise for pedophiles and child pornography. But MySpace as well as other sites has achieved great success in protecting the personal data of minors who use the site.
Again, this is one of those situations where problems are related to the fact that many users do not use privacy settings making their profiles publicly available.
MySpace has taken a big step in preventing minors from receiving personal data by sending them a friend request to identify email addresses, etc.
They also require that profiles of adolescents up to the age of 16 are closed to public access and that they are visible only to users from the “friends” category. Other sites have taken similar steps.
Privacy issues
Recently, Facebook was attacked by the public due to changes in its privacy policy, which was formulated very ambitiously, allowing Facebook to use the personal information of users, both public and personal, for their personal purposes (for example, in advertising) even when they deleted their accounts from this site.
Although the company claims that its intentions have never been this way and that it was simply a misnomer, the reaction was so severe that Facebook changed its privacy policy to the old version and then asked users to make changes to this document. It was a good lesson that many users greatly value the information they provide on the Internet.
Considering that many people publish information about all aspects of their online lives mainly on social sites, it is not surprising that many people are concerned about what the company can do with this information.
Social networks and other sites should quickly respond to user concerns about privacy and security. With the information on the average social profile, it will be quite easy for hackers to obtain the necessary data about the user for illegal use or for other harm.
There were also security issues when the profiles of some users were hacked and their personal data was published everywhere.
Although before such things happened only with celebrities, recently it has begun to happen with regular users (such as this woman from Facebook).
The role of social media in pop culture
Over the past couple of years, social media has become the main focus of online activities. In 2007, social media outpaced pornography as the most popular online activity in the United States (these two industries continue to struggle to this day, alternately gaining and losing positions on a monthly basis).
Celebrities use Twitter, Facebook and other social networks on a regular basis.And this is not the activity of their agents or employees, the stars themselves update their statuses and communicate with their fans on a regular basis.
T-shirts with Twitter symbols are not uncommon and there was at least one tattoo (I am sure there are more).
When Twitter and Facebook were subjected to DDoS attacks in August 2009, many users had a great loss feeling until the websites started working again.
Social media has become an integral part of how people communicate, learn about new events and other ways to connect with the world around.
The development of social media
Social media has come a long way from electronic bulletin boards and IRC chat. And they continue to develop on a daily basis.
With large social networks and sites in which changes are made almost every day, this industry, of course, will develop further in the coming years.
The only thing we can be quite sure about at the moment is that social media is not just a phase and will probably not disappear anytime soon ... at least until they come up with something better.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/72136/
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