Social Media - How it all started?

It is 21st century and a major portion of our daily routine is fiddling around on some social media platform or in other words, wasting time on such platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter to name a few.

But although majority of the human population is addicted to these social media platforms, only a handful of them know or have even cared to know how it all started. So, today for the one's who are curious enough to explore the beginning of social media, we at geekwithbrain decided to share with you a brief history of social media.

Well, to start with we could talk about the traditional ways of connecting with each other and dive much deeper into the past about 550 B.C. which is the time around which the first postal services were in place and after that a revolutionary step with the invention of telegraph in 1792. But the main focus of this post is not to feed you with dates you can't even hope to remember but, the intention is to brief you a little over the history of social media and it's evolution into the state it is now.

So lets start with the 1980s, the internet was in place, it was booming and more and more people had access to personal computers that they could use to leverage the power of internet.

Social media, as we know it now was not the same back then, when internet was booming. Though, we had various forms of services like chatrooms which allowed users to connect with each other and share experiences in form of text messages and it was not very late when some enterprise business would realize how profitable this squeezing of the world through internet could be.

The year 1997, is a remarkable year in the history of social media. This was the year when "Sixdegrees", which is probably the world's first social networking site which had all the lovely features that anyone from the 21st century would expect from any lame social media platform. But, back then the website was very much far ahead of it'a time. Since, only about 2% of the world's population had access to internet, Sixdegrees could not sustain itself with such a small userbase and had to eventually shutdown it's operations in 2001.

Sixdegrees had laid the foundation for what the modern day social networking platform would look like with features such as user profiles and friends list. After, 2001 when sixdegrees had shut down, the internet userbase had grown massively and now over 100 million users had access to internet.

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It was the time when another player jumped into the field, this was "MySpace". Those who were born before or around 1990 might be familiar with the name. MySpace started an evolution in the field of social networking. Since, now there were a lot of internet users so unlike Sixdegrees, MySpace could sustain itself with a significantly large userbase of over 3 million users. Although that might seem negligible when compared to the current standards set by modern day social media platforms like facebook, it was quite a milestone back then.

Also, in 2003 LinkedIn was started as a social networking platform specifically aimed at setting up networking between business persons. More on that later.

Just when MySpace was flourishing and people were liking it more and more, a Harvard dropout was working on a college project that would soon destroy virtually every other social media platform out there - it was the Facebook. Facebook originally started as a digital record for university students when made accessible to the public drove people crazy with it's lovely features like the wall, status and easy connection with friends and all that with much lesser intervention from ad networks which in the case of MySpace could be seen everywhere on the site.

MySpace tried it's best to compete with Facebook but owing to it's outdated design and non-user friendly ad setup, and as you very well know now MySpace couldn't keep up. The executives at MySpace also realised this and they stopped competing with Facebook atleast as a social networking rival. As of now, MySpace is no more a social networking platform that it used to be but is now a site that allows musicians and artists to share their creations.

Also, in 2006 a bunch of smart people who realised that while going head on against facebook was not a good idea, started a new way of networking. A 140 character text message, which could be shared with everyone else on the platform with just a click. This was called, as most of you might have guessed - Twitter, the microblogging site. Twitter and Facebook both grew leaps and bounds and shaped the modern day social media.

Now, Facebook is the world's largest social media platform with over 2 billion users and twitter also has a whopping 600 million users. In addition to Facebook and twitter, there are others that cater some more specific needs of people.

LinkedIn, which was one of the few platforms that managed to sustain itself has it's focus on building networks of business people.Snapchat and Instagram, which by the way is owned by Facebook, provides users the service to share photos and short videos with their followers. There a bunch of other social networks that exist today.

We hope that you might now have a little info on how it all started and what made social media the way, we all see it today. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them down in the comment section and also if you want more such articles kn history of various tech surrounding you then let us know that too in the comments. Also, help us grow by sharing our content on social media :P