Rise of social media

First launches of social media

Facebook

Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. The first appearance of Facebook can be called the launching “TheFacebook” on thefacebook.com , but it is not where the Facebook’s story starts.

FB logo

Back in 2003 Zuckerberg, while studied in Harvard University, built a “Facemash” that was the Hot or Not website which took pictures from face books of University’s Houses (of course without any permissions) and offered to choose the “hotter” person, but this website was soon shut down by Harvard’s Administration for obvious reasons. In general, we can say that scandals followed Facebook from the very beginning. Later, this website was redesigned and became the basis for the Facebook.

Few days after The Facebook launch, Harvard seniors accused Zuckerberg of stealing their ideas for a HarvardConnection website, because initially Zuckerberg had to work on Harvard’s project. Then the seniors filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, but the issue was settled out of court..

For the Harvard students it was restricted to have an account at TheFacebook. In March 2004, TheFacebook “expands from Harvard to Stanford, Columbia and Yale” and in December TheFacebook reached about 1 million active users and TheFacebook receives its first investment for $500,000 from Peter Thiel . In 2005 “TheFacebook” was changed to “Facebook”, Accel Partners invests $13 million into Facebook and there were already about 5.5 million active accounts . And then in September 2006, Facebook became open to everyone older than 13 with valid email address.

Starting from that moment Facebook developed to the most popular social median in the world with about 3 billion monthly active users. During this time, Facebook has been involved in several scandals. Most of them were related to the user’s privacy. For this reason Zuckerberg began to make appearances before the U.S. Congress.

The most interesting incident was when about 50 million accounts were under the risk because of the security issue . Also, it was known that user passwords were not encrypted for some account to 2012. In April 2021, the database with about half a billion accounts was published on the Internet with addresses, dates of birth, emails. It is also worth mentioning the case when Facebook with Apple arbitrarily gave user Data to Hackers who pretended law enforcement officials.

Eventually, the only thing that can be said about Facebook social media is that it is absolutely untrustable. User data is shared with third parties using blind trust of users which do not read license agreement and security issues related even to such things as password encryption.

In addition, there is evidence that Zuckerberg is obsessed with meta-universes and most likely the development of Facebook is not in the first place right now, which may lead to even more problems in all Facebook’s aspects.

Twitter

Twitter was founded on March 21, 2006. If we look at the first tweet , made by co-founder Jack Dorsey (@Jack), we can find out that “Twitter” was “Twttr” actually. But let us go in order.

Twitter logo

The co-founders were Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. After brainstorming at the podcasting company Odeo, Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an SMS-based social network. Groups of friends could track what each other were doing based on their status updates. Technically, you still can use Twitter using SMS, but here is the location limitation.

To operate with SMS, they needed the short code, which was initially “10958”, but then it was decided to change it to “Twitter”. The origin of the “Twitter” title was “a short burst of inconsequential information” and “chirps from birds” as it was described by Jack Dorsey. But here was the problem that American SMS short code could contain only 5 symbols, so all the vowels were removed from “Twitter” to make “Twttr”. But even here there was a problem. “Twttr” was remarkably like “txttp” which was used by another company, so it was decided to use an easy-to-remember code “40404”.

Every tweet could hold only 140 characters which was dictated by SMS technology which handled only 160 characters, but 20 of them were reserved for the username of tweet publisher. This limitation was held even after migration to web, but then the maximum size of tweet was expanded to 280 characters in 2017 .

There are some highlights in Twitters history. One of the most important was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive conference. They got the festival’s Web Award prize. They had about 5,000 tweets per day in 2007, and in 2008 there were about 300,000 tweets per day and now this number increased to 50 million tweets per day..

Today Twitter has about 330 million active accounts. Twitter became so common in people’s lives that it is used as the official information source (like this article, for example), most politicians around the world use Twitter as tribune for their statements. Even separate platforms have their own accounts on Twitter (@YouTube, @Meta etc.) which are often used to communicate with audience and news.

In this article we did not mention such topics as "Cancel culture", "Hate speech" and "Racism in social media", despite the fact they are closely related to Twitter, because these topics deserve separate, objective, large articles.

Six degrees

It is believed that the very firstsocial media site was Six Degrees, founded by Andrew Weinreich in May 1997. It had simple, but useful features such as: friends lists and profiles. It was sold in December 2000 to Youth Stream Media Networks. Unfortunately, it was shut down one year later in 2001.

SixDegrees logo

LiveJournal

LiveJournal was one of the first blogging platforms. It was founded by Brad Fitzpatrick in April, 1999. Originally, it was designed to keep Brad in touch with his friends, but it grew into a place, where everyone could share their thoughts. It was sold in 2005 to Six Apart, and then in 2007 it was sold to SUP Media. It became one of Russia’s social media platforms.

Blogger

Coincidentally, only two months later, after LiveJournal's birth, Blogger was created in August, 1999 by Evan Williams from Pyra Labs. Although, it was designed as a commercial project. Google purchased Blogger and made it free. Many believe that blogging as we know it today, became so popular, because of Google made Blogger available to everyone. It is still popular service for blogging.

Blogger logo

Dodgeball

Dodgeball was a mobile designed geolocation-based app. It was founded by Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert in 2000. Users could share their activities and statuses through a world map to their friends. Dodgeball was sold to Google in 2005 and shut down in 2009.

Ryze

Ryze was a premise of LinkedIn. It was founded by Adrian Scott in October 2001. Its target audience was business professionals. Ryze also had a simple list of features: profiles, messages, and friend lists. Currently, it still running.

Friendster

What Six Degrees lacked Friendster had. Friendster was a social media platform that showed how people were connected. It helped in melting the ice between strangers. Friendster was founded by Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chin in March 2002. Due to technical issues that emerged from the enormous popularity of the service, many users migrated from Friendster to its rival MySpace. It was sold to a Malaysian Internet Company in 2009. In 2011, the aim of Friendster changed from being a social media site to an online gaming site. Friendster was shut down in 2015.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn was founded in 2002, by Reid Hoffman, Konstantin Guericke, Allen Blue, Jean-Luc Vaillant and Eric Ly. However, LinkedIn was launched on May 5, 2003. Originally, it was a possibility to store and share your resume, but eventually it grew into if not the most, then at least one of the most popular hiring platforms with many useful features. The turning point was in 2011, when LinkedIn went public and everyone could find a job or hire a worker. In 2016 Microsoft bought LinkedIn.

MySpace

MySpace was founded by Brad Greenspan, Josh Berman, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in August 2003. It had customizable profiles, music bands, messages, forum, events. Overall, a compilation of all gripping features. In 2005, MySpace was sold to News Corporation for 580 million dollars. MySpace was the most popular social media service in 2006. In 2008, Facebook shifted MySpace from the top. When all re-design choices News Corporation made were unsuccessful, MySpace was sold to Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake in 2016.

Orkut

After an unsuccessful Friendster acquiring attempt, Google decided to make its social media site called Orkut. It was founded in January 2004 by Orkut Büyükkökten. Originally, the service could be accessed only by invitation. According to Marissa Mayer, Orkut could not handle the rapidly growing flow of new users and most of their userbase migrated to MySpace. Although, Orkut remain popular in Brazil and India, until it was closed in 2014.

Bebo

Bebo was oriented at young users with highly customizable profiles, modern-widget-style, setting the account either to public or private, and the possibility to link to other social media services. It was founded in July 2005, by Michael Birch and his wife Xochi Birch. Bebo even overtook MySpace with its popularity. It was sold to AOL in 2010. They found it harder and harder to maintain the same level as other new and existing social media set, and eventually, AOL decided to sell it to Criterion Capital Partners in 2010. They redesigned the whole service, but nothing could help keep users logging on. Ironically, Bebo was sold to its founders, Michael Birch and Xochi Birch. They tried to resurrect it, but after another failure they sold Bebo to Amazon. It was the fourth and at the current time last attempt to resurrect service, but it was also a failure. Bebo could be given a title of the unluckiest social media site.

YouTube

Currently, YouTube is one of the most popular social media services and the second most popular search engine It was founded in February 2005 by Steve Chen, Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley. The concept of the service was to share funny home videos. YouTube gained enormous popularity. Concept, has proved to be very successful, but the lack of hardware equipment and constantly uploaded copyrighted materials made its founders sell YouTube in November 2006 to Google.

Odnoklassniki

Odnoklassniki stands for classmates. It is a Russian oriented social media service. It was founded in March 2006, by Albert Popkov. Odnoklassniki was the premise for Vkontakte. It was the second most popular social media in Russian speaking community. However, its userbase is slowly decreasing, due to its old design. The userbase mostly consists of old people, who does not want to switch to something more modern.

Vkontakte

VK logo

Vkontakte stands for be in touch. Vkontakte had more specific and diverse features than Odnoklassniki. It made Vkontakte the most popular social media in Russian speaking community. It was founded in October 2006 by Pavel Durov. It has all the attributes of any social media platform: messages, share and tag images, video, music, groups, etc. In 2021 Vkontakte was sold to Mailru.

Commercialization of social networks

At first, when the social media start becoming what it is today there were no commercialization. They were simply made from enthusiasm of the developers. As social media platforms grew, they realized that they need dome type of commercialization to receive finances for maintaining the servers . There are some well-known types of commercialization the social network platform.

Commercials

The most popular way of commercializing social network is integration commercials from sponsors into their platform. This is the first thing what comes to mind when someone thinks about how to commercialize their web product. There is a plenty of examples of this type of commercialization, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Freemium

Another widely used way of receiving money from users called freemium. The word Freemium comes from two words free and premium. It is a type of business model which grants an access to a platform for free. However, to receive full experience of this platform the user must buy premium status, which is usually subscription based. This way of commercialization is used by such popular social networks as Discord, YouTube, and Reddit. While the Discord is fully holds onto Freemium, the YouTube and Reddit have the commercials and subscription at the same time.

Premium

Premium is a business model, where users must pay to access special content, this platform has. Those payment could either be split between the content creators and platform holders or go to the platform holders directly. On second type, those platforms usually are private and have some type of bulletproof hosting on them. A popular example of premium social networks would be Patreon, OnlyFans or Boosty for Russian users. As for second type platforms, there is no popular platforms of them, and they are usually live within a month.

Selling user data

One of the most scandalous and both effective way of making money is selling user data to third party companies. To do that, companies create huge systems of gathering and linking data. Sometimes the neural networks connected to it. Those organized data then sold to anyone who have enough money to buy it, usually though an auction. As for example of it, the major giants such as Meta (The Facebook and Instagram holder), Google (The YouTube holder), Microsoft (The Xbox holder), Amazon (The Twitch holder) has done it.

Public funding

This type of commercialization is generally used by open-source projects. This type of funding is the most straightforward. “If you like us, could you donate to us, so we keep going :)” label and/or big donate button is the most common way of saying that the social network receives most of funding from this type of donations. Usually, they implement other commercialization types too, such as freemium and government granting.

Government funding

This type of commercialization is done mostly by startups or other platforms which interests the government. It is usually done through government grants, which supports small businesses. This type of commercialization is almost never used as main source of income because it could be fatal for the platform when the funding eventually drops. As for popular example of government funding, the Zoom platform several hundred million dollars during the pandemic.

Social media algorithms

Admittedly, one of the reasons for social media being so addictive is the unique property to show exactly the content the user likes and wants to see in the feed. This feature is attributed to the social media algorithms that are frequently thought of as something mysterious, unknown, powerful and broken simultaneously. Nevertheless, a lot of things rotate around social media algorithms and feel the influence of it. Marketing mechanism striving to outsmart the social media prioritization to attract more potential clients, one part of users whose feed falls the victim of either random trends or accidentally opened the video and another part cleverly taking advantage of social media algorithms filtering useless content -- every party contributes to the global information cycle being processed and analyzed to give the best experience on the social network. At the first sight, it might seem that social medial algorithms invade forcefully users’ privacy and manipulate suspiciously with given data, however, originally they are designed to filter out irrelevant content or content that’s not high quality. This technology keeps growing and finding other ways of application (hopefully intended to improve user experience and work for a user first), nevertheless, they are not ideal. There are a lot of contradictions caused by social media algorithms -- starting from videos surging to millions of views out of nowhere or misusing the data for sake of corporation benefit and ending with either extra sensitivity spoiling the whole table of content or, in contrast, weak adaptability. This article section will address the main principles of social media algorithms and bring relevant examples.

Main principles

Nowadays, almost all algorithms constitute quite a fallible system, therefore they are being improved constantly. Despite this fact, there are variables that each modern algorithm takes into consideration.

The first key signal is relevance. Relevance in all senses makes us watch the content even if it is not so good objectively. Here it is important to emphasize that in this context relevance implies the level of users’ interest and interactions around the particular subject. This level of interest can be measured with likes, time dedicated to the subject or comments. For example, Facebook measures relevance through ranking signals. Ranking signals are data that has been accumulated by the bots to understand a user’s past behaviour. There are three major ranking signals that Facebook focuses on: who the users are interacting with, the types of posts they are interacting with, and how popular the post is. The strategy also depends on the main business logic one or another social media has. For example, for Twitter it is important to ensure that the given post is recent, so Twitter will favour recent posts over older posts. Another situation is about YouTube, where it is totally fine when a 10-years-old video becomes a trend. Here we are coming to the next key point -- recency. Instagram and TikTok are perfect examples that it is possible to hit trends only in the case of long-term video and post uploads. This principle works for subscribers since it obliges the author of their favourite content to work regularly and give more. Otherwise, the last videos and posts get older and the author is lost in the background of the newest content. From the marketing point of view, it is not always profitable to be so “insistent”, because along with the wide content variety there are also “not interested” buttons adding some interactions between users and algorithms and allowing to adjust the filtering system if it is needed. The recency can be considered as a quite accurate variable in the whole global formula since the user sees the fresh content of the followed author and he is always free to adjust the current filtering system. Besides the above-mentioned factors, social media also consider popularity, content type, relationship, user interaction, and quality. As was seen in the previous examples, the extent of variable significance closely correlates with social media business logic, therefore the following overview will address particular cases for revealing algorithms on well-known social media.

Straightforward TikTok algorithms

To orientate among tonnes of content, there is a benchmark simplifying the process of gathering the information -- hashtags. Let’s take a TikTok. It is a highly popular social media and its popularity can be explained mainly by the straightforward algorithms being used. There are a few simple ranking signals for TikTok content which include user interaction, device and account settings (concerning the country and language) and video details such as captions and hashtags. Hashtags serve as an indication (for users and algorithms) that a piece of content relates to a specific topic or belongs to a category.

There is no focus on the popularity the author has, this variable is partially or fully removed from the equation, that’s why every user has a chance to become popular on TikTok.

TikTok logo

Relationship-based algorithms

In contrast to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube which are primarily based on the number of subscriptions, LinkedIn is a social platform dedicated to networking, rather than building followers. The site has developed an algorithm based on connection and engagement. The algorithm aims to promote engagement and prioritize relevant content. ”Even if you don't have a lot of links in your networking chain, you can build this later if you have read-worthy content” -- Digital Marketing Institute Accessed 2022 1 May.

LinkedIn is a great example of algorithm staging.

1. When content (e.g., a status update, video or photo) is posted, it is fed through a computerized filter. Bots flag content as spam, low-quality or clear. If your content is flagged as low-quality, it will take longer to reach your target audience’s feed.
2. Once through the computerized filter, content enters the feed. All LinkedIn users have the option to mark posts as spam based on their judgement or they can “hide” content from their feed. If users mark your posts as spam or hide them, your content has a higher chance of being buried by the algorithm.
3. Computers perform a “virality” check to identify spam accounts. Spam accounts use a network of spam pages to like and share content, giving companies and users the impression that real accounts are interacting with their content. In this stage of the screening process, content can be demoted to a lower tier (back to the first computerized filter, for example) if the content is determined to be spam.
4. The final stage is an actual human review. LinkedIn editors review posts to ensure the quality and usefulness of the content. After all, the best algorithm can still let things slip through the cracks. Posts continuously sift through this entire process. If the content still matches user preferences and is deemed useful, it will continue to appear in your audience’s feeds.

Another kind of relationship is friends, family, groups and even time relations that can be found on Facebook. The algorithm is sophisticated enough to differentiate between “quality time” users spend with content versus the overall time spent interacting with a post. This is influenced by real interactions instead of “engagement bait” like “SHARE this post if you LOVE our products!”. Also the following aspects matter:

• Active interactions, where users spend time commenting on and sharing social media content (Conversations and replies, Post likes and reactions to comments, Shares through Facebook Messenger)

• Passive interactions, which include likes and click-throughs
• Engagement rates once content is shared
• Average time a user spends engaging or viewing a post
• Average time a user spends time engaging or viewing a post
• What time the content was posted
• The completeness of a Facebook profile sharing a post
• How informative the content is
• The type of content

Finishing algorithm section...

Regardless of why social media algorithms exist, the fact remains that they aren’t going anywhere. For brands, this means learning what algorithms “want” and likewise what might cause content to be viewed as low-quality or irrelevant to their audience. For users, it is a reason to be rationally selective and think about what to watch by carefully unpleasant content.

The future of social media

One of the major limitations and a clear disadvantage of newspapers was that they had to follow government or its own institutions rules, which themselves were imposed by the government itself. This became an issue when some journalists were being used as weapons of clear political intent. However in the internet anonymity is possible and widely used. This allows the reader to decide which sources to trust as the facts can vary. Clearly this statement does not apply to social media as anonymity and freedom of speech is rather vaguely controlled and anyone has the chance to listen to any creator they want without being limited to a controlled set of articles. In the future, freedom is one of the most valued aspects online and in real life, and with social media being the bridge between the two realities it is key to realize the importance of it. For example if someone likes a specific discussion topic which most people do not like, they could easily find anyone around the globe to chat about it, without difficulty. In addition the market has taken advantage oft he amount of people socializing online, and will definitely keep social media commerce as one of its main advertisement methods. Further more social commerce will definitely continue to expand as more consumers shop online and particularly via social media. The majority of corporations and offices have profiles online which serve as a bridge that connects them with potential customers and fans. A profile on any platform like Instagram helps big companies to humanize their image and attract more people to their products. Many companies are even setting promotion trends and giveaways. With the correct approach this definitely could lead to the improvement of a companies position in business. This happens because a lot of people are constantly exposed to the ads and want to be part of it.

TikTok could overtake Instagram as a platform for marketing

In the past couple of years Instagram has definitely taken a spot as one of the top social marketing apps. It was the fastest-growing, offered the simplest returns on investment (depending on your sector). But that's could be about to change, since TikTok and its new way of short videos took the world. It is based on small fast content presented to the user right after they finish the previous video, allowing for TikTok to capture its users for a while in an infinite stream of new short videos. In addition the algorithm selects relavant content which allows the user to stay longer, since they are being presented what they like. In September 2021, TikTok achieved its first 1 billion user mark, which is a great number in itself. As a result, it bumped itself to the seventh most popular social network. Actually, looking at only social networks, TikTok is the fourth most popular network after Instagram, if we exclude messaging networks. As a matter of fact Tiktok only had 689 million users in January 2021 and it managed a 45 percent gain in less than a year . However the biggest increase was the 1,157 percent growth in global user base between 2018 and 2020. On the othe r hand Instagram's monthly active users only increased by 6% in 2020 . In addition TikTok started to dominates Instagram's short-form video content (Shorts). This could be verified by Google Search Trends. TikTok's search demand has increased by 173 percent in the last year . However, demand for Instagram Reels has only increased by 22%. Furthermore, it has dropped by 33% for Stories. Despite being amazed by TikTok's explosive growth, a lot of businesses are doubtful about investing in the platform. To battle with this TikTok provided various useful business tools, including business profiles, advertisements, and a creator marketplace. This could definitely be one of the reasons to be more hopeful this year. In addition to that social media allow business to communicate with their customers in real-time and therefore respond to issues much more quickly than it was possible in systems like email and phone calls. Employees are no longer limited by equipment availability, time zones or geographic locations and can communicate seamlessly. As an example, if someone has a question about returning an item, there is no need to go all the way to the shop, or call and be put on wait for 15 minutes. They could just write to the support in Instagram and get a real-time reply from one of the multiple employees constantly monitoring the chats.

Technology effects

Currently humans cannot function without the help of digital devices. When we wake up, first thing we do is check our smartphone and then check the online news for if there is anything new. And we end our day with and episode of a movie on the tv or an online article. This definitely makes us intertwined with the whole world as we are always present online. Technology is the reason for humans to be able to be presented with content anywhere they go, and constantly be occupied by something, thus maximizing profit. Now imagine how wearable tech and more connected devices will not only add to increasingly connected audiences and make it easy to share and consume content, but boost the creation of video content which will and is favored. With tech like smart watches and phones becoming more advanced, it is easier to record and share opinions and content around the whole world. Not only in just plain video but soon evolving into augmented and virtual reality, thus having a new type of hype content, which itself is a big thing for causing large spikes in popularity. This could be linked with the metaverse and how its being talked about as the new version of social media presence. No matter its success it will also bring a big positive impact to the popularity of social media . With the rise of a new method of digital socializing people would have no need to meet in real life for small or medium occasions and could for example have a business meeting in a virtual environment which visually looks like their office . Now think about the subtle advertisement that could take place, however now it would be more intertwined with the actual content and thus not making it annoying. Meaning that the tons of people who spend meeting or talking to friends would be exposed to it.