Rise of social media
First launches of social media
Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. The first appearance of Facebook can be called the launching “TheFacebook” on thefacebook.com [1], but it is not where the Facebook’s story starts.
Back in 2003 Zuckerberg, while studied in Harvard University[2], built a “Facemash” that was the Hot or Not [3] website which took pictures from face books[4] 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. [5] 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 TheFacebook 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.[6].
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 [9] [8]. In 2005 “TheFacebook” was changed to “Facebook”, Accel Partners [10] invests $13 million into Facebook and there were already about 5.5 million active accounts [7]. 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 [11]. 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. [12]
The most interesting incident was when about 50 million accounts were under the risk because of the security issue [13]. Also, it was known that user passwords were not encrypted for some account to 2012 [15]. In April 2021, the database with about half a billion accounts was published on the Internet with addresses, dates of birth, emails [14]. It is also worth mentioning the case when Facebook with Apple arbitrarily gave user Data to Hackers who pretended law enforcement officials [16].
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[17].
Twitter was founded on March 21, 2006. If we look at the first tweet [1], made by co-founder Jack Dorsey [2] (@Jack [3]), we can find out that “Twitter” was “Twttr” actually. But let us go in order.
The co-founders were Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass [6], Biz Stone [7] and Evan Williams [8]. 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 [4] [5].
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” [9] [10].
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 [11].
There are some highlights in Twitters history. One of the most important was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive conference [18]. 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. [13] [14] [15].
Today Twitter has about 330 million active accounts [12]. 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 [16], @Meta [17] 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 first social 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.
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.
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 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
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.
Commercials
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.
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.
