To get to grips with the background of my PhD in Publishing and Social Media, well before I began to write anything or wading into Foucault and McLuhan and digital copyright, I did a lot of reading on the history of social media.
There are loads of good timelines and even more that are not so good, but I thought it best to pick and choose what platforms I wanted to cover and therefore needed to create my own timeline. But I also wrote a fair bit about the background of Social Media, which I’ll share here in three parts. In the final part, I’ll include a bibliography, so don’t worry, I wasn’t just making this stuff up.
Introduction
Today it’s not uncommon to wake up to a smartphone alarm, check your emails, text messages, like something on Facebook, send out a morning tweet, pin the newest salad recipe on your ‘foodie’ board on Pinterest, place a digital echo on a map, give a somber hue to a late-night photo on Instagram, and write a blog post all before you roll out of bed. These examples are all forms of Social Networking Sites (SNS) that have become integrated into our lives since the advent of Web 2.0, which shifted use of the web from reactive to creative. Boyd and Ellison provide a useful starting point for defining social networking sites in explaining them as “web-based services that allow individuals to (1)construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (2008, pp 211). This definition is carefully constructed to be broad enough to include a variety of platforms for SNS as well as many of the platforms that are built for and in mobile technology. However, it is useful to further clarify that an “articulated list” of connected users can be a grab and borrow function of the platform itself which requests access to the user’s other social media sites in order to build a ready made list of connections. What can be taken from Boyd and Ellison’s definition is the backbone of what SNS entail: profile-building, creating a list or space where you share your information, and the ability to search and find potential connections. It is this ability to search for and make connections outwith your own list that is another central pillar of a SNS. Closed systems like Whatsapp, Viber, and Skype only allow access to your own connections, and no one can connect with your contacts via your profile.
With all these connections comes a wealth of information that SNS accumulate about users, their likes, dislikes, etc., and with this comes the opportunity to disseminate this information for research and advertising purposes. Though the ways that the algorithms of SNS are written are often gently (and sometimes not so gently) directing the collection of information flow in order for the platform to best monetise it, marketing on and through social media is a specialist subject unto itself and I will not be focussing on the intricacies of their algorithms or marketing outputs unless they explicitly relate to and influence the way that we understand publishing and the role of the book within a social media environment.
Similarly, this study will focus less on the history of social networking sites, except where relevant, and will instead present an overview of a selection of sites, with more detailed research identifying the future methods that publishers can use to incorporate social media as a slush pile for traditionally published products.
The Upstarts
Beginning in 1978 with the Bulletin Board System (BBS), which was an online space where users could use code to meet and post messages, in the early days these communities were often limited by the necessity of modem connections and the cost of out of town calls. In 1984 and 1985 Tom Jennings created FidoNet, connecting different nodes of BBS from around the world, and, arguably the first social media system was created (Bush, R 1993). But perhaps it is America Online and its distinctive instant messaging service, ‘Welcome! You’ve got mail’ soundbite, and utility allowing users to build and search profiles that truly started the social revolution (Washington Post 2010) in 1985.
Ten years on, Geocities was created, which allowed users to create and sort websites based on content. In 1995, TheGlobe.com was launched. TheGlobe.com was an “online community” that “gave users the freedom to personalize their online experiences by publishing their own content and interacting with others with similar interests (TheGlobe.com 2009). These sites were followed by Classmates (1995) and Six Degrees (1996), both of which were based on the idea that virtual connections and social sharing are good things. Classmates was developed to satisfy that curiosity of what our former school mates have made of themselves and their lives. Users connected by listing their schools and being able to see who else attended there.
Instead of using a physical real-world entity such as a school be the basis of users’ virtual connections, Six Degrees allowed users to build their own connections from both online and offline sources. This then invited those offline to join in (where an email was known), thus building their user base. Notice boards and messages could be sent between users within a certain level of separation, and users could see how many degrees of separation they had from other users. It is widely believed that “The site was the first to combine personal profiles, instant messaging, friends lists and the ability to search other members friends lists” (Plymale, S. 2012), and was the true forerunner of how we view and use today’s SNS.
In 1999 LiveJournal started as a “community publishing platform” that wanted to blur the lines between blogging and social networking (2015). The customisable, journal-entry format allows users to keep their own journal and allow others to read, comment, share, and connect with it. One of the most interesting facets of LiveJournal is how the popular focus for journal articles alters in each country, creating a kind of open-source journalistic record of the country’s political and cultural temperature. The influence of live journaling and community reporting can still be seen across the web from Blogspot to MySpace blogs, to Wikipedia (which went live in 2001), to Facebook, to Twitter.
Much like LiveJournal, another blogging and social media platform also got its start that year: Blogger. Run as a small startup that wanted to allow users to create blogs with their own customisable spaces to tell their stories and connect with others, Blogger held on by the skin of its teeth during the dot.com collapse, saying, “We narrowly survived, not all in one piece, but kept the service going the whole time (most days) and started building it back up” (About Us 2015). And in 2003, Google bought the company for a substantial sum and integrated it into their own services where it continues to grow. Blogger is often considered to be one of the major forerunners in the blogosphere.
In 2002, Friendster, a SNS that began to truly resemble the platforms that are most prevalent today, went live. The history of Friendster is one of fierce competition in the early days of SNS and missed opportunities. It was only two years after Friendster launched that Facebook opened to the engaged network of college students that helped it grow so quickly. But, whereas Facebook thrived, Friendster faltered. The founder, Jonathan Abrams, had plans to implement a timeline, music lists and more (Fiegerman, S. 2014). But over time Friendster stalled and instead of buying Facebook, as it tried to do, “Facebook bought the entire Friendster portfolio of patents” (Gannes, L. 2010) and Friendster faded away into irrelevance.
In the ensuing years, SNS began popping up with more frequency with the big names continuing to make a huge impact in the ‘real world’ of face-to-face connectivity and advertising. In 2003 the big names to launch were Couchsurfing, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Last.FM, all three were focussed at different social market shares. Couchsurfing is a website that did what the name suggested: it connected people who had a spare sofa or bed to those who wanted to find one for a cheap place to stay. By building profiles and rating/reviewing users, and connecting with other travellers, couchsurfing created a unique niche for a particular style of social-travel. This style of social travel has given rise to similar sites such as Airbnb and Behomm (for artsy travellers), Kid & Coe (for families), and luxury rentals from HomeAway.
MySpace was started up as a more “free-wheeling” Friendster, and quickly found its niche. It reached its peak following five years after launching (2003), in December 2008 with “75.9 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S.” (Gillette, F. 2011). For many years it was the rising star of SNS and was the place to be for new bands to showcase their music, friends to hang out, post photos, write and share blogs, and to connect. But soon after it was purchased by the large corporation News Corp. in 2007, it began to haemorrhage followers. Even the paid members who were brought in to promote the site began to leave. In her article “The Rise and Inglorious Fall of MySpace”, Felix Gillette summerises MySpace’s descent by quoting Danah Boyd who says, “The thing about user adoption and user departure is that it’s not a steady flow. Think of it as, you’re knitting a beautiful scarf, and you’re knitting and knitting, and you get a bigger and bigger scarf. Then someone pulls a loose thread at the bottom. And it all unravels” (2011).
While MySpace was focussed on the younger, socially experimental crowd, another start up SNS that launched in 2003 found its niche in making business connections. LinkedIn allows members to build a past portfolio, create a CV, and make and endorse connections and skills. In the early days, LinkedIn advertised with Friendster, and ever since has focussed on making partnerships that will secure its place within the social networking market. In order to do so, in 2005 it opened business lines for jobs and subscriptions. It grew rapidly, becoming an international company and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011. It continued its acceleration with its 2012 purchase of Slideshare, which is a site sharing presentations on the web; this purchase included all Slideshare’s expansive data stock (Savitz, E. 2012).
Another SNS launched in 2003 was Last.FM. As one of the first sites to use streaming music as a connection point between users, it may best be described as a music site that incorporates several aspects of social networking. Last.fm uses a music recommender service called Scrobbler that suggests songs, artists, and albums to a user based on what they listen to. Users can build a profile, find real-life gigs, create and answer public messages and have their music taste rated by others. Users can also connect with ‘neighbours’, groups, and more to share and expand content and off-line connections, in addition to having their music choices feed into the chart listings. Having given itself over to advertising-based revenue streams, Last.FM offers free, limited accounts with advertising as well as freemium service of advertisement-free subscription accounts, making it one of the few SNS that has not folded after introducing subscription fees. Its freemium platform works here because it gives users a sense of choice and power. They can still use the service in a way they want, but without all the bells and whistles, and, most notably, with unavoidable paid advertisements.
2004 was the year best remembered in social networking as the birth year of Facebook. Similar in its structure and original ideas of social connection to early competitor Friendster, Facebook was begun in Harvard by Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. The site was preceded by Facemash in 2003, a Zuckerberg-created Harvard version of a ‘hot or not’ site where the students’ photos were placed side (Zeevi, D. 2013). Facemash was shut down shortly after being launched. When Facebook went live, it became hugely popular in the Harvard network with over half the undergraduates signing up in the first month (Hoffman, C. 2008). Within a few years it gained large investments, a growing membership, and expanded to other universities and eventually to everyone worldwide. Today, it is largest social network with over 1,366 million users worldwide (We Are Social 2015) and it still adheres to a mission of “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them” (Facebook.com 2015).
There are several authors who have comprehensively detailed Facebook’s history (Kirkpatrick, D. 2010; Lacy, S. 2008; Brügger, N. 2015) and others who have focussed on how it has changed the ways we interact with one another both online and offline (Seidman, G. 2012; Wright, K. & Webb, L. 2010; Burke, M. & Kraut, R. 2014). It is important to also mention Facebook’s acquisition of popular cross-platform messaging app Whatsapp in 2014 for 19 billion USD. The deal allows Facebook access to a complementary platform that is growing “much faster than Facebook” itself (Barajin, B. quoted on BBC.co.uk 2014).
In 2004, Facebook was launched and rose to the top, while others, such as Catster were launched and failed to really break into the mainstream. Catster, like the name suggests, is a SNS for your pet cats, with community boards, groups to join or create, and give treats or purchase virtual items. What is unique about Catster and its sister site Dogster, is the ability for each user to create and maintain multiple sub-profiles: one for each of their pets. In a wise move, Catster made itself compatible with larger SNS such as Facebook to allow users to register and have ready-made friend lists and a community of cat lovers. Catster is still alive today, though it falls outside the top 900 websites in the US and UK as listed by QuantCast (based on independently verified monthly visits).
As the designs and styles of SNS became more sleek and user friendly, they also began to stake out their territory. Flickr began in 2004 and strove to be the go-to place for the photographers of the world to store their high-resolution images. In marking out this niche, the website calls itself “Almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world” (Flickr 2015). The photobucket site allows users to register and upload their images and to take advantage of the many ways the site offers to organise and share photos with “people who matter”. One way the site facilitates this connection is by allowing users to create a Flickr event on affiliate site MeetUp.com, to make connections and ‘follow’ other Flickr users. Like Last.FM, Flickr works with a freemium membership strategy which offers up to 1 tetrabite of free storage to users before users need to purchase a premium account to acquire more storage space.
The title of the 2014 article on Eater by Hillary Dixler sums up the rise of Yelp “Yelp Turns Ten: From Startup to Online Review Dominance” (2014). Founded “to help people find great local businesses like dentists, hair stylists and mechanics” (Yelp 2015) Yelp started as an email circle that enabled friends to give reviews of local businesses by allowing users to register and ask questions about local services. The site’s programmes would then locate nearby users who expressed a similar query and eventually email you back with suggestions. In 2005, the site got a revamp to reflect a look and feel that is less email circle and more the website it is today. Today the site boasts 142 million unique monthly visitors in Q1 of 2015. Yelp, like Facebook and Twitter, is a publically traded company.
Users can sign in, create social networks and leave reviews of places and services. The more reviews the users create, the more highly they are valued by Yelp, eventually they can become part of the Yelp Elite Squad. Users can talk to one another and build friend lists as well as becoming a ‘fan’ of another’s work. Much like the later Foursquare, Yelp offers a form of check-in and badges on offer if a user frequents a particular business, all of which works to create a social network that extends into and interacts with the real world.