Carrying on from the previous blog post on the history of social media, here is part 2 of 3.
Each year in the 2000s more SNS tried to rise above the rest. In 2005 two sites were launched that made a large impact at the time, but only one of which has retained a valuable user base today. 2005’s most notable upstart was YouTube. We now know YouTube as the place to go viral, upload your home movies, or to catch up on the latest music videos or TV shows. Businesses consider it a great place to advertise, and as a place to store their back-catalogue of adverts, but with its interconnected lists, community groups and comments sections, it is a social network. Like Last.FM uses music, and Flickr uses photographs as a niche, YouTube uses videos as the central form of content for users to upload, share, and discuss. YouTube has situated itself as a SNS by becoming a place of connection, describing itself as “a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small” (YouTube 2015). In October of 2006, Google (eight years old at the time) purchased the yet-to-be profitable YouTube for $1.65 billion, in a deal that placed Google firmly in the lead of the online video streaming content market.
YouTube also has a vested interest in protecting the copyright of its users – if for no other reason than to save itself from litigation from copyright infringement lawsuits. Prior to the sale, YouTube encouraged all things to go up, and if there was a complaint, their instruction to users was to remove the offending videos. Policing the copyright of user-created content was not a position that first-year YouTube took, but it was one of the first things that Google began to iron out. They did this by cozying up to the large creative and publishing industries to convince them of the benefit of being part of YouTube, of working together and sharing content. But not all industry players agreed, and in 2012 YouTube settled a seven year long court case brought by media giant Viacom who claimed that YouTube posted their content without their permission. The settlement saw no money change hands (Viacom originally wanted one billion in damages) in the landmark ‘win’ for YouTube. The courts held that while “YouTube could be held liable for willful blindness, this standard did not impose an affirmative duty to seek out infringing activity” (ARL Staff 2014), as long as when the infringing content was identified, it was removed.
Though 2005 was a big year for YouTube, Bebo didn’t fare so well in the long run. The US-based start up brought something new and different to the social connection around blogging by encouraging users to ‘Blog Early, Blog Often’, as suggested by the name BEBO. By making it easy to connect with other users via videos, messages, and posts, share their thoughts and journals in online blogs, and to customise their own layout, Bebo was ahead of the game in 2005. At the time Bebo was one of the first SNS to link to the other major SNS to create a user-centred stream of information and connections. With its meteoric rise, Bebo was purchased by AOL for 850 million, only to be the company’s albatross. In 2010 it was purchased by Criterion Capital Partners, and re-launched in 2011. But Bebo simply could not compete with SNS powerhouses like Facebook and Twitter and in 2013 Criterion Capital Partners filed for Bankruptcy and the original founder re-purchased the site in 2013. In 2014, Bebo was given new life by Michael Birch and was re-launched as a more modern app-based SNS that has a more cartoon-esque atmosphere, with games and drawing functions, and is focused heavily on chat. It describes itself by staying that “The new Bebo is for people who don’t take life too seriously” (Griffen 2014), but whether or not it will be picked up by users remains to be seen.
2006 and 2007 saw the rise of four SNS: MyChurch, Twitter, Tumblr, and Bubbly. As far as niche social media markets go, MyChurch has tapped into a large, diverse and readily available market with its launch in 2006. In a Mashable article introducing the new site, Peter Cashmore called it the “Facebook of Churches” (2006) and lauded its ability to integrate MySpace features to create unique profiles. The “private social network” targeted Christian individuals and churches who are less media savvy than Facebook’s, often younger, more educated members, and offered a way to connect with other churches in the community. By offering both free and paid memberships for blogs, events, classifieds, small groups and more, MyChurch filled a gap in the SNS marketplace that allows them to continue to thrive, somewhat under the radar of big-name SNS, and offer simple, effective services to their users.
On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s creator sent the world’s first Tweet. It read: “Just setting up my twttr” (@Jack 2006). No one knew then that this was the first step in Twitter becoming one of the largest SNS in the world. The platform was begun as a free platform for microblogging. Users sign up, creating an @ handle (referring to an online name), and speak to the world in 140 characters or less. The premise of Twitter is one person, speaking to many in an open forum. In 2007, Twitter introduced the hashtag # which created a word or string of characters as a searchable topic. Users can create a profile, build lists of connections, follow public and private feeds, reply to and retweet (RT) others’ tweets.
Twitter started out with a much older demographic that other SNS, and had a huge surge in join-ups towards the end of 2008: a time when the majority of its users were 35-44 (Blanchard, O. 2008). This, combined with its use of trending topics and hashtags, has inevitably led to it becoming less of what Van Dijck calls “a neutral platform upon which users freely interact” and “an echo chamber of random chatter” (pg 69 2013), and more of an information sharing network. This is apparent in the rise of Twitter journalism, which shone through when, in January 2009, a US plane crashed into Hudson River and a Tweet was the first to show the scene, even before traditional media had heard about it. From this point, the rise in the use of Twitter as a real-time “social sensor” increased at a rapid pace (Sakaki, Okazaki, and Matsui 2010).
In 2010, Twitter sold the rights to include tweets in searches to Microsoft and Google, giving a Twitter an even wider reach than its ubiquitous “share” button, which is now found in every corner of the web.
Tumblr is a favourite SNS that allows uses to be ‘creators’ and to “Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be” (Tumblr 2015). Though Tumblr was begun in 2007 by David Karp, it has a history that can be traced back to Germany in 1997 when a seventeen year old Chris Neukirchen created a place to publish short content composed of different elements such as links, photos, quotes, and more. He called his invention Anarchaia, and described it as a ‘Tumbelogs’, a combination of ‘tumble’ and ‘web-logging’. Soon after, Chicago-based Marcel Molina developed Projectionist, a more underwritten and stylised version of Neukirchen’s tumblelog platform. In 2007, David Karp was inspired by the Projectionist to develop Tumblr, which combined the simplicity of Anarchaia with the style of the Projectionist. In 2013, Yahoo purchased Tumblr for 1.1 billion USD. Today, Tumblr has accrued almost 80 million posts and has facilitated almost 46,000 real-life meetups through the SNS, bringing ‘tumbleloggers’ together into the real world.
In 2007 Bubbly was launched and over the years has positions itself to be the “Twitter and Instagram for your voice” (Bubbly 2015). Though this SNS had few ups and downs in the years following its launch, it is currently growing steadily in its predominantly Asian market, and is making headway into the UK, where it launched in 2013. Users on Bubbly create a profile, record voice updates and blogs and shares them with connections. They can follow others’ feeds, add in their own special voice effects and can ring others on the same app. One of the benefits of the Bubbly is the ability to allow users to feel close to their social connections, as nothing says ‘this message is only for you’ like listening to a voice message or blog from your nearest and dearest. At the same time, adding short voice blogs to high-profile accounts allows those celebrities to become more ‘human’ than with other SNS, where a user knows that the connection is often not mutual. The effect of feeling other users are speaking directly to you will also be interesting as it relates to advertising, especially since the site monetises in-app purchases to connect with celebrities.
Skip forward to 2009 and the start of Foursquare, a company that looked to become the “location layer of the internet” (Dash, A. 2013). Foursquare as we know it today was a second project by founder Dennis Crowley; the first was a similar check-in based location programme that was called Dodgeball and was acquired by Google in 2005. It subsequently closed down in 2009 and the original founders left to start Foursquare. As it grew from a small mobile function that combined the check-in with ranking aspects of a game, Foursquare amassed a huge following, boosted by visits to the popular SXSW festival in Texas. Mayorships of locations, badges for returning to places (such as the Gym Rat badge for gym users), and real-life interactions between merchants and users (free crisps for the mayor, etc), drove the site to grow exponentially in the following years. In 2014, Foursquare unbundled its two main app components into separate but intricately linked apps. Foursquare would still be used to find a specific spot based on a user’s location, where they’ve been before, and what limiting criteria they placed on the search. Swarm, the company’s second app, was more social. It identified where a user’s friends were gathered and used passive data to generally locate those around you in a curated list.
Those users who do not have either the Foursquare or Swarm apps are still giving passive locative data to the company, even if they are simply posting to Twitter about their slow commute, the partnership between the companies allows Foursquare to record that information. Since working with a number of partners, including Vine, Flickr, Twitter, Path, and Instagram, Foursquare has positioned itself as one of the most important location apps. It now uses location and personal ratings-based advertisements to specifically target geolocated demographics, a move which could boost the whole SNS and actually make it a “Yelp-Killer” (Popper, B. & Hamburger, E. 2014) while still keeping users connected with those they choose.
The biggest newcomer to the SNS market in 2010 was the photo and video sharing SNS, Instagram. The premise of this SNS is relatively simple, users sign in, upload photos to their stream, apply preset filters, and connect with others using hashtags and @ symbols to tag other users. Early adopters were photographers who wanted to showcase their works. As the site became more mainstream, it became populated with celebrities, hipters, and companies wanting to market their brand. In 2012, just before Facebook took its stock public, it purchased Instagram for 1 billion USD, giving it an instant boost in users. Since its purchase, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying, “we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently” (Diallo, A. 2014), and the only changes have been the introduction of advertisements in a user’s feed, a seamless integration with Facebook posting, and a more intricate terms of service agreement.
According to the Pew Research Centre, Instagram users account for 23% of adult internet users, but the biggest number of users are in the 18-29 age bracket – with 53% of those young adults posting regularly (Duggan, M., et. al. 2015). In 2014, the number of Instagram users surpassed that of Twitter, reaching some 300 million active monthly users, a number which is expected to grow in coming years.
If you blinked in 2011, you may have missed one of the fastest growing SNS launched that year: Snapchat. Begun as a Stanford startup between friends, Picaboo (which later became Snapchat) was a service that allowed users to send disappearing photos and videos with timers, sound, captions, and doodling capabilities. With a demographic that is younger, cooler, and more keyed into the mobile generation than those who use Facebook, the SNS’s biggest competitor, Snapchat is “more intimate and exclusive”, paring down your ‘friends’ to those contacts you actually know and speak to (Coalo, J. 2014, pp 3). Recently, the introduction of targeted advertising and guaranteed user interaction with adverts has pushed the social media app’s valuation up to 15 billion USD, in March 2015[1]. It has also been plagued by competition and hacking scandals, but this hasn’t dramatically hindered its growth.
In a year when photos were a driving force in the growth of SNS, Pinterest emerged as a “visual bookmarking” site. Users who sign up to SNS Pinterest use the web as sources for items to pin to their boards on the site. Boards can be organised however a user sees fit, and pinned items can be shared from one board to another. Users can make friend lists, build and share boards, and pull images from the wider web to curate their own custom scrapbook of the web. Of particular interest is the demographic of Pinterest, more than 80% of its users are women, and it is more popular than Twitter among that constituency (Bercovici, J. 2014, pp 1).
Pinterest is based on future events, and Bercovici quotes Pinterest’s Head of Partnerships, Joanne Bradford, as saying, “There’s intent around a pin, It says, ‘I’m organizing this into a place in my life,’ like when people tear out a page of a magazine” (Bercovici, J. 2014, pp 1). It’s through this sort of ‘future pinning’ that Pinterest allows users to gather together and create groups and boards. It is also this aspect of the SNS that makes it of particular use to advertisers (they always want to be able to sell to the future bride), as well as opens it up to potential copyright litigation by pinning and re-pinning images of which a user does not own the copyright.
Google+ has become a way to integrate many of Google’s core services such as Gmail, Hangouts and video Hangouts, mobile, SMS, Google Play, Maps, and YouTube, all in one convenient, albeit rather lonely, place. The major draw for users who sign up to Google+ is the division of “Circles”. Connections can be divided into a number of circles, or groups, arranged by the user with differing privacy settings. Each circle can have its own messages, known as ‘huddles’. Google+ has Communities, which are similar to Facebook’s Groups, in that they connect users who have common interests. It has the distinction of being one of the fastest growing SNS ever, amassing over 25 million users in the first month alone, but even though it has grown since, the pages seem rather quiet when compared to Facebook, its main rival. As Forbes author Steve Faktor said, “Friends and family stayed on Facebook, Business contacts stayed on LinkedIn, Celebrities stayed on Twitter, Women stayed on Pinterest, and Kylie Jenner and Kodachrome hipsters stayed on Instagram” (2014, pp 2). Faktor goes on to say that Google+ is not a new Facebook, but is simply a “fancier Reddit”. The jury is still out on whether Google+ will remain a part of our SNS landscape.
In 2012, Twitter purchased a yet-to-be-launched video-based version of itself, called Vine. It was officially launched in January 2013. With Vine, users are able to shoot, edit, and share six-second videos straight from their mobile devices. These videos are uploaded to a users’ stream where they loop and can be hashtagged and shared. Tero Kuittinen writes for web technology site BGR that “Most app vendors are focusing on making their apps supremely easy and painless to use.” He makes a valid point when he goes on to say that “Creating apps that demand substantial time commitment and feature long learning periods can work if the apps tie consumers into communities of deeply committed aficionados” (2013). This isn’t to say that low quality vines or quickly shot Instagram photos won’t foster much public reaction, but it does indicate that those users who put in the time to get to know a SNS like Vine are likely the ones who will stay with the SNS and find ways to integrate it with other SNS, giving it more value and a longer life than other apps.
In 2014, the world said hello to Ello, a new “revolutionary social network that is transforming how people connect, free from advertising, manipulation, and exploitation” (Ello 2015). Though it was first started in late 2014 with only 90 users and a invitation only joining policy, today is free to join and is growing. People are drawn to its ‘no add, never selling user data’ policy (Ello 2015). Ello also features a unique opt-out policy for its user data collection. Ello does have a store in-site selling branded products and offers a few in-site purchases (where the proceeds go back into the company), to help it raise funds in the absence of advertisement and data mining. The clean lines and uncluttered space of Ello is a deliberate design feature to remove the clutter seen on other SNS, but can be construed as a Hipster version of Facebook. One of the key features of Ello, and perhaps the thing that will help it stay alive in the face competing SNS, is going to be putting into action their manifesto that states “that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership” (Ello 2015).
Ello aside, in 2014 one of the trends in SNS in has been the division of services. Of the major SNS that have survived the marketplace, arguably only Facebook and Google+ are aggregates of all services: video, chat, images, and connections. Other sites have taken on one aspect of these and given it a special twist: Twitter’s 140 character Tweets, Vine’s six-second videos, Bubbly’s 90 second recordings, and Instagram’s images, among others. But in 2014, more than in previous years, SNS have relied on taking one of those features and paring them with geo-locating services giving us Recho, Space Tag, and Findery, which are all best used on a mobile device, helping to give the social networking app (SNA) more credence among users.
[1] In March of 2015, the social networking app was valued at 15 billion USD.