History of the social media

To begin with, let’s get clear that the value of social media hardly can be overestimated today. Recently, it became inherent part of modern culture and one of the prior means of socialization. Being relatively innovative communication tool, social media impresses billiards with pace of development and overall expansion. In this paper I’ll try to outline the basic history facts about three the most popular social medias: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Facebook is a social network service founded in February 2004, privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As for the progenitors, the web resource with more than 750 million users was founded by the group of Harvard students: Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Mark Zuckerberg as main founder and chief developer. Initially, Facebook was intended to establish social network for students of Harvard. The story of its progress began with its expansion to other universities of Boston area: Stranford and Ivy league. Gradually, it gave the support to other universities and high schools in North America and in states far beyond its borders. Eventually, the only requirement to became the member of Facebook community is 13 and higher age. However, this rule is violated often. Talking about users and generation categories of Facebook, it is quite hard to get age qualification. However, it should be stressed that 65% of Facebook users are teenagers.

Another social network Twitter was launched by Jack Dorsey in July 2006. Its purpose is a little different from Facebook. Being aimed to establish original mean of online communication, the producers and founders were aimed to get the tool of small groups contacting. As the result, the function of microbloging was implemented. Thereby, Twitter is often called “Internet SMS”. Twitter is very different from Facebook with generation categories of its users. Being 2nd world popular social network, this resource is mostly intended to adult people. According to official stats, only 11 percent from the entire amount of Twitter community are teenagers. The mean age of resource user is 32 years. It is quite difficult to talk about the concrete amount of Twitter users, as the company does not advertise such info. However, it is well known that in 2010 Twitter experienced more than 600 000 000 unique visits.

YouTube is conceptually different type of social media. The main purpose can be determined as the idea of free video-sharing community designing. It was created by three former employees of Pay Pall: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. YouTube was launched in February 2005. The creation of YouTube became the real breakthrough in social medias. This fact is determined by incredible social value of this resource, as it became the first truly available way to post own video in web. The large amount of precedents approved it as one of the most efficient solutions for “speech freedom” improvement. Talking about age categories of YouTube users, this aspect seems to be different from Facebook and Twitter, which are featured by “users’ age” priorities. The point is YouTube is not age directed, as the absence of decent competitors allowed company to monopolize appropriate market of online video sharing. Being huge international company, YouTube is the world leading web site with the amount of annual attends. Eventually, this company has 31 localized and a worldwide version.



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