Social Media Revolution

 Posted by Harsimranjit Singh

Remember spending spare time on your desktop computer using msn messenger chatting with friends. Remember times when people used cell phones just to make voice calls, there was no massive text chatting. Unlike today there was no Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, no smart phones, no video or picture sharing; online social activity was very minimum back in 2003. Teenagers would spend more time outdoors playing or just interacting with friends and family in person. Business to consumer online communication barely existed; it was very tough for organizations to catch their customer’s perspective or build databases.

Later in 2003, People began to get involved in social activities via online social websites like My Space and Hi5.New innovations to laptops also occurred after 2003 which had a huge impact on desktop system price, therefore more people were available to afford PCs. This resulted in increasing online traffic on social sites as well.

 

On Feb 2004 Facebook was presented to online community, a social networking website that took off like a rocket to moon. Facebook as a social media website was modernized very uniquely by offering users to create their own profiles by adding basic information, sharing pictures, displaying daily online activities known as live feeds from friends,  and "like" button. Within 4 years Facebook had 100 million active users with enormous monthly growth rate by 178.38%. See chart below.

Total active users
Date	Users (in millions)	Days later	Monthly growth
August 26, 2008	100	1,665	178.38%
April 8, 2009	200	225	13.33%
September 15, 2009	300	160	9.38%
February 5, 2010	400	143	6.99%
July 21, 2010	500	166	4.52%
January 5, 2011	600	168	3.57%
May 30, 2011	700	145	3.45%
September 22, 2011	800	115	3.73%
April 24, 2012	900	215	1.74%
October 4, 2012	1,000	163	2.04%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

 

 

One year after Facebook launch, On Feb 2005 YouTube became part of social media, created by 3 former PayPal employees. A video sharing website which allowed users to upload videos, view videos and share them widely on the internet. YouTube uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.

With new technological developments smartphones turned smarter year after year, as now in 2013 people are well connected to social media via smartphone applications. Smartphones have also made communication on social media more efficient and faster. The mobile operating systems (OS) used by modern smartphones include Google's Android, Apple's iOS, Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry OS, Samsung's Bada, Microsoft's Windows Phone, Hewlett-Packard's webOS, and embedded Linux distributions such as Maemo and MeeGo. Such operating systems can be installed on many different phone models, and typically each device can receive multiple OS software updates over its lifetime. A few other upcoming operating systems are Mozilla's Firefox OS, Canonical Ltd.'s Ubuntu Phone, and Tizen.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone

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