History of Social Media in details

History of Social Media

 

Social Media are websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.

 

1969

 

CompuServe

 

            CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its acronym CIS) was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates.

 

1971

First email

1978

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer. As of August 2015^[update], Project Gutenberg has over 49,500 items in its collection.

        The releases are available in plain text but, wherever possible, other formats are included, such as HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and Plucker. Most releases are in the English language, but many non-English works are also available. There are multiple affiliated projects that are providing additional content, including regional and language-specific works. Project Gutenberg is also closely affiliated with Distributed Proofreaders, an Internet-based community for proofreading scanned texts.

1978

BBS (bulletin board system)

          A bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer server running custom software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through email, public message boards, and sometimes via direct chatting. Many BBSes also offer on-line games, in which users can compete with each other, and BBSes with multiple phone lines often provide chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks and other aspects of the Internet. Low-cost, high-performance modems drove online use through the early 1990s, both online services and BBSes. Infoworld estimated there were 60,000 BBS systems serving 17 million users in the US alone in 1994, a collective market much larger than the major online services like CompuServe.

1978

Birth of spam

1979

Usernet

         Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Usenet can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between email and web forums. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.

1985

Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link

         The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, normally shortened to The WELL, is one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation. As of June 2012, it had 2,693 members. It is best known for its Internet forums, but also provides email, shell accounts, and web pages. The discussion and topics on The WELL range from deeply serious to trivial, depending on the nature and interests of the participants.

1988

Inetrnet Relay Chat

         Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an application layer protocol that facilitates communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client/server networking model. IRC clients are computer programs that a user can install on their system. These clients communicate with chat servers to transfer messages to other clients. IRC is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing.

 

1989

World Wide Web Proposed

          The World Wide Web (www, W3) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by URIs, interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet. It has become known simply as the Web. The World Wide Web is the primary tool billions use to interact on the Internet, and it has changed people's lives immeasurably.Web pages are primarily text documents formatted and annotated with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In addition to formatted text, web pages may contain images, video, and software components that are rendered in the user's web browser as coherent pages of multimedia content. Embedded hyperlinks permit users to navigate between web pages. Multiple web pages with a common theme, a common domain name, or both, may be called a website. Website content can largely be provided by the publisher, or interactive where users contribute content or the content depends upon the user or their actions. Websites may be mostly informative, primarily for entertainment, or largely for commercial purposes.

1990

2.6M Internet Users

1991

The World Wide Web goes public

1991

Mp3 file format

       Is an audio coding format for digital audio which uses a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio streaming or storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on most digital audio players.

1993

Mosaic

       Mosaic, is an early web browser. It has been credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. The browser was named for its support of multiple internet protocols. 

 

1994

First blog

       Justin's Links from the Underground

theglobe.com

        theGlobe.com was an internet startup founded in 1994 by Cornell students Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman. A social networking service, theGlobe.com made headlines by going public on November 13, 1998 and posting the largest first day gain of any IPO in history up to that date. Part of the dot-com bubble, the company's stock price collapsed the next year, and the company retrenched for several years before ceasing operations in 2008.

1995

Personal home-page service - GeoCities

        GeoCities (also known as GeoCities) is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan. It was founded in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was called Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) for a very short time.[citation needed] In 1999 GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo!; at that time it was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web. In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content—for example, computer-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to "Hollywood"—hence the name of the site. Shortly after its acquisition by Yahoo!, this practice was abandoned in favor of using the Yahoo! member names in the URLs.

1996

ICQ, a free Instant Messaging software

       ICQ is an instant messaging computer program that was first developed and popularized by the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996. The name ICQ stands for "I Seek You". Its ownership was passed to AOL in 1998 and to Mail.Ru Group in 2010 (M).

       The ICQ client application and service were initially released in November 1996 and the client was freely available to download. Users could register an account and would be assigned a number, like a phone number, for others to be able to contact them (users could also provide handles). ICQ was the first stand-alone instant messenger and the first online instant messenger service as such — while real-time chat was not in itself new to the internet (IRC being the most common platform at the time), the concept of a fully centralized service with individual user accounts focused on one-on-one conversations set the blueprint for later instant messaging services like AIM, and its influence is seen in modern social media applications.

1997

The word “weblog” coined by Jorn Barger

 

Hotmail

       Outlook.com is a free web-based email service run by Microsoft. One of the world's first webmail services, it was founded in 1996 as Hotmail (stylized as HoTMaiL) by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in Mountain View, California, and headquartered in Sunnyvale. Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million and launched as MSN Hotmail, later rebranded to Windows Live Hotmail as part of the Windows Live suite of products.

SixDegrees.com

        SixDegrees.com was a social network service website that lasted from 1997 to 2001 and was based on the Web of Contacts model of social networking. It was named after the six degrees of separation concept and allowed users to list friends, family members and acquaintances both on the site and externally; external contacts were invited to join the site. Users could send messages and post bulletin board items to people in their first, second, and third degrees, and see their connection to any other user on the site. It was one of the first manifestations of social networking websites in the format now seen today. Six Degrees was followed by more successful social networking sites based on the "social-circles network model" such as Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, XING, and Facebook.

AOL instant messenger

       Is an instant messaging and presence computer program which uses the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time.

1998

GOOGLE – major Internet search engine

       Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares but control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil". In 2004, Google moved to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its interests as a holding company called Alphabet Inc. Once this restructuring is complete, Google will become Alphabet's leading subsidiary, as well as the parent for Google's Internet interests.

1999

Live jornal

      LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick. Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP Media in 2007, but continued to develop the site by the San Francisco-based company LiveJournal, Inc. In January 2009 LiveJournal laid off some employees and moved product development and design functions to Russia.

Blogger

       Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be hosted in the registered custom domain of the blogger (like www.example.com). So blogspot.com domain publishings will be redirected to the custom domain. A user can have up to 100 blogs per account.

Napster peer-to-peer file-sharing

        Napster was the name given to two music-focused online services. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files, typically music, encoded in MP3 format. The original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement, ceased operations and was eventually acquired by Roxio. In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until it was acquired by Rhapsody from Best Buy on December 1, 2011.

70M computers connected to Internet

2001

Wikipedia

        Is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopaedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access the site can edit most of its articles, with the expectation that they follow the website's policies. Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites and constitutes the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.

       Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger coined its name, a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopaedia. Initially only in English, Wikipedia quickly became multilingual as it developed similar versions in other languages, which differ in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one of more than 200 Wikipedia and is the largest with over 4.9 million articles. There is a grand total, including all Wikipedia, of nearly 35 million articles in 288 different languages.

Apple ipods

2002

Friendster

       Friendster was a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was previously a social networking service website. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via profiles and networks. It is considered one of the original and even the "grandfather" of social networks.

last.fm

        Last.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, either from Internet radio stations, or the user's computer or many portable music devices. This information is transferred ("scrobbled") to Last.fm's database either via the music player itself (Rdio, Spotify, Clementine, Amarok, MusicBee) or via a plugin installed into the user's music player. The data are then displayed on the user's profile page and compiled to create reference pages for individual artists.

2003

Social networking and bookmark sites

LinkedIn

       LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service. It was founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. In 2006, LinkedIn increased to 20 million members. As of March 2015, LinkedIn reports more than 364 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories.

Photobucket

       Photobucket is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community dedicated to preserving and sharing the entire photo and video lifecycle. Photobucket hosts more than 10 billion images from 100 million registered members, who upload more than four million images and videos per day from the Web and connected digital devices. Photobucket's headquarters are in Denver with regional offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. The website was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007. In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Ontela then renamed itself Photobucket Inc. and continues to operate as Photobucket.

Del.icio.us

        Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

Myspace.com

        MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. It is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California.

        Myspace was acquired by News Corporation in July 2005 for $580 million. From 2005 until 2008, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors, and was surpassed in the number of unique U.S. visitors in May 2009, though Myspace generated $800 million in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year.

Word Press

      WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. WordPress was used by more than 23.3% of the top 10 million websites as of January 2015. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites.

       It was first released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, as a fork of b2/cafelog. The license under which WordPress software is released is the GPLv2 (or later) from the Free Software Foundation.

TypePad

       TypePad is a blogging service owned by Endurance International Group, previously owned by SAY Media (from the merger of Six Apart Ltd and VideoEgg). Originally launched in October 2003, TypePad is based on Six Apart's Movable Type platform, and shares technology with Movable Type such as templates and APIs, but is marketed to non-technical users and includes additional features like multiple author support, photo albums and mobile blogging.

Skype

        Skype is a telecommunications application software product that specializes in providing video chat and voice calls from computers, tablets, and mobile devices via the Internet to other devices or telephones/smartphones. Users can also send instant messages, exchange files and images, send video messages, and create conference calls. Skype is available to download onto computers running Microsoft Windows, Mac, or Linux, as well as Android, Blackberry, iOS, and Windows Phone smartphones and tablets. Much of the service is free, but users require Skype Credit or a subscription to call landline or mobile numbers. Skype is based on a freemium model.

2004

Facebook

       Facebook is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to high-school students. Since 2006, anyone who is at least 13 years old was allowed to become a registered user of the website, though the age requirement may be higher depending on applicable local laws. Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to it by American universities' students.

After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". Facebook had over 1.18 billion monthly active users as of August 2015. Because of the large volume of data users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny for their privacy policies. Facebook, Inc. held its initial public offering in February 2012 and began selling stock to the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion. On July 13, 2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to reach a market cap of $250 billion.

Podcasting

       A podcast is a form of digital media that consists of an episodic series of audio or digital radio, subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed online to a computer or mobile device. The word is portmanteau of "pod" and "broadcast."

      The Merriam Webster Tenth International Collegiate defines "Podcast" as: a program (as of music or talk) made available in digital format for automatic download over the Internet.

Image hosting Flickr

       Flickr (pronounced "flicker") is an image hosting and video hosting website, and web services suite that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, and effectively an online community, the service is widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.

Digg – social bookmarking

       Digg is a news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

        It formerly had been a very popular social news website, allowing people to vote web content up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Quantcast had estimated Digg's monthly U.S. unique visits at 3.8 million. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of similar social networking sites with story submission and voting systems such as Reddit.

2005

Facebook for high school students

 

YouTube

       YouTube is a video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States. The service was created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005. In November 2006, it was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion. YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries. The site allows users to upload, view, and share videos, and it makes use of WebM, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. Available content includes video clips, TV clips, music videos, and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.

2006

Twitter

      Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called "tweets".

       Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS, or mobile device app. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco and has more than 25 offices around the world.

Slideshare

         LinkedIn SlideShare is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service. Users can upload files privately or publicly in the following file formats: PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenDocument presentations. Slide decks can then be viewed on the site itself, on hand held devices or embedded on other sites. Launched on October 4, 2006, the website is considered to be similar to YouTube, but for slideshows. It was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. The website was originally meant to be used for businesses to share slides among employees more easily, but it has since expanded to also become a host of a large number of slides that are uploaded merely to entertain. Although the website is primarily a slide hosting service, it also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars. SlideShare also provides users the ability to rate, comment on, and share the uploaded content.

400M searches a day with Google

Justin.tv

         Justin.tv was a website created by Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt in 2007 that allowed anyone to broadcast video online. Justin.tv user accounts were called "channels", like those on YouTube, and users were encouraged to broadcast a wide variety of user-generated live video content, called "broadcasts".

        The company was an Internet startup based in San Francisco, California, with seed funding from Paul Graham of seed capital firm Y Combinator and Series A funding with Alsop Louie Partners and Draper Associates.

        The original Justin.tv was a single channel featuring founder Justin Kan, who broadcast his life 24/7 and popularized the term lifecasting. In 2007, Justin Kan stopped broadcasting and Justin.tv relaunched into its later form as a network of thousands of various channels.
        Users were permitted to broadcast to an unlimited number of people for free, and watching broadcasts did not require user registration. Broadcasts that were considered to contain potentially offensive content were available only to registered users over the age of 18. Broadcasts containing defamation, pornography, copyright violations, or encouraging criminal conduct were prohibited by Justin.tv's terms of service.

2007

Tumblr.

        Tumblr (stylized in its logo as tumblr.) is a microblogging platform and social networking website founded by David Karp and owned by Yahoo! Inc. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs, as well as make their blogs private. Much of the website's features are accessed from the "dashboard" interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear.

        As of September 1, 2015, Tumblr hosts over 252 million blogs. The company's headquarters is in New York City.

Ustream

        Ustream is a company founded in 2007 that provides video streaming services to more than 80 million viewers and broadcasters. It is based in San Francisco and has more than 180 employees in their San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Budapest offices. Company partners include Panasonic, Samsung, Logitech, CBS News, PBS NewsHour, Viacom, and IMG Media. It received $11.1 million in Series A funding for new product development from DCM (Doll Capital Management) and investors Labrador Ventures and Band of Angels. It is owned by an American company of the same name, Ustream, Inc., based in San Francisco, California. Ustream will be the live game streaming service for Sony's PlayStation 4.

2008

Iphone

        iPhone is a line of smartphones designed and marketed by Apple Inc. They run Apple's iOS mobile operating system. The first generation iPhone was released on June 29, 2007; the most recent iPhone models are the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which were unveiled at a special event on September 9, 2014.

       The user interface is built around the device's multi-touch screen, including a virtual keyboard. The iPhone has Wi-Fi and can connect to cellular networks. An iPhone can shoot video (though this was not a standard feature until the iPhone 3GS), take photos, play music, send and receive email, browse the web, send texts, GPS navigation, record notes, do mathematical calculations, and receive visual voicemail. Other functions—video games, reference works, social networking, etc.—can be enabled by downloading application programs (‘apps’); as of October 2013, the App Store offered more than one million apps by Apple and third parties and is ranked as the world's second largest mobile software distribution network of its kind (by number of currently available applications).

        There are eight generations of iPhone models, each accompanied by one of the eight major releases of iOS. The original 1st-generation iPhone was a GSM phone and established design precedents, such as a button placement that has persisted throughout all releases and a screen size maintained for the next four iterations. The iPhone 3G added 3G cellular network capabilities and A-GPS location. The iPhone 3GS added a faster processor and a higher-resolution camera that could record video at 480p. The iPhone 4 featured a higher-resolution 960×640 "Retina Display", a VGA front-facing camera for video calling and other apps, and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with 720p video capture. The iPhone 4S upgrades to an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p video recording, a dual-core A5 processor, and a natural language voice control system called Siri. iPhone 5 features the dual-core A6 processor, increases the size of the Retina display to 4 inches, introduces LTE support and replaces the 30-pin connector with an all-digital Lightning connector. The iPhone 5C features the same A6 chip as the iPhone 5, along with a new backside-illuminated FaceTime camera and a new casing made of polycarbonate. The iPhone 5S features the dual-core 64-bit A7 processor, an updated camera with a larger aperture and dual-LED flash, and the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, integrated into the home button, and fitness tracking facilities. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus further increased screen size, measuring at 4.7 inches and 5.5 inches, respectively. In addition, they also feature a new A8 chip and M8 motion coprocessor. As of 2013, the iPhone 3GS had the longest production run, 1,181 days; followed by the iPhone 4, produced for 1,174 days.

2009

Posterous

        Posterous was a simple blogging platform started in May 2008, funded by Y Combinator. It was based in San Francisco. Posterous agreed to be shut down in March 12, 2012 after much of the team was acquired by Twitter on March 12, 2012. In February 2013, Posterous announced that they would be shutting down the service on 30 April 2013. Following the shutdown, Posterous URLs displayed a "bye" page showing an image of an astronaut with a spanner and a satellite.

       Updating to Posterous was similar to other blogging platforms. Posting could be done by logging into the website's rich text editor, but it was particularly designed for mobile blogging. Mobile methods include sending an email, with attachments of photos, MP3s, documents, and video (both links and files). Many social media pundits considered Posterous to be the leading free application for lifestreaming. The platform received wide attention when leading social media expert Steve Rubel declared he was moving his blogging activity entirely to Posterous.

       Posterous also had its own URL shortening service, which as of March 2010 could post to Twitter.

       Posterous allowed users to point the DNS listing for a domain name or subdomain they already owned to their Posterous account, allowing them to have a site hosted by Posterous that used their own domain name.

350M Facebook users

 

“Unfriend” added to New Oxford American Dictionary

2010

Bing

      Bing (known previously as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine") from Microsoft.

      Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009, at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, California, for release on June 1, 2009. Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions while queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explore pane") based on semantic technology from Powerset, which Microsoft purchased in 2008.

      On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012.

      In October 2011, Microsoft stated that they were working on new back-end search infrastructure with the goal of delivering faster and slightly more relevant search results for users. Known as "Tiger", the new index-serving technology has been incorporated into Bing globally since August 2011. In May 2012, Microsoft announced another redesign of its search engine that includes "Sidebar", a social feature that searches users' social networks for information relevant to the search query. In September 2013, a new-look Bing was released to tie in with Microsoft's "Metro" design language.

      As of February 2015, it is the second largest search engine in the US with a query volume at 19.8%, while Yahoo Search, which Bing powers, has 12.8%, while its competitor Google is at 64.5%.

Google buzz

       Google Buzz was a social networking, microblogging and messaging tool that was developed by Google and integrated into their web-based email program, Gmail. Users could share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in "conversations" and visible in the user's inbox.

      On October 14, 2011, Google announced that it would be discontinuing the service and that the existing content would be available in read-only mode. Buzz was discontinued on December 15, 2011.

      Buzz enabled users to choose to share publicly with the world or privately to a group of friends each time they posted. Picasa, Flickr, Google Latitude, Google Reader, Google Sidewiki, YouTube, Blogger, FriendFeed, identi.ca and Twitter were integrated. The creation of Buzz was seen by industry analysts as an attempt by Google to compete with social networking websites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter. Buzz also included several interface and interaction elements from other Google products (e.g., Google Reader) such as the ability to "like" a post.

Pinterest

       Pinterest is a web and mobile application company, which operates an eponymous photo sharing website. Registration is required for use. The site was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp. It is managed by Cold Brew Labs and funded by a small group of entrepreneurs and investors.

       Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann summarized the company as a "catalog of ideas," rather than as a social network, that inspires users to "go out and do that thing."

2011

Social media accesible from virtually anywhere

 

Twitter – 56M users

 

Facebook – 550M users

 

Google+

       Google+ is an interest-based social network that is owned and operated by Google Inc.

      The service, Google's fourth foray into social networking, experienced strong growth in its initial years, although usage statistics have varied, depending on how the service is defined. User engagement has been relatively low. Three Google executives have overseen the product, which is undergoing substantial changes. These include the re-launch of two core Google+ functions, communications and photos, as standalone products, as well as refocusing the service on shared interests. Males of ages 24–36 have comprised the largest share of the user base.

2012

1B Facebook users

 

500M Twitter users

 

400M Google+ users

 

2.4B users Internet Population

 

6B Mobile subscriptions