The growth of social
After Elon Musk’s massive multibillion-dollar purchase of Twitter and the commotion it’s causing in the tech world, here’s a look at social media’s history
It might seem like social media has been around forever, but it’s relatively new tech, with a major boom in 2004.
Nice to tweet you
What began in April, with months of waffling, lawsuits and almost a full-blown trial, Elon Musk now owns Twitter. The $44 billion deal closed in October. Musk used most of his own money with about $12 billion in loans. The takeover has been continually in the news after he began cleaning house, with at least four top Twitter executives — including the chief executive and chief financial officer — getting fired recently.
Musk, 51, will be remaking Twitter without having to disclose how it is performing every few months — by taking the company private.
He said he will transform Twitter into an “everything app” called X. In presentations to investors about the deal this spring, he said he anticipated that Twitter would reach annual revenue of $26.4 billion and have 931 million users by 2028. The company reported $5.08 billion in revenue last year and had more than 200 million users.
What Is social media?
The term social media refers to a computer-based technology that facilitates the sharing of information through virtual networks and communities. Social media is internet-based and gives users quick electronic communication of such data as personal information, documents, videos and photos. More than 4.6 billion people use social media, as of January.
Six types of social media
The six types of social media, though this can be broken down in many ways, include social networking, bookmarking, social news, media sharing, microblogging, and online forum sites.
Twitter evolution
Founded in 2006, Twitter was originally designed as an SMS mobile phone-based platform. Twitter users were able to communicate with one another through 140-character tweets (280-character tweets today). Since the platform was first designed for SMS use, there was no photo or media sharing like the mobile application offers today. Though labeled as a social network, Twitter is more defined by the ability to share thoughts and information with the world.
While there are over 1.3 billion Twitter accounts, only 237.8 million of them are monetizable monthly active users.
About this timeline
Miriam J. Johnson is from Alabama; she graduated from Auburn University with a degree in English. She is a senior lecturer in publishing at Oxford Brookes University in England, where she received her doctorate in publishing.
The timeline of social media from 1978 to 2022 was updated last week.
Johnson said of the latest update, “One thing I have noticed is that there are more federated social platforms that have popped up in the last year or so, and that are older, but have now come into wider usage as people search around for a replacement for Twitter as we wait to see what will happen with that platform.”
Sources: Dr. Miriam Johnson, PC Mag, Pew Research Center, The Associated Press, digitaltrends.com, Forbes