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These social media sites are call Instagram,Facebook, Twitter,Vine,SnapChat, Soundcloud, and Pinterest.

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Here are the credits!

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Watch this video by Vimeo

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This is a drive for people attending the evening meeting of Common Ground Church Rondebosch to use social media. #BoschPM

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Youtube was born in Feburary 14, 2005.  It was created by Steve Chen,  Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim.
Want to find out more? Check out this link from
Youtube5.

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As content and photo sharing sites were taking off in 2005, the founders of YouTube noticed a small problem: there was an explosion in the number of expensive and inexpensive ways to capture video but there wasn't a good way to share videos.

Chad Hurley had studied design at Indiana University in Pennsylvania, while Steve Chen had studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After graduation, the two started work at PayPal in San Jose, California where they met many of their future employees.

On Valentine's Day 2005, Hurley registered the trademark, logo and domain of YouTube. Three months later, in May of 2005, a small group of early employees launched the beta test site www.youtube.com.

In November 2005, YouTube received funding from Sequoia Capital. In December, YouTube officially became a corporation. The first office was located above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. Over time the number of employees increased, the desks multiplied, cables tangled into knots and from time to time, rats were discovered scurrying around. The time had come to move.

In October 2006, Google came knocking on the door. YouTube had about 65 employees. On the day the acquisition was announced YouTube moved into a former GAP office in San Bruno, California. The much-discussed deal was settled one month later.

Today, YouTube is the the largest online video destination in the world and the third most visited Website overall. T he site exceeds two billion views a day - nearly double the prime time audience of all three major U.S. networks combined. The platform comprises the largest video-sharing community in the world and includes users, advertisers and over 10,000 partners. Every minute 24 hours of video uploaded to the site. Hundreds of millions of users spanning the globe come to YouTube to discover and shape the world through video.

A Brief History of YouTube

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A Brief History of YouTube - YouTube5Year

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As content and photo sharing sites were taking off in 2005, the founders of YouTube noticed a small problem: there was an explosion in the number of expensive and inexpensive ways to capture video but there wasn't a good way to share videos.

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Instagram was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and was  launched in October 2010 as a free mobile app. The service rapidly gained popularity, with over 100 million active users as of April 2012 and over 300 million as of December 2014.

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Snapchat is a mobile photo messaging and multimedia sharing app which was released in September 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown.The app was initially launched to share impermanent pictures via private message snaps"that can be viewed for a user-specified length of time before becoming inaccessible.

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How many Snapchat users are there? Discover all facts and statistics on Snapchat now on statista.com!

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Social Media was made in the year of 1997 and the first social media site that was made was called Six Degrees.
Check out this link

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Long before it became the commercialized mass information and entertainment juggernaut it is today, long before it was accessible to the general public, and certainly many years before Al Gore claimed he "took the initiative in creating" it, the Internet - and its predecessors - were a focal point for social interactivity. Granted, computer networking was initially envisioned in the heyday of The Beatles as a military-centric command and control scheme. But as it expanded beyond just a privileged few hubs and nodes, so too did the idea that connected computers might also make a great forum for discussing mutual topics of interest, and perhaps even meeting or renewing acquaintances with other humans. In the 1970s, that process began in earnest.
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Mullets reigned supreme in the late '70s and early '80s; computers were a far rarer commodity. Machine languages were bewildering, and their potential seemingly limited. What's more, this whole sitting-in-front-of-a-keyboard thing was so... isolationistic. Put all this together and you have a medium where only the most ardent enthusiasts and techno-babbling hobbyists dared tread. It was, in effect, a breeding ground for pocket-protector-wearing societal rejects, or nerds. Boring, reclusive nerds at that.

Yet it also was during this time, and with a parade of purportedly antisocial geeks at the helm, that the very gregarious notion of social networking would take its first steps towards becoming the omnipresent cultural phenomenon we know and love in 2014.

BBS, AOL and CompuServe: The Infant Years

"Put all this together and you have a medium where only the most ardent enthusiasts and techno-babbling hobbyists dared tread."

The BBS was no joke. Though the technology of the time restricted the flexibility of these systems, and the end-user's experience, to text-only exchanges of data that crawled along at glacial speed, BBSes continued to gain popularity throughout the '80s and well into the '90s, when the Internet truly kicked into gear. Indeed, some services - such as Tom Jennings' FidoNet - linked numerous BBSes together into worldwide computer networks that managed to survive the Internet revolution.

But there were also other avenues for social interaction long before the Internet exploded onto the mainstream consciousness. One such option was CompuServe, a service that began life in the 1970s as a business-oriented mainframe computer communication solution, but expanded into the public domain in the late 1980s.

CompuServe allowed members to share files and access news and events. But it also offered something few had ever experienced - true interaction. Not only could you send a message to your friend via a newfangled technology dubbed "e-mail" (granted, the concept of e-mail wasn't exactly newfangled at the time, though widespread public access to it was). You could also join any of CompuServe's thousands of discussion forums to yap with thousands of other members on virtually any important subject of the day. Those forums proved tremendously popular and paved the way for the modern iterations we know today.

But if there is a true precursor to today's social networking sites, it was likely spawned under the AOL (America Online) umbrella. In many ways, and for many people, AOL was the Internet before the Internet, and its member-created communities (complete with searchable "Member Profiles," in which users would list pertinent details about themselves), were arguably the service's most fascinating, forward-thinking feature.

Yet there was no stopping the real Internet, and by the mid-1990s it was moving full bore. Yahoo had just set up shop, Amazon had just begun selling books, and the race to get a PC in every household was on. And, by 1995, the site that may have been the first to fulfill the modern definition of social networking was born.

The Internet Boom: Social Networking's Adolescence

Though differing from many current social networking sites in that it asks not "Who can I connect with?" but rather, "Who can I connect with that was once a schoolmate of mine?" Classmates.com proved almost immediately that the idea of a virtual reunion was a good one. Early users could not create profiles, but they could locate long-lost grade school chums, menacing school bullies and maybe even that prom date they just couldn't forget. It was a hit almost immediately, and even today the service boasts some 57 million registered accounts.

That same level of success can't be said for SixDegrees.com. Sporting a name based on the theory somehow associated with actor Kevin Bacon that no person is separated by more than six degrees from another, the site sprung up in 1997 and was one of the very first to allow its users to create profiles, invite friends, organize groups, and surf other user profiles. Its founders worked the six degrees angle hard by encouraging members to bring more people into the fold. Unfortunately, this "encouragement" ultimately became a bit too pushy for many, and the site slowly devolved into a loose association of computer users and numerous complaints of spam-filled membership drives. SixDegrees.com folded completely just after the turn of the millennium.

Other sites of the era opted solely for niche, demographic-driven markets. One was AsianAvenue.com, founded in 1997. A product of Community Connect Inc., which itself was founded just one year prior in the New York apartment of former investment banker and the future Community Connect CEO, AsianAvenue.com was followed by BlackPlanet.com in 1999 and by the Hispanic-oriented MiGente.com in 2000. All three still exist today, with BlackPlanet.com in particular still enjoying tremendous success with more than eight million visitors per month.

Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook: The Biz Grows Up

In 2002, social networking hit really its stride with the launch of Friendster. Friendster used a degree of separation concept similar to that of the now-defunct SixDegrees.com, refined it into a routine dubbed the "Circle of Friends," and promoted the idea that a rich online community can exist only between people who truly have common bonds. And it ensured there were plenty of ways to discover those bonds.

An interface that shared many of the same traits one would find at an online dating site certainly didn't seem to hurt. Friendster CEO Jonathan Abrams even once referred to his creation as a dating site that isn't about dating. Within a year after its launch, Friendster boasted more than three million registered users and a ton of investment interest. Unfortunately, the service has since seen more than its fair share of technical difficulties, questionable management decisions, and a resulting drop in its North American fortunes. Although briefly enjoying success in Indonesia and in the Philippines, Friendster has since abandoned social networking and now exists solely as an online gaming site.

Introduced just a year later in 2003, LinkedIn took a decidedly more serious, sober approach to the social networking phenomenon. Rather than being a mere playground for former classmates, teenagers, and cyberspace Don Juans, LinkedIn was, and still is, a networking resource for business people who want to connect with other professionals. In fact, LinkedIn contacts are referred to as "connections." Today, LinkedIn boasts more than 297 million members.

MySpace also launched in 2003. Though it no longer resides upon the social networking throne in many English-speaking countries - that honor now belongs to Facebook just about everywhere - MySpace was once the perennial favorite. It did so by tempting the key young adult demographic with music, music videos, and a funky, feature-filled environment. It looked and felt hipper than major competitor Friendster right from the start, and it conducted a campaign of sorts in the early days to show alienated Friendster users just what they were missing. Over the years however, the number of casual Myspace users declined, and today the site exists now as a social networking site targeted to bands and musicians.

As expected, the ubiquitous Facebook now leads the global social networking pack. Founded, like many social networking sites, by university students who initially peddled their product to other university students, Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only exercise and remained a campus-oriented site for two full years before finally opening to the general public in 2006. Yet, even by that time, Facebook was considered big business. So much so that, by 2009, Silicon Valley bigwigs such as Paypal co-founder and billionaire Peter Thiel invested tens of millions of dollars just to see it flourish.

The secret of Facebook's success - the site currently boasts more than 1.3 billion active users - is a subject of much debate. Some point to its ease of use, others to its multitude of easily-accessed features, and still others, to its memorable name. A highly targeted advertising model certainly doesn't hurt, either, nor did financial injections such as the $60 million from noted Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing in 2007. Regardless, there's universal agreement on one thing: Facebook promotes both honesty and openness. It seems people really enjoy being themselves, and throwing that openness out there for all to see.

Pulling Ahead: How Facebook and Twitter won the Web

Facebook is king for a reason. It wasn't just through luck that founder Mark Zuckerberg's darling came to reign supreme over the social media kingdom. It was, in fact, a series of smart moves and innovative features that set the platform apart from the rest of the social media pack. First and foremost, the 2007 launch of the Facebook Platform was key to site's success. The open API made it possible for third-party developers to create applications that work within Facebook itself. Almost immediately after being released, the platform gained a massive amount of attention. At one point in time, Facebook had hundreds of thousands of apps built on the platform, so many that Facebook launched the Facebook App Store to organize and display them all. Twitter, meanwhile, created its own API and enjoyed similar success as a result.

The other key to success was Facebook's ubiquitous 'Like' button, which broke free from the bounds of the site and began appearing all over the Internet. Now you can 'like' or "tweet' just about everything even when you're not on Facebook or Twitter. Realizing the power of social networking, Google decided to launch their own social network (Google+) in 2007. It differed from Facebook and Twitter in that it wasn't necessarily a full-featured networking site, but rather a social "layer" of the overall Google experience. Initially, Google generated a lot of buzz with the service's Hangouts feature, which allowed users to enter live video chats with other online friends. At the time of launch, Facebook was scrambling to keep up by integrating a video chat feature of their own.

Within just four weeks, Google+ had garnered 25 million unique visitors, with as much as 540 million active monthly users as of June 2014. Regardless, the service definitely didn't dethrone Zuckerberg's behemoth, especially considering more than half of Google+ users have never even visited the service's official site. It still arguably showed the world that there was still room for innovation and competition in the realm of social networking, though.

The Multi-platformed Self: The Rise of Mobile

Over the course of the past two years, "Fourth screen" technology - smartphones, tablets, etc. - has changed social networking and the way we communicate with one another entirely. What used to sit on our desks now conveniently fits in the palm of our hands, allowing us to effortlessly utilize functionality once reserved for multiple devices wherever we go.

Given the abrupt rise in mobile computing, it's not surprising the most popular social media platforms of the past several years hinge on the capabilities of smartphones. Photo and video-sharing applications such as Snapchat and Instagram, the latter of which has now garnered a staggering 20 billion images since the app's initial inception in October 2010, exist almost entirely on mobile. The same goes with platforms such as Foursquare, an application in which users use their smartphones to check in to various locations around the globe, and various matchmaking services. Tinder, for instance, currently boasts more than 10 million daily users, each of which swipes for potential partners based on their approximately in relation to their smartphone.

Mobile-based platforms also approach social networking in an entirely different fashion than their Web-based counterparts. Rather than offering a comprehensive social networking experience like the now-defunct Myspace and the struggling Google+, they instead specialize in a specific kind of interaction service that involves the sharing of public images (Instagram), the private sharing of images sharing (Snapchat), augmented reality (Foursquare), and location-based matchmaking (Tinder). People essentially use the various services in conjunction with other platforms to build a comprehensive, digital identity.

"People now exist on multiple platforms, and instead of fighting against this trend, larger companies are tapping into this new environment."

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality: The Future of Social Networking

In March 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR, a company on the cusp of mass producing virtual-reality headsets. Upon sealing the deal, Zuckerberg commented regarding the communication potential for the platform, highlighting the slew of potential uses for the virtual technology when it comes to academics, viewing live events, and consulting with doctors face-to-face. However, Facebook has taken a hands-off approach in its management of Oculus VR, allowing the company to continue focusing predominately on gaming applications while other parties - i.e. the Pentagon - quietly look into using virtual reality headsets for military purposes. A number of medical experts have even begun using virtual reality to treat anxiety, combat-induced P.T.S.D., and other pronounced mental illnesses. Adult entertainment, meanwhile, has invested in virtual reality for years.

To simplify my point, it appears a good deal of people have high hopes that virtual reality will become the next blockbuster computing platform. The technology already exists, and with the consumer version of the Oculus Rift VR headset slated to go on sale in late 2014 for under $300, the potential for widespread adoption of virtual reality has never been greater. At the very least, the Rift's success or failure in the market will shape Facebook's approach toward incorporating virtual reality. Note that augmented reality differs from virtual reality in that it applies digital interaction to the real world instead of creating an audio-visual experience from scratch. In terms of social networking, augmented reality offers a number of possibilities. For instance, people could share their name, interests, relationship status, and mutual friends all within a digital sphere.

Believe it or not, augmented reality already exists in apps like Yelp and Google Ingress. Smartphones are more than capable of delivering augmented reality, and as one might expect, the technology is the entire concept driving Google Glass' digital integration with the real world. Google's deliberate decision to sell Glass at an inflated price of $1,500, however, is likely meant to exclude the general public while the tech giant and a selective group of consumers - aka "explorers" work to hammer out the device's flaws. The day Google lowers the price of Glass to its estimated production cost of $150 marks the day when widespread adoption of augmented reality, including augmented reality in social networking, becomes a greater possibility. Until then, there's always Snapchat and the overuse of hashtags in just about everything we do.

The bid for originality: Facebook and Twitter bet big on video and livestreaming

Fueled by the rise of third-party apps, social media giants were forced to take note of the video format by 2012. But not before that same format, in a different guise, had laid waste to any form of originality on their respective services.

A spending spree followed. Within the span of just a couple of years, several major buyouts -and failed acquisition attempts - took place within the sector. In 2012, Twitter purchased video-looping platform, Vine. Later that same year, Facebook bought Instagram, which would eventually introduce video-sharing into its own app app to great success. Then in 2013, Facebook made its infamous bid for Snapchat, which was turned down by the makers of the ephemeral messaging app.

Meanwhile, the video-shaped void on Facebook and Twitter had been filled by new media companies that were experts in the art of viral content (i.e. BuzzFeed, 9GAG, Mashable). An earlier source had been YouTube, which had heralded the dawn of the internet celebrity with its homegrown roster of creators. Despite their popularity, however, viral videos posed more complications for social media giants than they did opportunities.

Left to operate independently, both Instagram and Vine proved to be solid investments. Their respective owners, however, were still facing the same issue. By 2015, Twitter was being labelled as "inaccessible" due to its flat growth in user numbers. Facebook, on the other hand, saw its users sharing less personal information. Instead of original posts, Facebook news feeds and Twitter timelines became bloated with viral videos, memes, GIFs, and clickbait articles - making them harder to navigate in the process. As in the past, the perceived solution came from an existing product, which ended up paying the ultimate price for its abrupt rise.

Having dominated the conversation at the 2015 SXSW Interactive festival, livestreaming app Meerkat caught the attention of Twitter. Capitalizing on what it viewed as an emerging trend, Twitter bought rival livestreaming app Periscope just a few months later. It has since integrated Periscope streams into its main platform, in an attempt to further popularize the app. Fast forward a few months to the end of 2015, and Facebook inevitably followed suit with the launch of Live Video. Overshadowed by its rivals, Meerkat quickly quickly abandoned livestreaming altogether.

It is easy to see the attraction live broadcasts hold for social networks. Like viral videos, livestreams have the unique benefit of making viewers feel like they are 'in the moment.' A popular livestream has a snowball effect and, in turn, can quickly become a trending topic. Like the immediacy offered by Snapchat, the format can transform the mundane into the unmissable. Best of all, it allows social networks to lay claim to something original, which now autoplays on its flagship platform.

The integration of the livestream on Twitter and Facebook has also made the two companies more open to striking broadcast deals with third-parties. In turn, having seen the success that BuzzFeed and its counterparts have had with video, both traditional and new media companies have been quick to embrace Periscope and Facebook Live.

Nowhere is this theory better evidenced than Twitter's recent deal to livestream NFL games. This compromise on the part of the social media giants comes in the wake of the realization that they can no longer be relegated to the second, third, or fourth screen. They have to be the main attraction by showcasing viral, trending, or popular visual media - whether original or not - in real-time, fueling interaction and reaction in the process.
This article was originally published on August 5, 2014, and updated on May 4, 2016, by Saqib Shah to reflect the widespread adoption of video-sharing platforms and livestreaming.

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Long before it became the commercialized mass information and entertainment juggernaut it is today, long before it was accessible to the general public, and certainly many years before Al Gore claimed he "took the initiative in creating" it, the Internet - and its predecessors - were a focal point for social interactivity.

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We chose this topic because  our entire group had Instagram and Snapchat. We thought how fun it would be talk about Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, and Youtube.

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What is the most popular Social Media website? 

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What is the most popular Social Media website? 

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Take a guess.

The answer is Facebook.

Facebook has 1,710,000,000 people followed by Youtube with 1,000,000,000  people.
Instagram has 500,000,000 visitors followed by Twitter with 313,000,000 visitors.

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Social media started in 1997.  The first social media site  actually was social media was a website called Six Degrees.

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Today, social media is a term that everyone knows. Even the most remote areas of the world have at least heard of Facebook and Twitter, and are probably using them on a regular basis. But it wasn't always that way. Social media, in its present form, has been around a relatively short term and even though you probably can't imagine living without it now, except for the last few decades, everyone did.

Of course, how you define social media can determine where you actually start the history of the medium.

For example: some people define communication by letters via the postal service as social media, but most people define it as the ability to use the internet to share and communicate instantly with others, even across great distances. That means, that social media can be traced back to one website in particular - and no, it wasn't Facebook.

1997: The Birth of Social Media

The first social media site that everyone can agree actually was social media was a website called Six Degrees. It was named after the 'six degrees of separation' theory and lasted from 1997 to 2001. Six Degrees allowed users to create a profile and then friend other users. Six Degrees even allowed those who didn't register as users to confirm friendships and connected quite a few people this way.

From Six Degrees, the internet moved into the era of blogging and instant messaging. Although blogging may not seem like social media precisely, the term fits because people were suddenly able to communicate with a blog other instantly as well as other readers. The term "blog" is a form of the phrase "Weblog" which was coined by Jorn Barger, an early blogger that was the editor of the site "Robot Wisdom."

From there, ICQ was born and most members of Generation X remember ICQ and the service that was created shortly thereafter, America Online, with AOL's instant messenger especially prominent in the social media lineup.

2000: The Internet is Everywhere

By the year 2000, around 100 million people had access to the internet, and it became quite common for people to be engaged socially online. Of course, then it was looked at as an odd hobby at best. Still, more and more people began to utilize chat rooms for making friends, dating and discussing topics that they wanted to talk about. But the huge boom of social media was still to come.

2003: The First Social Media Surge

Although the younger generation of today might not know about it, back in the early 2000's the website MySpace was the popular place to set up a profile and make friends. MySpace was the original social media profile website, leading into and inspiring websites like Facebook.

But even though MySpace has a very small user base today compared to Facebook and Twitter, there are musicians who have used MySpace to promote their music and even be heard by record producers and other artists. Colbie Caillat is an example.

Another website that was one of the beginning social media websites was LinkedIn, still a social media website today, geared specifically towards professionals who want to network with each other.

In fact, most of the social media websites we have today are similar to LinkedIn, in that they are specifically about one particular thing, or they have some kind of unique quality that has made them popular. While MySpace was a general social media site, LinkedIn was, and is still is, meant for professional businesspeople to connect with each other to network, find jobs and socialize.

2005: Facebook and Twitter

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched what would soon become the social media giant that would set the bar for all other social media services. Facebook is the number one social media website today and it currently boasts over a billion users.

However, back in 2004, Facebook (TheFacebook.com then) was launched just for Harvard students. Zuckerberg saw the potential and released the service to the world at the website facebook.com.

In 2006, the popularity of text messaging or SMS inspired Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Noah Glass and Evan Williams to create Twitter, a service that had the unique distinction of allowing users to send "tweets" o f 140 characters or less. Today, Twitter has over 500 million users.

Around 2010: The Rest of the Pack

Before long, there were dozens of other websites providing social media services of some kind. Flickr was one of the earliest and still is one of the most popular photo sharing sites, but others include Photobucket and Instagram, with Instagram gaining popularity today as one of the top social media sites to include on business cards and other media.

Tumblr, a microblogging website started in 2007 by David Karp and now owned by Yahoo, is one of the sites that could be seen sprouting up in the late 2000s. Foursquare was quite a popular website for a while, particularly with smartphones being used so extensively, and then there is Pinterest, Spotify, and many others. Some of the most popular social media platforms in the late 2000's included: Google Buzz, Loopt, Blippy, and Groupon.

One of the things that started happening right in this time period is that social media not only became widely used, it also became widespread in business.

Websites were starting to list their social media addresses, businesses would include Facebook and Twitter addresses on their television commercials and many tools were being built to include social media on websites - for example: WordPress plugins that would allow users to include not only links to their social media websites, but also to include their latest social media posts directly on their websites.

Social media icons were seen everywhere and it became almost unusual to see businesses or brands without them.

In addition, social media began to be one of the ways in which internet marketers and website owners would boost the visibility of their websites. The benefits of social media marketing for business began to become quite clear to business owners large and small. Social media bookmarking became quite popular and there were services that would bookmark a post or a website across dozens or even hundreds of social media services.

Social Media Today

Social media today consists of thousands of social media platforms, all serving the same - but slightly different purpose. Of course, some social media platforms are more popular than others, but even the smaller ones get used by a portion of the population because each one caters to a very different type of person.

For example: Instagram caters to the kind of person that communicates through photographs best, and other platforms such as Twitter are perfect for those who communicate in short bursts of information. As mentioned, businesses are using social media to promote their products and services in a brand new way and so each form of social media serves a purpose that the others available may not.

The Future of Social Media

Although it is impossible to know what the future of social media holds, it is clear that it will continue. Humans are social animals and the more ability to communicate with each other on the level that each person likes best, the more prevalent social media will become. With new and exciting technologies just around the corner, social media will be interesting to see in the coming decades.

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The History of Social Media: Social Networking Evolution! | History Cooperative

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Today, social media is a term that everyone knows. Even the most remote areas of the world have at least heard of Facebook and Twitter, and are probably using them on a regular basis. But it wasn't always that way. Social media, in its present form, has been around a relatively short term and even [...]