A (very) brief history of the social web

Social media has been around as long as the Internet.  In fact, social media can be thought of as grassroots applications of the Internet.  It began quietly in the 1980’s on campuses around the world, students and tech geeks meeting and communicating by email, in MUDs, and LISTSERV, the first electronic mailing list system.

 

The use of social media continued on quietly through the dot.com bubble in the late 1990’s.   While corporations tried to insert business models built for non-Internet products and services; user-supported websites like eBay (1995) and Amazon.com (1994) were slowly, but steadily, increasing in popularity and use.   External corporations continued to lose money, until the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. 

 

Even though the Internet’s marketability was uncertain, individuals and social organizations continued using the undeveloped tools of social media for the facilitation of communication and interaction.   In 1999, the mass protest at the WTO meeting in Seattle was, perhaps, the first large-scale application of social media.  Using rudimentary forms like email, websites, public forums and listservs, social media facilitated the congregation of over 1400 international organizations on a single location towards a collective purpose. 

 

Online diaries or journals were also becoming increasingly popular, and although they only received the formal title “blog” in 1999, there were numerous examples of personal websites and webrings which shared similar characteristics of the current blog since as far back as 1994.  When Matt Drudge broke the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal story in 1998 on his pre-blog site known as “The Drudge Report” everybody, including the traditional media, started to pay attention.   

 

Although the business world was still uncertain of the marketability of the Internet, by 2003, corporations were coming around from the mistakes made during the first dot-com bubble.  They were beginning to use the medium as the audience was using it.  In 2004, O’Reilly Media carved out an effective online presence and marketing strategy which was dubbed Web 2.0.  Web 2.0 was the business model that really opened up the Internet to the dynamic site of market research and advertising which we know it as today.  It was a model that captured the essence of what social media had been doing all along: using the Internet.