1969
CompuServe was
the first major commercial Internet service provider for the public in the
United States. Using a technology known then as dial-up, it dominated the field
through the 1980s and remained a major player until the mid-1990s.
1971
The first
email was delivered.
1978
Two Chicago
computer hobbyists invented the bulletin board system (BBS) to inform friends
of meetings, make announcements and share information through postings. It was
the rudimentary beginning of a small virtual community. Trolling and flame wars
began.
1979
Usenet was an
early bulletin board that connected Duke University and the University of North
Carolina.
1984
The Prodigy
online service was introduced. Later, it grew to become the second-largest
online service provider in 1990, with 465,000 subscribers compared with
CompuServe's 600,000. In 1994, Prodigy pioneered sales of dial-up connections
to the World Wide Web and hosting services for Web publishers. Subsequently, it
was resold repeatedly and now is part of AT&T.
1985
The America
Online (AOL) service opened.
1989
British
engineer Tim Berners-Lee began work at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear
Research, in Switzerland), on what was to become the World Wide Web.
1992
Tripod opened
as a community online for college students and young adults.
1993
CERN donated
the WWW technology to the world.
Students at
NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) displayed the first graphical browser, Mosaic,
and Web pages as we know them today were born.
More than 200
Web servers were online.
THE DAWNING
1994
Beverly Hills
Internet (BHI) started Geocities, which allowed users to create their own
websites modeled after types of urban areas. GeoCities would cross the one
million member mark by 1997. There were 38 million user Web pages on GeoCities
before it was shut down for United States users in 2009. Yahoo, which opened as
a major Internet search engine and index in 1994, owns GeoCities today and
offers it only as a web hosting service for Japan.
More than
1,500 Web servers were online in 1994 and people were referring to the Internet
as the Information Superhighway.
EarthLink
started up as an online service provider.
1995
Newsweek
headlines an article: The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and
will never be, nirvana. read it here »
1997
The Web had
one million sites.
Blogging
begins.
SixDegrees.com
lets users create profiles and list friends.
AOL Instant
Messenger lets users chat.
Blackboard is
founded as an online course management system for educators and learners.
1998
Google opens
as a major Internet search engine and index.
1999
Friends
Reunited, remembered as the first online social network to achieve prominence,
was founded in Great Britain to relocate past school pals.
2000
In the world
of business and commerce, the dot.com bubble burst and the future online seemed
bleak as the millennium turned.
Seventy
million computers were connected to the Internet.
2001
Wikipedia, the
online encyclopedia and world's largest wiki, was started.
Apple started
selling iPods.
2002
Friendster, a
social networking website, was opened to the public in the U.S. and grew to 3
million users in three months.
AOL had 34
million members.
2003
MySpace.
another social networking website, was launched as a clone of Friendster.
Linden Lab opened
the virtual world Second Life on the Internet.
LinkedIn was
started as a business-oriented social networking site for professionals.
There were
more than 3 billion Web pages.
Apple
introduced the online music service iTunes.
2004
Facebook, another
social networking website, was started for students at Harvard College. It was
referred to at the time as a college version of Friendster.
MySpace
surpassed Friendster in page views.
Podcasting
began on the Internet.
Flickr image
hosting website opened.
Digg was
founded as a social news website where people shared stories found across the
Internet.
AFTER THE DAWN
2005
Bebo, an
acronym for Blog Early, Blog Often, was started as another social networking
website.
News
Corporation, a global media company founded by Rupert Murdoch, with holdings in
film, television, cable, magazines, newspapers and book publishing, purchased
MySpace.
Facebook
launched a version for high school students.
Friends
Reunited, now with 15 million members, was sold to the British television
company ITV.
YouTube began
storing and retrieving videos.
There were
more than 8 billion Web pages.
2006
MySpace was
the most popular social networking site in the U.S. However, based on monthly
unique visitors, Facebook would take away that lead later, in 2008.
Twitter was
launched as a social networking and microblogging site, enabling members to
send and receive 140-character messages called tweets.
Facebook
membership was expanded and opened to anyone over age 13.
Google had indexed
more than 25 billion web pages, 400 million queries per day, 1.3 billion
images, and more than a billion Usenet messages.
2007
Microsoft
bought a stake in Facebook.
Facebook
initiated Facebook Platform which let third-party developers create applications
(apps) for the site.
Facebook
launched its Beacon advertising system, which exposed user purchasing activity.
Beacon sent data from external websites to Facebook so targeted advertisements
could be presented. The civic action group MoveOn.org and many others protested
it as an invasion of privacy. Beacon was shut down in 2009.
Apple released
the iPhone multimedia and Internet smartphone.
2008
Facebook
surpassed MySpace in the total number of monthly unique visitors. Meanwhile,
Facebook tried unsuccessfully to buy Twitter.
Bebo was
purchased by AOL. Later, AOL would re-sell the relatively-unsuccessful social
media site.
2009
Facebook
ranked as the most-used social network worldwide with more than 200 million.
The site's traffic was twice that of MySpace.
Citizen
journalists everywhere were electrified when Twitter broke a hard news story
about a plane crash in the Hudson River. The New York Times later reported a
user on a ferry had sent a tweet, "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on
the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy."
Unfriend was
the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year.
Microsoft's
Bing joined Yahoo and Google as major search engines on the Internet.
ITV sold the
relatively-unsuccessful Friends Reunited social media site to Brightsolid
Limited.
It's estimated
that a quarter of Earth's population used the Internet.
Google saw one
trillion unique URLs – after eliminating duplicate entries.
The Internet
had at least 27 billion web pages and could have had as many as 58 billion web
pages. They changed so many times a day it was nearly impossible to count.
2010
Facebook's
rapid growth moved it above 400 million users, while MySpace users declined to
57 million users, down from a peak of about 75 million.
To compete with
Facebook and Twitter, Google launched Buzz, a social networking site integrated
with the company's Gmail. It was reported that in the first week, millions of
Gmail users created 9 million posts.
Apple released
the iPad tablet computer with advanced multimedia and Internet capabilities.
AOL sold the
relatively-unsuccessful Bebo social media site to Criterion Capital Partners.
The Democratic
National Committee advertised for a social networks manager to oversee
President Barack Obama's accounts on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.
It was
estimated the population of Internet users was 1.97 billion. That was almost 30
percent of the global population.
The Internet
had surpassed newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news, according
to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The Internet was the third most
popular news platform, with many users looking to social media and personalized
feeds for news. National and local TV stations were strong, but the Internet
was ahead of national and local newspapers.
2011
Social media
were accessible from virtually anywhere and had become an integral part of our
daily lives with more than 550 million people on Facebook, 65 million tweets
sent through Twitter each day, and 2 billion video views every day on YouTube.
LinkedIn has 90 million professional users.
Social media
commerce was on the rise along with mobile social media via smartphones and
tablet computers.
Public sharing
of so much personal information via social media sites raised concern over
privacy.
Apple
introduced the Ping social network for music and integrated with iTunes.
Both MySpace
and Bebo were redesigned and updated to compete with the far more successful
social networks Facebook and Twitter.
It was
estimated Internet users would double by 2015 to a global total of some four
billion users, or nearly 60 percent of Earth's population.
2012
Ever more
people are connecting to the Internet for longer periods of time. Some 2
billion people around the world use the Internet and social media, while 213
million Americans use the Internet via computers while 52 million use the Web
via smartphone and 55 million use it via tablets. People also connect to the
Internet via handheld music players, game consoles, Internet-enabled TVs and
e-readers.
It is
estimated Internet users would double by 2015 to a global total of some four
billion users, or nearly 60 percent of Earth's population.
Social media
has come of age with more people using smartphones and tables to access social
networks. New sites emerge and catch on. The top ten social networks are
Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Wordpress, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr,
MySpace and Wikia.
More than half
of adults 25-34 use social media at the office. Almost a third of young adults
18-24 use social media in the bathroom. All use social networks to stay
connected with acquaintances, be informed and be amused.
Advertisers
look to social "likes" to enhance brand visibility.
Facebook
reached a billion users in 2012.
YouTube has
more than 800 million users each month with more than 1 trillion views per year
or around 140 views for every person on Earth. Seventy percent of YouTube
traffic comes from outside the U.S. YouTube is local in 43 countries and uses
60 languages. Some 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute with
more than 4 billion hours of video watched each month on YouTube.
Apple closed
the Ping social network in 2012 and improved iTunes.
Public sharing
of so much personal information via social media continues to elevate privacy
concerns.
2013
YouTube topped
one billion monthly users with 4 billion views per day, and launched paid
channels to provide content creators with a means of earning revenue.
Facebook user
total climbed to 1.11 billion.
Twitter had
500 million registered users, with more than 200 million active.
Apple's
customers have downloaded over 50 billion apps and the company again improved
iTunes, even as iPads were revolutionizing social games.
Yahoo
purchased Tumblr blogging-social media network, with 170 million users and 100
million blogs.
Flickr had 87
million users and stored 8 billion photos, while Instagram had 100 million
users storing 4 billion photos.
LinkedIn had
225 million users, while MySpace had 25 million users.
Pinterest had
48.7 million users, while WordPress hosted 74 million blogs.
Dropbox had
more than 100 million users with 1 billion files uploaded daily.
Google+ had
343 million users.
Reddit had
69.9 million monthly users, with 4.8 billion monthly page views.
The People's
Liberation Army of China and the Syrian Electronic Army rose among the gaggle
of infamous hackers.
Privacy
concerns continued over public sharing of personal information on social
networks.
There were 156
million blogs. Blogs, online videos and podcasts continue to be staples for
marketers.
An Australian
survey found 34 percent of social network users logged on at work, 13 percent
at school, and 18 percent in the car, while 44 percent used social networks in
bed, 7 percent in the bathroom, and 6 percent in the toilet.
Astronauts
aboard the International Space Station regularly tweeted live from space to a
global audience.
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