DEFINE THAT FEED TYPE
This kind of site is organized around profiles and relationships among people, not just around posts.
What is a social network?
Launched in 1978, the earliest virtual community made this possible: groups talking and exchanging information by computer.
What is computer conferencing?
Launched in 1997 and called the first true social network site, it took its name from Stanley Milgram’s finding that any person is tied to any other through six or fewer relationships.
What is Six Degrees?
It launched as “TheFacebook” for Harvard students and, by April 2008, had passed Myspace in unique visitors.
What is Facebook?
People use this site to save images to boards for décor, fashion, recipes, and weddings. Typical use is plan-and-buy-later, not scrolling a public status feed.
What is Pinterest?
This broader term covers tools people use to create, publish, and circulate content.
What is social media?
He used a program called Enquire to store information in files that linked to other files, and he is credited as inventor of the World Wide Web.
Who is Tim Berners-Lee?
This 2002 site connected people through “friends of friends” and was the first social networking site to reach 1 million members.
What is Friendster?
Kevin Systrom’s original app was a check-in tool; the rebuild kept only posting a photo, liking it, and commenting.
What is Burbn? (later Instagram)
Facebook bought this app in 2014 for about $19 billion. It won by being cheap, simple, and tied to a phone number, and it is private messaging, not a public content feed.
What is WhatsApp?
Beyond sharing information, shopping, and entertainment, social media is also used for this kind of personal work: how people present who they are online.
What is identity construction?
Hypertext (HTML) is this: a way to write documents so one file can link to another. That linking is how the Web lets people move from page to page.
What is hypertext (or HTML)?
Anyone can create and edit entries here. Its core rule is neutrality, and its ongoing problems include bias, bad information, and people writing about themselves.
What is Wikipedia?
Instagram popularized this word for people whose following was their career; celebrity itself is older.
What is an influencer?
This app started as Picaboo: photos and videos that disappear after they are viewed. In 2013 it added Stories, which Instagram and others later copied.
What is Snapchat?
This is content made by ordinary users — posts, photos, comments, videos — rather than by a company or a newsroom.
What is user-generated content?
In 1994 he put a personal diary on the Web, the first time someone used a site to publish ongoing personal writing for anyone to read.
Who is Justin Hall?
Launched in 2001 by Adrian Scott, this was the first digital network for business professionals and a stepping stone to later career sites.
What is Ryze?
Its first posts were capped at 140 characters so they would fit in a text message after leaving room for a username.
What is Twitter?
Vine used six-second loops and then shut down. This later app set the short-video standard and folded in Musical.ly in 2018.
What is TikTok?
This is a group of people who gather online to talk, share, and stay in contact, even if they never meet in person.
What is a virtual community?
Heather Armstrong was fired after posting about her workplace on dooce.com. That case is remembered for raising questions about privacy, free speech, and this cost of posting online.
What is losing a job? (or What is being “dooced”?)
From 2005 to 2008 this was the most visited website in the world; users could personalize pages with HTML and CSS, and the blurry bathroom-mirror “pic” helped popularize the selfie.
What is Myspace?
This 2007 program let creators earn money from ads and turned “YouTuber” into a job.
What is the Partner Program?
This app began as an open Twitter project in 2019. It runs on a protocol that lets users take their identity and followers to another host, and people can build their own feeds.
What is Bluesky?