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The 5 Years Becoming Of Social Media

Five years ago, YouTube was just getting started, MySpace was the most popular website in the U.S., and Facebook was still limited to college and high school students. Mobile was mostly an after-thought, as we were still more than a year away from the introduction of the iPhone and the idea of an app store. And “widgets” were just starting to emerge as a way to integrate third-party apps on a website (Newsweek would declare 2007 to be “year of the widget” in a late 2006 article).

And what are the pictures now? Facebook will soon replace Google as the most visited website. Its “Like” buttons are like money to publishers. iPhone and its applications are on demand.

How was going on in between? Let’s review the development of social media in the previous 5 years.

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The Magnetic News Feed

The introduction of the news feed in late 2006 was a breakthrough from the conventional MySpace layout. Its idea of publishing stories in reverse-chronological order was followed by other social platforms like Twitter, Flickr and even MySpace. Though it was not accepted at the beginning (along with many other complaints such as the privacy issue), the feature was undoubtedly influential and successfully extended users’ attention span.

Video Emerges as Social Media’s Perfect Compliment

A few months before the birth of Mashable , YouTube made its debut on the Web in February 2005, making an unprecedented ascent into the mainstream consciousness. By December of that year, it had already become the most popular video site, and by July of 2006, it was serving 100 million video views per day (today, it serves more than 2 billion views daily). Then, in October, Google bought YouTube for a whopping $1.6 billion, just 18 months after the site launched. At the end of last year, I declared YouTube the top social media innovation of the decade, as it has come to embody so much of what we now know as social media, from highly shareable content to citizen journalism to the ability of anyone with a camera to claim their 15 minutes of fame.

Social Networks Spread Their Wings

At the beginning of 2008, social platforms started competing over users’ ID. Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and MySpace were launched one after another, hoping to see users’ profiles across the Internet. The Facebook Open Graph successfully attracted millions of websites to add its plugins while Twitter and MySpace formed alliance with Google Friend Connect, connecting similar numbers of sites.

Social Media Goes Mobile

Social media is no longer operated in the desktop or laptop setting. After 10 years of speculation and the introduction of smartphones in the last few years, social media finally became mobile.

Research says that, excluding the downloading of applications, 30% of users visit social networking websites on their smartphones.

Thanks to increasing mobile broadband speeds, video is also going mobile. YouTube now serves up 100 million videos to mobile devices each day, and with more and more new phones offering video capture capabilities, we’re also seeing smartphones become an important part of content production.

What’s Next?

Now that we’ve established where we are – a social ecosystem that’s moving beyond the walls of individual sites to mobile devices and third-party applications – the question is: what’s next? Over the next month, we’ll be exploring some of the past five years more in-depth, and concluding with a look at what the next five years hold. Stay tuned to Mashable as we celebrate our five year anniversary!

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