These social networking sites defined the past decade
Adecade ago, social media seemed to be so much simpler.
There weren’t sponsored ads all over our newsfeeds. Virtually no one was a social media influencer. Photo editing was best left to the professionals and live streaming on an app wasn’t a thing.
Over the past 10 years, social media has largely evolved from keeping in touch with others to flaunting what we have for attention or curating unrecognisable versions of our real selves.
We went from draining our data plans and digitally poking friends on Facebook to being constantly immersed in an endless sea of memes. Social media’s influence has undermined political elections and changed the way we communicate while perpetually raising questions concerning privacy.
After over a decade of scrolling, thumbs-upping, swiping and double-tapping, it’s safe to say that social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
In 2010, fewer than a billion people were signed on. That number has since tripled, and Facebook, with its 1 billion users, has remained the market leader since dethroning the oldschool MySpace.
A look back at social networking websites that helped define the decade
In 2010, Facebook was still defined by one major feature: the Wall. It’s where you went to leave a thoughtful message or inside joke for your friend. A year later, CEO Mark Zuckerberg killed it with the introduction of Timeline.
The social networking giant has since seen a few other major redesigns. It has introduced new ways to display current events and news and most recently became more group-centric.
The decade was most notably defined by privacy scandals, and it has famously been accused of propagating and spreading so-called fake news.
While the microblogging website went live in 2006, Twitter didn’t have an official mobile app until 2010 when it launched on iOS and Android. In the early days, there was the restrictive 140 character messages and little else.
Over the years, the platform’s interface changed to allow mobile sharing of videos and photos viewable within the Timeline, and the word tweet was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013, marking the app’s prominence in pop culture.
Favourites (stars) have changed into hearts (likes). The app is rife with political discussions and GIFs, and the character limit has doubled to 280.
When Facebook shelled out $1 billion to buy Instagram in 2012, the app was barely two years old and the interface was so simple.
People would create photo collages on third-party apps, slap a heavy sunburst filter on it and post it in three clicks. The app gave iPhone 4 users a new platform to share their photos and it hit one million downloads in its first three months.
Instagram has since ballooned to 1 billion monthly users. Virtually every celebrity is on it. Influencers have built careers off of doing what everyone else does, but better, and users continue to post carefully staged, cleaned up photos of themselves.
SNAPCHAT
Snapchat was a game-changer for young adults looking to post content that disappears soon after.
The founders of the photo messaging app met at Stanford University around 2010 and launched an app called Picaboo that later became Snapchat. The app hit 1 million daily active users in 2012, despite a number of privacy concerns. And in 2013, it invented the “My Story” feature which later became “Stories”.
Facebook and Instagram later rolled out versions of Snapchat’s stories. Snap went on to hit 100 million daily users, launched wacky filters called “Lenses” and has crossed into hardware with Spectacles.
TIKTOK
The app for teens formerly known as Musical.ly was developed in China in 2016 and it crossed the 1 billion mark for worldwide installs in 2019.
The mobile application is used to make amateur music videos, and it integrates songs in a way that other social networking websites don’t.
While it’s still in its infancy, it ranks just behind Facebook-owned duo WhatsApp and Messenger in downloads.
The app could lead the future of social media. According to mobile analyst firm Sensor Tower, TikTok surpassed 1.5 billion downloads on Apple’s App Store and Google Play as of November.
OTHER APPS
Reddit, Pinterest and LinkedIn individually have about 300 million active users worldwide, according to the market research firm Statista.
And while these apps tend to avoid big privacy scandals and front-page coverage, they have innovated over the decade to keep up.
Pinterest will celebrate its 10-year anniversary in January 2020 after revolutionising the way we keep track of the gems that we find on the internet.
LinkedIn had a slow start in the early 2000s but has consistently been the go-to source for professionals, bringing jobseekers, employers and recruiters to one place.
And the discussion website Reddit still does what Facebook was supposed to: bring people together based on their interests, rather than focusing on appearances and Likes.