USA TODAY US Edition

In a decade, social media changed us

- Dalvin Brown

A decade 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 unrecogniz­able versions of our real selves.

We went from draining our data plans and digitally poking friends on Facebook to being constantly im

After over a decade of scrolling, thumbsuppi­ng, swiping and double tapping, it’s safe to say that social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

mersed in an endless sea of memes. Social media’s influence has undermined political elections and changed the way we communicat­e while raising questions concerning privacy.

After over a decade of scrolling, thumbs-upping, swiping and doubletapp­ing, it’s safe to say that social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

In 2010, fewer than 1 billion people were signed on. That number has since tripled, and Facebook, with its 1 billion users, has remained the market leader since dethroning Myspace.

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A look back at social networking sites that defined the decade Facebook

In 2010, Facebook still was 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 Facebook has been accused of propagatin­g and spreading so-called “fake news.”

Twitter

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 140charact­er 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.

Favorites (stars) have changed into hearts (likes). The app is rife with political discussion­s and GIFs, and the character limit has doubled to 280.

Tumblr began carving out its corner of the internet in 2007 and quickly grew to become one of the most visited websites in the U.S. It started off as a shortform blogging website generating memes and uniting people with niche interests.

Yahoo acquired Tumblr in a $1.1 billion deal in 2013.

Tumblr is a shell of its former self after banning all adult content at the end of 2019. Users left and flooded Twitter. This year, Verizon sold Tumblr to the owner of blogging platform WordPress.

Vine

In 2012, the six-second video messaging app made waves when it introduced the world to short video content that rewound itself. The time restraint was a creative challenge for users and soon, Twitter bought it for $30 million.

Vine took advantage of the fact that people on smartphone­s prefer short, entertaini­ng videos.

Instagram was the beginning of the end for Vine after it introduced video. Twitter shut down Vine in 2016.

Instagram

When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, the app was barely 2 years old and the interface was simple.

The app gave iPhone 4 users a new platform to share their photos and it hit 1 million downloads in its first three months.

Instagram has since ballooned to 1 billion monthly users. Influencer­s have built careers off of doing what everyone else does and users continue to post staged, 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 and launched an app 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.”

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.

It ranks just behind WhatsApp and Messenger in downloads.

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 privacy scandals, they have innovated over the decade to keep up with the pack.

Pinterest will celebrate its 10-year anniversar­y in January 2020 after revolution­izing 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 bringing job-seekers, 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.

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