Social networks permeate our lives - whether personal or professional – making it worth the effort of looking at their history.

• 1978 - Bulletin Board System: In the late 1970s, Randy Suess and Ward Christensen developed the Bulletin Board System (BBS) that allowed users to post data, news and other information, on public boards. However, due to the high costs, it was often mainly about regional communities at BBS, nevertheless it can be identified impeccably as the birth of the social web.
• 1995 - Classmates: A website goes online, which already carries the ingredients of today's social networks in itself. On Classmates.com, old school friends can find each other, highlighting the social component of the web successfully for the first time.
• 1996/97 - ICQ and AOL Messenger: With the release of ICQ, another building block of social networks is becoming accessible to a wide audience. That the Internet is a communication tool is made clear in the early days by not only ICQ but also AOL Messenger and other tools of this kind.
• 1999 - Blogs: The blogger service Blogger.com opened its doors. Although there have been already many blogs around, Blogger.com enabled every user to maintain a blog relatively easy, and was bought just a few years later in 2003 by Google.
• 2000 - Friendster: The social network Friendster could attracted millions of users just after a few months in operation.
• 2003 - LinkedIn, Myspace and WordPress: LinkedIn has been the first platform that explicitly targeted professionals (Xing started in the German-speaking countries the same year). MySpace pulled off one of the most brilliant performances in social media history - the network could win up to 230,000 members per day in early times. With the release of WordPress, a software that makes blogging easier and more powerful was launched. With facemash.com, the direct predecessor of Facebook was going online in 2003, too.
• 2004 - Facebook, Flickr: The world's largest social network of today went online in 2004. At the beginning, the distribution took place mainly through universities. With Flickr appears a service that simplified uploading and sharing images, paving the way for the success of visual social media trends.
• 2005 –YouTube: Google bought the video sharing platform just a year later.
• 2006 – Twitter: The company revolutionized the social web with 140-character restriction and real-time communication.
• 2007 - Tumblr: The blogging platform was later bought by Yahoo.
• 2009 - Likes and Unfriend: Facebook created the Like button, at the same time "Unfriend" is becoming the word of the year of the New Oxford American Dictionary.
• 2010 - Pinterest, Google Buzz and Instagram: The Social Network Share focused on images. Google tried to gain ground in social media with Google Buzz, an extension for Gmail. Instagram has been launched as video and photo sharing app and was bought by Facebook in 2012.
• 2011 - Google+ and Snapchat: After the failure of Buzz, Google released Google+. With Snapchat a proprietary instant messaging application entered the market that deletes messages after displaying them briefly.
• 2012 - Vine: The video-sharing service Vine was acquired by Twitter right before its official launch.
• 2013 - Graph Search & Social Media Study: The University of Florida offers the first Master's program in social media with the name "Online Master of Arts in Mass Communication - Social Media". In addition, Facebook introduced Graph Search, allowing social media to dash forward in the field of search.

Social media can look back at a great success story as the figures confirm:

• Facebook: 1.39 billion active users.
• Twitter: Over 1 billion registered users, 284 million active users.
• Google+: 1.6 billion registered users, 540 million active users.
• YouTube: More than 1 billion users.
• Instagram: More than 300 million active users.
• LinkedIn: More than 300 million registered users, 187 million active users.
• Pinterest: More than 70 million registered users, 40 million active users.
• Snapchat: more than 60 million registered users, 30 million active users.

By MediaBUZZ