social media

Social media can take many different forms, including social networks, blogs, vlogs, social bookmarks, user reviews, video sharing, podcasts, rating systems, collaborative ranking, wikis, comments, message boards, and online forums. Technologies include: picture-sharing, wall-postings, e-mail, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and VoIP, to name a few.

Examples of social media applications include: Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Instagram (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging). Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms (like Plaxo).

Social media depends upon interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words builds shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit, but free user be warned, many of these sites employ techniques to harvest your data.

Historical perspective: As of April 2007, the most frequently visited social networking sites were viewed by approximately one out of every four Internet users at least once a month. By the end of 2011, Twitter hit 100 million active users, connecting users in over 17 languages around the globe, and on average, there was over a day's worth of YouTube content uploaded every single minute. At the same time, Facebook had over 800 million users --an amount well over twice that of the population of the United States-- and by June of 2017, Facebook reached 2 billion users. Social media first came on the scene in 1997 with the platform Six Degrees.