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Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched CBBS, the first public dial-up bulletin-board system; it seeded local online communities and early message-board culture. -
Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis’s Usenet introduced decentralized, threaded discussions that became a model for forums and early community norms. -
Quantum Link / Q-Link (which evolved into America Online) brought dial-up internet and easy user interfaces to households, popularizing online chatrooms, profiles, and mass onboarding. -
GeoCities democratized web publishing (neighborhoods of personal pages), letting non-tech users create personal sites and shaping early web identity/communities. -
Friendster was an early mainstream social network that used friend of a friend connections to help people discover others and showed how social graphs could scale. -
MySpace exploded as a customizable social profile and music hub, starting profile personalization, fan communities, and early influencer culture. -
Mark Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook at Harvard. Facebook scaled the idea of personal networks into a global identity platform that reshaped social ties online -
YouTube’s 2005 debut made video sharing easy and mainstream, spawning creator culture, viral videos, and a new media economy. -
Facebook’s News Feed changed how people consume friends’ activity, moving users from profile visits to a centralized, constantly updating stream and sparking major privacy
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Twitter popularized micro-blogging and real-time public conversations, changing live reporting, event chatter, and short-form discourse.
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Chris Messina proposed using the “#” on Twitter (Aug 23, 2007); hashtags then became a universal way to group content, mobilize movements, and track trends across platforms. -
Tumblr combined blogging with social networking, allowing users to easily post multimedia content and reblog others’ posts. It became a hub for niche communities, fandoms, and early meme culture, influencing internet subcultures for years.
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Instagram launched Oct 6, 2010 as a mobile-first photo app with filters, quickly transforming visual self-presentation and influencer marketing. -
Snapchat’s “My Story” introduced ephemeral 24-hour Stories that reshaped casual sharing and were later copied by Instagram/Facebook as a core format
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The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (summer 2014) went globally viral on social platforms, demonstrating how networks can rapidly amplify fundraising and meme culture -
“The Dress” meme went viral on Twitter and Tumblr, showing how image perception and debates could spread globally overnight. -
Musical.ly launched in 2014, but it was acquired and rebranded as TikTok in September 2016 by ByteDance. TikTok popularized short-form, algorithm-driven videos and global viral trends, redefining online creativity and influencer culture. -
Social media hype around the Fyre Festival’s Instagram-perfect marketing went viral after its disastrous execution, highlighting influencer culture risks. -
After George Floyd’s murder, social media amplified protests, resources, and education about systemic racism, proving platforms’ role in activism and awareness campaigns.