The Evolution of Social Media and Confabo

Jakaria Rony
Confabo
Published in
4 min readDec 26, 2018

Let’s go back about 2 decades. The year 1997 was a significant year in the history of the tech industry. Microsoft, Apple, Intel were already big companies in 1997, but few other companies would take crucial baby steps in the same year that would influence our life enormously today after 21 years. One such company was Amazon that went public in the May of that year. Two Stanford students registered the most searched domain of the world google.com in September that year. Although tech enthusiasts remember 1997 for all these significant incidents, they often miss something, that is, in the very same year a company named Six Degrees was founded which was the beginning of a new concept that would drastically change the way how people interact among themselves. Yeah, Six Degrees was the first social networking platform.

Although the first social networking platform was founded in 1997, it would take a few more years for social media to be popular among general people. The concept became popular very fast. In 1999 Yahoo! Messenger started their journey, Friendster and LinkedIn came in 2002. In 2003 Myspace was launched which was the most popular social media for several years, Skype was also launched in the same year. In February 2004, the industry giant Facebook was launched from a Harvard dorm room. Facebook became popular very fast and is ruling the social networking industry still today. In the following years, new social networking platforms like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, VK, Tumblr and many more came out in the market with different purposes and objectives. Within only 2 decades social media turned from an unknown concept to part and parcel of people’s lives.

What’s the reason for this fast growth? Well, we are social beings. We love to engage ourselves in social interactions. Social media platforms made way for us to stay connected with our friends and family. We could do that with telephones too, why do we need social media then? Private chatting can be more or less compared to a telephone phone call, but the big difference is made by the fact that we can continuously share about our daily life, feelings, and activities with hundreds of people instantly on social media. New social media is coming with new features of sharing. Some are for photo sharing, some for video, some for both. However, are we missing any point? Can we share everything on Social media platforms? If you go to any social media now, you will find a lot of food pictures, photos in beautiful places, or selfies. I am not saying that anything is wrong with this kind of posts, but they are not the only things in people’s life. People don’t think about taking selfies, beautiful places or their lunch all the time. People have a lot more issues, ideas, opinions, feelings, facts, speculations to share, and in most cases, these are more important in our life than our selfies. Then again, our societies are not perfect too. Our societies can’t take everything easily without being judgmental. Before we share anything, we almost always consider how other people are going to take whatever it is we are sharing, which makes it hard for us to share anything we want.

With a vision of solving this problem, a new social media platform Confabo is founded. Confabo lets us share anything we want to without having to disclose our identity, which means that we can make anonymous posts or chat anonymously on Confabo. Anonymous chatting is not a new thing on the internet. Some anonymous chatting websites let you chat anonymously, and almost all of them are free chat websites. There are some blogs and forums where you can share anonymously too.

Then what makes Confabo different? Well, consider for a moment that you sent a text about how you are feeling to a random number. Does it help you at all? When you chat online anonymously on those websites, you get the same feelings as you send an anonymous text message on internet. You don’t have any real identity on those websites or forums, and you are talking to someone anonymous too who is probably from a whole different continent. On Confabo you have your real identity and your real life friends as your Confabo friends. When you post something anonymously, although your friends won’t precisely know who made that post, they are going to know that it’s the post of one of their friends. Also if they like or comment on your anonymous post, you are going to know the real identity of the person who liked or commented, because comments or likes can’t be anonymous. The anonymous chatting is never anonymous from both sides because one person has to use real identity. There is another feature named “interaction” using which you can send an instant feeling with just a few clicks. On Confabo, you can still share with the people you know, or you care about, but unlike other social media platforms, you can share anything you want. That’s what makes Confabo different.

Social media platforms have changed our lives a lot and helped us to stay connected, but still, there are some pretty significant ignored gaps. Confabo is determined to fill up those gaps and make a happier world.

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