Social Media: past, present & future
Some are staple in my URL-diet as if my HP were reliant on their use. Now Circular is preparing for take-off
Social Media platforms seem so ingrained in the fibre of the Internet now that it’s nearly difficult for me to remember what it was like before the current crop of popular sites and Apps. I remember being in IT lessons and a few of us found Twitter in early 2008 we were just amazed by how incredibly useless it seemed. Now, a lot of them are staple in my URL-diet. Daily doses of Twitter, Reddit and YouTube as if my HP were reliant on their use.
Some have come and gone. Some died before I knew of them. Some are still battling (ha!) and some are about to get going.
The Past
Myspace
Founded: by Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson and Jon Hart in 2003
Aim: an interactive network for personal blogs, music, photos and videos.
What happened: Myspace were one of the OGs in this. Officially launching in Jan 2004, Myspace was brought to life by users of another platform — Friendster — and had reached 5 million users within the same calendar year. Unsurprisingly, their parent company (Intermix Media) was acquired; Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. coughed up $580 million which was a crazy figure at the time for this kind of platform. Myspace tripled in value within 1 year of being acquired by News Corp.
On a sad note, a Myspace user committed suicide due to cyberbullying on the platform — the first case of this happening — at just 13 years old. Nowadays there’s a plethora of information about cyberbullying but (I suppose) at the time it was a new phenomenon.
By 2008, Myspace and a newer platform (Facebook) were neck-and-neck with monthly visitors but it was downhill from there for Myspace. By 2011 most of their staff had been made redundant and and Myspace was put up for sale. They were sold for a rumoured $35 million in mid-2011.
Some remnants of Myspace remain, some of the old songs that were posted to the site can still be found and with a rebranding they actually picked up a few more users.. but it will never be the same again.
Path
Founded: by Dave Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau in 2010
Aim: a smart journal consisting of images, music, writing, and more
What happened: Path had a pretty short lived time in the limelight. They received a decent amount of funding early on, including investment from Ashton Kutcher — well known for investments in big businesses, including Airbnb. Path relaunched a second time toward the end of 2011, adding in more features, and saw a massive increase in their user-base. Even being featured as Editor’s Choice on the App Store in December 2012 couldn’t really save them.
I remember using it and taking interest in how it works, but hardly anyone that I knew IRL were on the platform so I saw no major benefit to having an account. (It’s a similar case for another platform called Momentage — I’ll be shocked if anyone remembers it. Basically through 2012–2014 ish, Momentage did Instagram better than Instagram but it lacked the same social focus and just fade into nothingness.) Stupidly, Path limited users to 150 friends and caught a lot of criticism for user-data storage and use.
Ultimately, Path were still trying to raise funds four years after launch, and it just didn’t really take off; in May 2015 Path were acquired by a South Korean company — Daum Kakao.
Vine
Founded: by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll in 2013
Aim: short form viral video content
What happened: Yo! Vine swept through every other Social Media platform. FULLY. Their user-base grew incredibly fast and they had a truly vast number of videos real quick. Any place on the Internet through 2014 and 2015, it was full of Vine clips. 6 seconds on a loop, who knew it would be so popular.
Soon after launch, Vine was acquired by Twitter and the growth was incredible. Celebrities were made from Vine, News networks used it to announce news and reveal album track-listings. I think Vine started losing their dominance once Snapchat reached a certain level of popularity, and when Instagram improved their video feature.
Come 2016, Vine announced that Twitter were axing their app and changing how they would be operating as of Jan 2017. The App rebranded to Vine Camera and would only allow users to share Vines to Twitter or save them. The website change makes it awful to search through and find content that you loved.
Now remnants of Vine stay living even after people’s attention spans have moved on. Twitter users gain thousands of retweets just sharing threads of their favourite Vine videos.. and people even adopted “Vine” as a phrase for short-length videos (even when Vine wasn’t used to create them).
The Present
Founded: by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes in 2004
Aim: originally intended to be a social network for Harvard Students. Now a social utility that connects you with the people around you.
What happened: well… you probably have a Facebook account and know quite well what happened. Within a few years of Facebook’s birth, they had been invested in heavily! A large investment of $240 million in 2007 came from Microsoft for just 1.6% of Facebook, giving the company a value of $15 billion.
Facebook have gone on to acquire over 50 other companies. They’ve spent billions; Oculus (VR) for $2 billion, WhatsApp for $19 billion, LiveRail for over $400 million, and countless more.
In terms of user base, Facebook is by far the largest of all social media sites in the World. 1.94 billion monthly visitors As of March ’17. Yes. Just over one-quarter of the World’s population visits Facebook at least once per month.
Personally, Facebook is long past it and no longer that relevant to what I find to be important. It’s only a bit handy for certain friends and groups. Let’s not forget who Facebook acquired in 2012 for $1 billion:
Founded: by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in 2010
Aim: initially a check-in project — Burbn — it became too similar to Foursquare and pivoted to focus on photo-sharing.
What happened: a rapid series of investment gave Instagram a value of over $20 million less than two years after their initial release. Instagram have gone on to introduce Web Profiles, direct messaging, live video, selfie filters, and an awful lot more.
Instagram was(/is) a dream to use. It’s a lot of fun and perfect for visual-based artists to showcase their work. A straightforward platform for showing off Photography, Design, Illustration, Videography, and more. However, since Facebook rolled out a few algorithm changes it can be an awful experience for the user. Since the addition of many new features, it doesn’t seem like Instagram will be disappearing any time soon.
Snapchat
Founded: by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown in 2011
Aim:
What happened: Is Snapchat the most revolutionary social media platform… ever? They raised funds in three rounds, totalling $143.5 million, while still perfecting their product pre-2014. Adding new features, Snapchat managed to rapidly grow their user base. From the end of 2014, they raised another three rounds of funding ($485 million, $200–500 million, and $1.8 billion respectively).
Stories, disappearing videos, disappearing chats, brief news content. Snapchat is a lot of fun and certain other platforms have regularly implemented features that seem directly nabbed from Snapchat’s product.
Now, Snapchat’s daily video views are in the tens of billions and there is near no real competition. (The closest is Instagram who are doing similar to Snapchat with selfie filters, disappearing photos/videos, stories and so on. But Instagram have a handicap of all of their other features.)
Founded: by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Evan Williams in 2006
Aim: short, sharp status updates
What happened: initially the founders had a podcast series and wanted to create a platform for status updates and begun working on the concept in early 2006. Thus, twttr was born.
Early attempts at large growth were mostly unsuccessful until a feature at SXSW festival saw them gain a massive bump in their user base. Steadily growing, Twitter introduced the hashtag in 2007 and the CEO (at the time) appeared on Oprah to explain what Twitter is in 2009.
Now, you probably know it well. Connecting with friends, musicians, actors, journalists and authors; all was possible on Twitter. From 2010 onwards, the core function of Twitter hasn’t really changed drastically. The main changes came with design, but Twitter made some minor changes to how the Timeline functions, private messaging, and the introduction of Moments.
The way people used it seems to have changed. In around 2012 you could get thousands of retweets and gain hundreds of followers from it. Now you can find Tweets with hundreds of thousands of retweets from users with just a couple of hundred followers. I think users have completely changed how they use it but I fail to pinpoint it.
and The Future
Circular
Founded: by Zai Allen, and Hendrix Nash in 2017 🚀
Aim: a platform with the desire to improve the creative world
What happened: toward the end of 2016, Circular’s CEO Zai Allen Tweeted out his shared his desire for a platform dedicated to creatives to share tips and support one another.
Soon enough, Circular were testing in a Slack community and taking sign ups for users. Planning went under way when Zai Allen recruited Hendrix Nash (ha — me!) to help bring Circular to life. Over 60000 messages later and we announced we were closing the Slack community to work on a bigger product. Features on Lost Culture, FWRD, and Affinity firmly cemented our place, whilst we steadily teased the changes that were to come.
On June 6th 2017, we announced via our Twitter that we would be launching an iOS App! Big news.
A few rumours were flying around for the month or two before the announcement, with many guessing that Circular would be the next social media platform to make their mark. Circular was even listed as a notable social media platform before any official announcement.
So… you wanna know more?
What’s going to happen: very, very soon Circular will be launching.
Users will be able to start projects, share tips, find coworkers, network.. whether for the purpose of an independent side-project or for a startup idea. Who knows, you might use Circular to find your Co-Founders for your own social media platform years from now 😏
You can see Circles in the screenshot above. That is where the magic will happen. You can use these — Design, Photography, Music, and so on — to have focussed discussion and project-starting. You can see on the background screenshot, Update Progress. Yeah.
- Start your project
- Users show their interest
- Update the project with progress as and when it is made
- Interested users can stay in the loop with your project.
There’s an awful lot more to come; more to be announced. You can keep up to date with new announcements on our Twitter @CircularHQ and sign up via our Website circularhq.com; there, you’ll get everything right away.
Interested in contributing or signing up for updates? ⛵️
