Keeping Touch in Facebook Snapchat Twitter Instagram these and many other applications called apps for short allow you to keep in touch with people using digital technology These applications are known as social media and they’ve changed the way people work live and communicate with others You can sometimes get useful information by reading content on social media sites and chatting with members of the site 4 You can share videos easily on many social media sites Share and share alike Traditional sources of information such as books and TV are created by a small number of people and are read or viewed by many people who usually have no communication with one another Social media is different because many people can create and share content and communicate with each other and with viewers Content can be words illustrations photos and videos It’s booming There are many reasons why social media is so popular today Most social media sites are free to use and it also makes staying connected with others easy and instantaneous Keeping in touch with messages is often as simple as a few clicks on a tablet smartphone or other digital device
Some social media apps allow you to alter pictures using filters or special effects For example you could turn your selfie into a doggie-you and share it with others People post news about themselves and their families and share news stories over social media TRUE STORY Tweets from the Top of the World In April 2010 adventurer Eric Larsen was the first person to tweet that is send a message using Twitter from the North Pole Later that same year he sent another tweet this time from the top of Mount Everest the highest mountain on Earth Content kings and queens Many types of social media help people produce their own content This means that users do not need special computer skills to create a personal page on a social media site or share a photo with their friends You can comment on Like or sometimes even share someone else’s content with others 5
social media History Social media is an integral part of today’s digital world but it has only been with us a short while People were able to connect with one another using email and electronic bulletin boards as far back as the 1980s Social media websites took off later in the 1990s and 2000s Bulletin boards The first elements of social media could be found on bulletin board systems BBSs in the late 1970s These were simple computer noticeboards to which users sent messages and files They often did this by connecting the computer to a telephone line to make what was often an expensive long-distance call Online community In 1995 GeoCities was launched This web hosting service offered people the chance to create their own simple homepage on the World Wide Web Homepages were stored on the GeoCities server By the end of the 1990s it was one of the most popular sites on the Web 66 Social media pioneers In 1995 Classmates became one of the first social networks The site was used by school and college friends to keep in touch SixDegrees com followed in 1997 and was considered by many to be the first true social media site At its peak it had 3 5 million users but it closed in 2001 These sites were followed in the 2000s by Friends Reunited in the United Kingdom and Friendster Myspace and others in the United States true story short lived social site WalMart launched The Hub as a social media site for teenagers in 2006 It lasted just 10 weeks before closing down
LinkedIn LinkedIn was designed to help professional people make career connections rather than friends The site allowed them to upload and share their resumes find out about job opportunities and link with people in similar industries By late 2016 when Microsoft bought LinkedIn for 26 4 billion US it had more than 450 million members COMPUTER Hero Before modern social media people often shared images and his barbershop quartet singing other file types by email American programmer Nathaniel Borenstein created the code that allowed emails to carry Before this emails could only include a message in text Borenstein’s first two attachments were a photo and sound file of these files known as attachments How Much Time Do You Spend Online A worldwide survey in 2016 found that individuals have an average of eight social media accounts 32 percent of the amount of their time spent on the Internet was devoted to social media People aged 16 24 averaged 2 hours and 40 minutes a day on social media GlobalWebIndex quarterly report 2017 Soaring social media Social media made a major leap forward with the arrival of smartphones and tablets These devices could link to the Internet without wires which allowed people to post updates and share pictures and information while they were on the move By the end of 2016 almost a third of the people on the planet used social media 7
