The 5 Years Becoming Of Social Media

So what was going on around social media right this second 5 years ago? MySpace was America's no. 1 website.

YouTube was still a starter. Facebook was used only by high school and college students. What's “mobile”? No idea at all until the launching of iPhone one year later. And “widgets” was not popular until 2007. Fast forward to today and the sites we use and the way we use them have shifted dramatically. Facebook is closing in on Google as the Web's most trafficked site.

There are hundreds of thousands of mobile applications that users access across a variety of smartphones, and social media is increasingly being consumed and produced on the go. And “Like” buttons have become the new form of social currency for publishers around the world. How was going on in between? Let's review the development of social media in the previous 5 years.

The News Feed Brings It All TogetherThe introduction of the news feed in late 2006 was a breakthrough from the conventional MySpace layout.

Its idea of publishing stories in reverse-chronological order was followed by other social platforms like Twitter, Flickr and even MySpace. Though it was not accepted at the beginning (along with many other complaints such as the privacy issue), the feature was undoubtedly influential and successfully extended users' attention span.

The Power of VideosA few months before the birth of Mashable ,

YouTube made its debut on the Web in February 2005, making an unprecedented ascent into the mainstream consciousness. By December of that year, it had already become the most popular video site, and by July of 2006, it was serving 100 million video views per day (today, it serves more than 2 billion views daily).

Then, in October, Google bought

YouTube for a whopping $1. 6 billion, just 18 months after the site launched. At the end of last year, I declared

YouTube the top social media innovation of the decade, as it has come to embody so much of what we now know as social media, from highly shareable content to citizen journalism to the ability of anyone with a camera to claim their 15 minutes of fame.

The Ever Growth Of Social NetworkingAt the beginning of 2008, social platforms started competing over users' ID. Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and MySpace were launched one after another, hoping to see users' profiles across the Internet.

The Facebook Open Graph successfully attracted millions of websites to add its plugins while Twitter and MySpace formed alliance with Google Friend Connect, connecting similar numbers of sites. Social Media Goes MobileThe speculation that social media would go mobile has been around for nearly 10 years and it did eventually happen in last few years when iPhone invaded the market. Research says that, excluding the downloading of applications, 30% of users visit social networking websites on their smartphones. Because of the improved broadband speeds, video is becoming mobile too. Of all videos served on

YouTube, for example, 100 million were viewed on portable devices every day. Since most smartphones have incorporated thefeature of video taking, they are expected to play an important role in the video making department. What Does

The Future Look Like? Now that we've established where we are – a social ecosystem that's moving beyond the walls of individual sites to mobile devices and third-party applications – the question is: what's next? Over the next month, we'll be exploring some of the past five years more in-depth, and concluding with a look at what the next five years hold. Stay tuned to Mashable as we celebrate our five year anniversary!
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