computerscience.johncabot.edu€¦ · web viewsocial media continues to grow apace around the...

Social Networks in the World

CECILIA CASADONTEJohn Cabot University

2ND OF MAY 2016


IndexThe History of Social Media................................................................................................2

1997: The Birth of Social Media......................................................................................2

2000: The Internet is Everywhere...................................................................................3

2003: The First Social Media Surge.................................................................................3

2005: Facebook and Twitter...........................................................................................3

Around 2010: The Rest of the Pack.................................................................................4

Social Media Today............................................................................................................4

The Most Used Social Media..............................................................................................6

Whatsapp..................................................................................................................6

History...................................................................................................................6

Acquisition by Facebook.........................................................................................7

Facebook...................................................................................................................8

History...................................................................................................................8

Facebook Messenger................................................................................................10

History.................................................................................................................10

Active Platforms...................................................................................................11

Bots......................................................................................................................12

Twitter....................................................................................................................12

History................................................................................................................12 Format................................................................................................................13 Mobile.................................................................................................................14 Usage..................................................................................................................14 Funding...............................................................................................................15

The Future of Social Media...............................................................................................16

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The History of Social Media Today, social media is a term that

everyone knows. Even the most remote areas of the world have at least heard of Facebook and Twitter, and are probably using them on a regular basis. But it wasn’t always that way. Social media, in its present form, has been around a relatively short term and even though you probably can’t imagine living without it now, except for the last few decades, everyone did.

Of course, how you define social media can determine where you actually start the history of the medium.

For example: some people define communication by letters via the postal service as social media, but most people define it as the ability to use the internet to share and communicate instantly with others, even across great distances. That means, that social media can be traced back to one website in particular – and no, it wasn’t Facebook.

1997: The Birth of Social Media

The first social media site that everyone can agree actually was social media was a website called Six Degrees. It was named after the ‘six degrees of separation’ theory and lasted from 1997 to 2001. Six Degrees allowed users to create a profile and then friend other users. Six Degrees even allowed those who

didn’t register as users to confirm friendships and connected quite a few people this way.

From Six Degrees, the Internet moved into the era of blogging and instant messaging. Although blogging may not seem like social media precisely, the term fits because people were suddenly able to communicate with a blog other instantly as well as other readers. The term “blog” is a form of the phrase “Weblog” which was coined by Jorn Barger, an early blogger that was the editor of the site “Robot Wisdom.”

From there, ICQ was born and most members of Generation X remember ICQ and the service that was created shortly thereafter, America Online, with AOL’s instant messenger especially prominent in the social media lineup.

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2000: The Internet is Everywhere

By the year 2000, around 100 million people had access to the internet, and it became quite common for people to be engaged socially online. Of course, then it was looked at as an odd hobby at best. Still, more and more people began to utilize chat rooms for making friends, dating and discussing topics that they wanted to talk about. But the huge boom of social media was still to come.

2003: The First Social Media Surge

Although the younger generation of today might not know about it, back in the early 2000’s the website MySpace was the popular place to set up a profile and make friends. MySpace was the original social media profile website, leading into and inspiring websites like Facebook.But even though MySpace has a very small user base today compared to Facebook and Twitter, there are musicians who have used MySpace to promote their music and even be heard by record producers and other artists. Colbie Caillat is an example.Another website that was one of the beginning social media websites was LinkedIn, still a social media website today, geared specifically towards professionals who want to network with each other.

In fact, most of the social media websites we have today are similar to LinkedIn, in that they are specifically about one particular thing, or they have some kind of unique quality that has made them popular. While MySpace was a general social media site, LinkedIn was, and is still is, meant for professional businesspeople to connect with each other to network, find jobs and socialize.

2005: Facebook and Twitter

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched what would soon become the social media giant that would set the bar for all other social media services. Facebook is the number one social media website today and it currently boasts over a billion users.

However, back in 2004, Facebook (TheFacebook.com then) was launched just for Harvard students. Zuckerberg saw the potential and released the service to the world at the website facebook.com.

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In 2006, the popularity of text messaging or SMS inspired Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Noah Glass and Evan Williams to create Twitter, a service that had the unique distinction of allowing users to send “tweets” of 140 characters or less. Today, Twitter has over 500 million users.

Around 2010: The Rest of the Pack

Before long, there were dozens of other websites providing social media services of some kind. Flickr was one of the earliest and still is one of the most popular photo sharing sites, but others include Photobucket and Instagram, with Instagram gaining popularity today as one of the top social media sites to include on business cards and other media.

Tumblr, a microblogging website started in 2007 by David Karp and now owned by Yahoo, is one of the sites that could be seen sprouting up in the late 2000s. Foursquare was quite a popular website for a while, particularly with smartphones being used so extensively, and then there is Pinterest, Spotify, and many others. Some of the most popular social media platforms in the late 2000’s included: Google Buzz, Loopt, Blippy, and Groupon.

One of the things that started happening right in this time period is that social media not only became widely used, it also became widespread in business.

Websites were starting to list their social media addresses, businesses would include Facebook and Twitter addresses on their television commercials and many tools were being built to include social media on websites – for example: WordPress plugins that would allow users to include not only links to their social media websites, but also to include their latest social media posts directly on their websites.

Social media icons were seen everywhere and it became almost unusual to see businesses or brands without them.

In addition, social media began to be one of the ways in which internet marketers and website owners would boost the visibility of their websites. The benefits of social media marketing for business began to become quite clear to business owners large and small. Social media bookmarking became quite popular and there were services that would bookmark a post or a website across dozens or even hundreds of social media services.

Social Media TodaySocial media continues to grow apace around the world too, with active user

accounts now equating to roughly 29% of the world’s population.

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Monthly active user (MAU) figures for the most active social network in each country add up to almost 2.08 billion – a 12% increase since January 2014. The graph shows the Social Media use:

For further information, click on the graph…

Meanwhile, research conducted by GlobalWebIndex suggests that the average social media user spends 2 hours and 25 minutes per day using social networks and microblogs, with Argentinian and Filipino users registering the most, at more than 4 hours per day, as you can see from the graph below:

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For further information, click on the graph…Social media today consists of thousands of social media platforms, all serving

the same – but slightly different purpose. Of course, some social media platforms are more popular than others, but even the smaller ones get used by a portion of the population because each one caters to a very different type of person.

For example: Instagram caters to the kind of person that communicates through photographs best, and other platforms such as Twitter are perfect for those who communicate in short bursts of information. As mentioned, businesses are using social media to promote their products and services in a brand new way and so each form of social media serves a purpose that the others available may not.

As we've seen in our on-going series of Digital Statshot reports, mobile increasingly dominates the digital world, and we're confident that 'ubiquitous connectivity' will gather even more pace during 2015, as cheaper handsets and more affordable data connections reach further around the world.

What's more, with mobile-oriented services like WhatsApp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger achieving the top social media ranking spots in some of the world's biggest economies, it's clear that much of our digital behaviour is now converging around mobile devices.

Based on the trends within this data, we expect that mobile will help to push internet penetration beyond 50% of the world's population during mid to late 2016.

Before that, though, we expect to see social media penetration reach one-

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third of the world's population - likely by the end of 2015 - with new users in developing nations accounting for almost all of this growth.

The digital world passed some impressive milestones in 2014:

Worldwide social media users exceeded 2 billion back in August; Worldwide penetration of mobile phones passed 50% in September; The number of global internet users passed 3 billion in early November; The number of active mobile connections surpassed the total world

population just last month.

The Most Used Social Media

Whatsapp

WhatsApp Messenger is an American proprietary cross-platform instant messaging client for smartphones. It uses the Internet to send text messages, documents, images, video, user location and audio media messages to other users using standard cellular mobile numbers.

History

WhatsApp Inc., was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former employees of Yahoo!. After Koum and Acton left Yahoo! in September 2007, the duo traveled to South America as a break from work. At one point they applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected. For the rest of the following years Koum relied on his $400,000 savings from Yahoo!. In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone and realizing that the seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps, he started visiting his friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose where the three would discuss "...having statuses next to individual names of the people," but this was not possible without an iPhone developer, so Fishman introduced Koum to Igor Solomennikov, a developer in Russia that he had found on RentACoder.com. Koum almost immediately chose the name "WhatsApp" because it sounded like "what's up", and a week later on his birthday, on February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, early WhatsApp kept crashing or getting stuck and at a particular point, Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon which Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months".

WhatsApp was switched from a free to paid service to avoid growing too fast, mainly because the primary cost was sending verification texts to users. In December 2009 WhatsApp for the iPhone was updated to send photos. By early 2011, WhatsApp was in the top 20 of all apps in Apple's U.S. App Store.

By February 2013, WhatsApp's user base had swollen to about 200 million

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active users and its staff to 50. WhatsApp had been valued at $1.5 billion.

In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users use the service each month. As of April 22, 2014, WhatsApp had over 500 million monthly active users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos were being shared daily, and the messaging system was handling more than 10 billion messages each day. On August 24, 2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide. At that point WhatsApp was adding about 25 million new users every month, or 833,000 active users per day. With 65 million active users, about 10% of the total worldwide users, India was the largest single country in terms of number of users.

In January 2015, WhatsApp was the most globally popular messaging app, with more than 600 million active users. In April 2015, WhatsApp reached 800 million active users. By September 2015, the user base had grown to 900 million, and by February 2016 it had grown to one billion.

Acquisition by Facebook

On February 19, 2014, months after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation, Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date. Facebook, which was advised by Allen & Co, paid $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp's founders (advised by Morgan Stanley), Koum and Acton. Employee stock was scheduled to vest over four years subsequent to closing. The transaction was the largest purchase of a company backed by venture capitalists to date. Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media.

The acquisition caused a considerable number of users to move, or try out other message services as well. Telegram claimed to have seen 8 million additional downloads of its app. Line claimed to have seen 2 million new users for its service.

WhatsApp Web

WhatsApp was officially made available for PCs through a web client, under the name WhatsApp Web, in late January 2015 through an announcement made by Koum on his Facebook page: "Our web client is simply an extension of your phone: the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device—this means all of your messages still live on your phone". The WhatsApp user's handset must still be connected to the Internet for the browser application to function. All major desktop browsers are supported except for Microsoft Internet Explorer. WhatsApp Web's user interface is based on the default Android one.

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Facebook

Facebook is a corporation and online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California, in the United States. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to high-school students. Since 2006, anyone who is at least 13 years old was allowed to become a registered user of the website, though the age requirement may be higher depending on applicable local laws. Its name comes from the face book directories often given to American university students.

After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos, use various apps and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". Also users can complain or block unpleasant people. Facebook had over 1.59 billion monthly active users as of August 2015. Because of the large volume of data users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny for their privacy policies. Facebook, Inc. held its initial public offering in February 2012 and began selling stock to the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion. On July 13, 2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to reach a market cap of $250 billion. Following its Q3 earnings call in 2015, Facebook's market cap exceeded $300 billion.

History

Zuckerberg wrote a program called Facemash on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard University as a sophomore (second year student). According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was comparable to Hot or Not and used "photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".

To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied private dormitory ID images. Harvard did not have a student "Facebook" (a directory with photos and basic information) at the time, although individual houses had been issuing their own paper facebooks since the mid-1980s, and Harvard's longtime Freshman Yearbook

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was colloquially referred to as the "Freshman Facebook". Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.

The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Ultimately, the charges were dropped. Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final exam. He uploaded 500 Augustan images to a website, each of which was featured with a corresponding comments section. He shared the site with his classmates, and people started sharing notes.Original layout and name of Thefacebook, 2004.

The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He said he was inspired by an editorial about the Facemash incident in The Harvard Crimson. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.

In mid-2004, entrepreneur Sean Parker — an informal advisor to Zuckerberg — became the company's president. In June 2004, Facebook moved its operations base to Palo Alto, California. It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In 2005, the company dropped "the" from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com for US$200,000, the domain facebook.com belonged to AboutFace Corporation before the purchase. this website last appeared on April 8, 2005, whereas from April 10, 2005 to August 4, 2005, this domain gave a 403 error.Mark Zuckerberg, co-creator of Facebook, in his Harvard dorm room, 2005.

In May 2005, Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, and Jim Breyer added $1 million of his own money. A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users. Entertainment Weekly included the site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?".

On September 26, 2006, Facebook was opened to everyone at least 13 years old with a valid email address.

Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. The company announced 500 million users in July 2010 making it the largest online social network in the world at the time. According to the company's data, half of the site's membership use Facebook daily, for an average of 34 minutes, while 150 million users access the site by mobile. A company representative called the milestone a "quiet revolution."

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In November 2010, based on SecondMarket Inc. (an exchange for privately held companies' shares), Facebook's value was $41 billion. The company had slightly surpassed eBay to become the third largest American web company after Google and Amazon.com.Facebook headquarters entrance sign at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California.

By January 2014, Facebook's market capitalization had risen to over $134 billion. At the end of January 2014, 1.23 billion users were active on the website every month.

The company celebrated its 10th anniversary during the week of February 3, 2014. In each of the first three months of 2014, over one billion users logged into their Facebook account on a mobile device.

In February 2014, Facebook announced that it would be buying mobile messaging company Whatsapp for US$19 billion in cash and stock. In June 2014, Facebook announced the acquisition of Pryte, a Finnish mobile data-plan firm that aims to make it easier for mobile phone users in underdeveloped parts of the world to use wireless Internet apps.

On April 12, 2016, Zuckerberg revealed a decade-long plan for Facebook in a keynote address. His speech outlined his vision, which was centered around three main pillars: artificial intelligence, increased connectivity around the world and virtual and augmented reality. He also announced a new Facebook Messenger platform, which will have developers creating bots that are able to engage in automatic interactions with customers.

Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger is an instant messaging service and software application which provides text and voice communication. Integrated with Facebook's web-based Chat feature and built on the open MQTT protocol, Messenger lets Facebook users chat with friends both on mobile and on the main website.

Facebook reported in January 2016 that Facebook Messenger has reached 800 million monthly active users. David A. Marcus heads Facebook Messenger and had joined Facebook on invitation of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.

History

Facebook launched the iOS and Android versions of Facebook Messenger on August 9, 2011, with an October 11 update making the app available for BlackBerry OS.

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In April 2014, Facebook announced that the messaging feature will be removed from the main Facebook app and users will be forced to download Messenger.

On March 17, 2015, Facebook added a functionality in which users can send money to their friends. It is currently only available in the United States.

On April 27, 2015, Facebook introduced video calling in the Facebook Messenger app. The functionality was first launched in Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Laos, Lithuania, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Uruguay.

At the Facebook F8 conference on March 25, 2015, Facebook announced that the Messenger platform is taking first steps to bring businesses on Messenger with the goal of enhancing how people and businesses communicate. Users will be able to sign up to connect with businesses in Messenger, receiving personalized updates. Businesses can use custom layouts designed for order confirmation, shipping updates and more. The service is already available with selected US businesses.

As part of this business feature, Facebook launched Transportation on Messenger in cooperation with Uber. As of January 2016, this service is still in testing and will be available to selected users in the locations where Uber operates in the United States.

Active Platforms

iOS

iPhone and iPod Touch: Facebook launched the iOS version of Facebook Messenger on August 9, 2011.

iPad: On July 3, 2014, a native Facebook Messenger app was released for iPad. It was specially designed for iPad rather than just running as an enlarged iPhone app. Messenger for iPad features a multi-window interface showing a list of threads and the current conversation at the same time.

Android

Facebook launched the Android version of Facebook Messenger on August 9, 2011.

In December 2012, the Facebook Messenger app for Android in some regions (such as Australia, South Asia, Indonesia, South Africa, and Venezuela) added the ability to use Messenger without a Facebook account by simply using a name and phone number. These changes are intended to allow Facebook Messenger to compete against similar mobile messaging platforms such as WhatsApp as an alternative to text messaging. Later updates added the ability to use Facebook

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Messenger as a replacement text messaging client on Android, and added "Chat Heads", an overlay chat system originating from Facebook Home.

BlackBerry OS

Facebook launched the BlackBerry OS version of Facebook Messenger on October 11, 2011.

Windows Phone 8

On March 5, 2014, Facebook Messenger app was released for Windows Phone 8. This app contains many features similar to iOS and Android apps but lacks chat heads and voice messaging features.

Web

On April 8, 2015, Facebook officially launched messenger.com, which enables users to chat directly through a web browser, without needing to visit facebook.com. Facebook stated that the messages feature in facebook.com will not be removed, unlike how Facebook has separated the feature in its mobile app.

Bots

Facebook Messenger supports chatbots, and in April 2016 launched a Messenger Platform service which allows developers to create bot accounts that can interact with Facebook users. Bots created at launch include weather services, CNN news, 1-800-Flowers and the interactive fiction adventure Zork.Reception

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has listed Facebook Messenger (Facebook chat) on its Secure Messaging Scorecard. As of November 6, 2014, Facebook Messenger has a score of 2 out of 7 points on the scorecard. It has received points for having communications encrypted in transit and for having recently completed an independent security audit. It is missing points because the communications are not encrypted with keys the provider doesn't have access to, users can't verify contacts' identities, past messages are not secure if the encryption keys are stolen, the source code is not open to independent review, and the security design is not properly documented.

Twitter

History

Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS

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service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The decision was also partly due to the fact that domain twitter.com was already in use, and it was six months after the launch of twttr that the crew purchased the domain and changed the name of the service to Twitter. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr".

The first Twitter prototype, developed by Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber, was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.

In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo, together with its assets—including Odeo.com and Twitter.com—from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass, who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.

Format

Users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags – words or phrases prefixed with a "#" sign. Similarly, the "@" sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users. To repost a message from another Twitter user and share it with one's own followers, a user can click the retweet button within the Tweet.

In late 2009, the "Twitter Lists" feature was added, making it possible for users to follow ad hoc lists of authors instead of individual authors.

Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers: short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those on the Vodafone, O2 and Orange networks. In India, since Twitter only supports tweets from Bharti Airtel, an alternative platform called smsTweet was set up by a user to work on all networks. A similar platform called GladlyCast exists for mobile phone users in Singapore and Malaysia.

The tweets were set to a largely constrictive 140-character limit for compatibility with SMS messaging, introducing the shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. The 140-character limit also increased the usage of URL shortening services such as bit.ly, goo.gl, and tr.im, and content-hosting

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services, such as Twitpic, memozu.com and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters. Since June 2011, Twitter has used its own t.co domain for automatic shortening of all URLs posted on its website, making other link shorteners superfluous for staying within the 140 character limit.

Mobile

Twitter has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 10, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Firefox OS, and Nokia S40. There is also version of the website for mobile devices, SMS and MMS service. For many years, Twitter has limited the use of third party applications accessing the service by implementing a 100,000 user limit per application.

Usage

In 2009, Twitter was mainly used by older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. "Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years," he said. According to comScore only eleven percent of Twitter's users are aged twelve to seventeen. comScore attributed this to Twitter's "early adopter period" when the social network first gained popularity in business settings and news outlets attracting primarily older users. However, comScore also stated in 2009 that Twitter had begun to "filter more into the mainstream", and "along with it came a culture of celebrity as Shaq, Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher joined the ranks of the Twitterati".

According to a study by Sysomos in June 2009, women make up a slightly larger Twitter demographic than men—fifty-three percent over forty-seven percent. It also stated that five percent of users accounted for seventy-five percent of all activity, and that New York City has more Twitter users than other cities.

According to Quancast, twenty-seven million people in the US used Twitter as of September 3, 2009. Sixty-three percent of Twitter users are under thirty-five years old; sixty percent of Twitter users are Caucasian, but a higher than average (compared to other Internet properties) are African American/black (sixteen percent) and Hispanic (eleven percent); fifty-eight percent of Twitter users have a total household income of at least US$60,000. The prevalence of African American Twitter usage and in many popular hashtags has been the subject of research studies.

On September 7, 2011, Twitter announced that it has 100 million active users logging in at least once a month and 50 million active users every day.

In an article published on January 6, 2012, Twitter was confirmed to be the biggest social media network in Japan, with Facebook following closely in second.

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comScore confirmed this, stating that Japan is the only country in the world where Twitter leads Facebook.

On March 31, 2014, Twitter announced there were 255 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 198 million mobile MAUs. In 2013, there were over 100 million users actively using Twitter daily and about 500 million Tweets every day, with about 29% of users checking Twitter multiple times a day.

In 2012, the country with the most active users on Twitter was the United States.

Funding

Twitter's San Francisco headquarters located at 1355 Market St.

Twitter raised over US$57 million from venture capitalist growth funding, although exact numbers are not publicly disclosed. Twitter's first A round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between US$1 million and US$5 million. Its second B round of funding in 2008 was for US$22 million and its third C round of funding in 2009 was for US$35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, and Insight Venture Partners. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.

In May 2008, The Industry Standard remarked that Twitter's long-term viability is limited by a lack of revenue. Twitter board member Todd Chaffee forecast that the company could profit from e-commerce, noting that users may want to buy items directly from Twitter since it already provides product recommendations and promotions.

By March 2009 communications consultant Bill Douglass predicted in an interview that Twitter would be worth $1 billion within six months, which came to pass when the company closed a financing round valuing it at $1 billion in September of that year.

The company raised US$200 million in new venture capital in December 2010, at a valuation of approximately US$3.7 billion. In March 2011, 35,000 Twitter shares sold for US$34.50 each on Sharespost, an implied valuation of US$7.8 billion. In August 2010 Twitter announced a "significant" investment led by Digital Sky Technologies that, at US$800 million, was reported to be the largest venture round in history.

In December 2011, the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal invested $300 million

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in Twitter. The company was valued at $8.4 billion at the time.

Twitter's financial revenue statistics for the first quarter of 2014 was reported as US$250 million.

The Future of Social MediaAlthough it is impossible to know what the future of social media holds, it is

clear that it will continue. Humans are social animals and the more ability to communicate with each other on the level that each person likes best, the more prevalent social media will become. With new and exciting technologies just around the corner, social media will be interesting to see in the coming decades.

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