The past, present and future of social media

Alex HowardGovernment 2.0 Correspondent

O’Reilly Media

What is social media?

Postal Service (550 BC)

Telegraph (1792)

Pneumatic mail (1865)

Telephone (1890)

Radio (1891)

Email (1966)

ARPANET (1969)

Commercial online services (1969)

Bulletin Board Services (BBS) (1979)

Ward Christensen and the First BBS [Credit: Wikipedia]

Usenet (1979)

• Conceived of by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis.

• Usenet let users post articles or posts to newsgroups.

Online chat rooms (1980)

Internet Relay Chat (1988)

• IRC was followed by ICQ in the mid-90s.

• First IM program for PCs.

World Wide Web (1991)

Credit: http://www.radford.edu/srabago/links/text.html]

Blogs (1994) First blog? Links.net

Wikis (1994)

• Ward Cunningham was inspired in part by Apple’s Hypercard

• He developed Vannevar Bush’s ideas of “allowing users to comment on and change one another’s text”

America Online (1995)

Social networks (1997)

P2P/ Social filesharing (1999)

Livejournal

…and Blogger (1999)

Wikipedia (2001)

RSS (2002)

Friendster (2002)

MySpace (2003)

• Friendster (2002)• MySpace (2003)

Second Life (2003)

Facebook, Digg, Flickr and LinkedIn (2004 )

YouTube (2005)

Twitter (2006)

Livestreaming (2006)

• uStream.tv• Justin.tv• Livestream.com

First YouTube Presidential Debate (2007)

[Credit: HowStuffWorks]

Tumblr (2007)

• Lifestreaming + microblogging platform

My.Barack.Obama.com (2007)• 2 million+ members. Most contributed to

nearly half a billion dollars raised online.

#IranElection (2009)

[Credit: UPI]

Foursquare (2009)

Posterous (2009)

DoD Social Media Policy (2010)

Google Plus (2011)

The Future?

China

Russia

Augmented reality

Augmented overload!

Image Credit: Daonk.org

Digital tools for open government

NY Senate on iTunes

Social audits

Socialmemories

Image Credit: Portal To Your Dreams

We’ll need better filter/browsers

Image credit: PC World on Aurora

Privacy challenges

The stream