The wave of social media

Social media has conquered a large chunk of our lives in a very short time span, and one of the driving forces has been the arrival of the smartphones.

Only four years ago, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in January 2007, which featured an innovative web browser. At this time, the internet was filled with non-connected proprietary communities, trying to satisfy the people’s need for social interaction by restricting them to an old-fashioned platform. At the same time, the so-called web 2.0 was on the rise with a lot of social features that paved the way forward.

Facebook was launched in a lot of countries a short time before the iPhone release. While also being proprietary, Facebook changed the market with their timeline and other innovative ways to interact with friends.

Twitter emerged in 2006 with a humble beginning in Jack Dorsey’s notebook. One year later it had over 11 000 requests per second.

The combination of social media and smartphones really changed the game plan. In February this year, Facebook became the largest online photo host, competing with newcomers such as Instagram. Google recently unveiled their social network Google Plus, trying integrate social media with SEO. Twitter was recently redesigned by taking ideas from Facebook, and now have about 300 million tweets per day.

What will happen next with social media? Only one thing is certain, the journey has just begun.