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[Audio] http://ssrn.com/link/ICAESMT-2019.html=xyz Information Systems &eBusiness Network (ISN) Historical Evolution of Social Media: An Overview Manish Dhingraa, Rakesh K. Mudgalb aResearch Scholar, TMIMT, Teerthanker Mahaveer University, Moradabad, 244001, India. dhingramanish2003@yahoo.com bVice Chancellor, Teerthanker Mahaveer University, Moradabad, 244001, India. rakesh.mudgil@gmail.com A R T I C L E I N F O Article history: Received 00 December 00 Received in revised form 00 January 00 Accepted 00 February 00 Keywords: Social Media Bulletin Board Systems UseNet A B S T R A C T Social media has become the buzz word of marketing nowadays. Today it is difficult to visualise the effectiveness of promotion mix of any company without social media. Starting from basic means of exchanging information, it grew to development of means of communication whose purpose was manifold. With the advent of social media customers and businesses have become well connected with each other. Business to business, business to customer, and customer to customer communication has been great facilitated by social media. Various types of social media platforms have evolved over a period of time, which have become more sophisticated in terms of technology, more effective in terms of capability to influence the customers and more efficient in terms of reaching the customers in optimum time. All these developments took place over many years and have passed through several stages. The aim of this paper is to capture the historical developments of social media over a period of time. © 2019Uttaranchal University, Dehradun. Hosting by Elsevier SSRN (ISN)All rights reserved. Peer review under responsibility of Uttaranchal University, Dehradun. 1. Introduction Social media which is defined as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content" (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010) have make a revolutionary change in the lives of individuals as well as promotional strategies of organizations. With social media people can undertake several activities like collaborating, exchanging information, sharing and sending messages over an electronic medium, engaging collectively and interacting, sharing contents like ideas, text, photos, images and video and they are creators and co-creators of this material (Thackeray et al., 2008) and also it has become a mandatory element in many companies' marketing strategy rather than merely an optional element of the promotional mix (Hanna et al., 2011). The purpose of this paper is to provide historical roots and evolution of social media. The developments in the field of social media have been presented chronologically in the subsequent sub sections of the paper followed by a brief summary of the important developments in social media. Studying history of social media can help us better understand just how much, and how quickly, the world around us is changing. 2. Early Times The primitive postal system dated back to 550 B.C when messages were delivered over long distances by the horse riders, evolved into a sophisticated mode of communication over a period of time. In 1792 Telegraph was invented, which facilitated long-distance transmission of messages without the physical exchange of an object. Developed in 1865, the pneumatic post which in order to carry capsules from one area to another used the underground pressurized air tubes and was a fast way of delivering letters. Subsequently the revolutionary means of communication.

[Audio] 2 http://ssrn.com/link/ICAESMT-2019.html=xyz Information Systems &eBusiness Network (ISN) 3.1 Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) In late 1970s, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) came into inception which were the first kind of social networking site that permitted its users to log on and interact with one another, similar to the way we do currently although at a much fast pace now. Users were accommodated on personal computers and get dial in through the modem of host computer (Emerson, 1983). There are various kind of technologies prevailing that support virtual community communication. But, if we go through the communities which are interacting through "bulletin board technology", the user can send a message to anyone in the community or even to the general public. Computer-based message systems especially the computer mail systems that support some form of BBS were found very useful. The computer mail system covers diversified areas viz, "organising the service", "accessing messages from personal workstations", "naming", "translation between different mail systems and usage of computer mail" and also "bulletin board systems". Figures collected from various computers interacting through UseNet indicated that 25% of the users practice bulletin board system whose usage frequency is at par with the popular computer software packages (Edighoffer, 1986). Schroeder et al. (1984) reported that "Grapevine" which is a computer mail system, served more than 4,400 users in 1983, with each user sending two messages and reading eight messages on an average daily. Bulletin boards also offered a unique feature that anyone could witness the community interaction without actually registering on it. This conversation in the community can also be preserved indefinitely, providing the potential members to access the interaction before joining. Although in order to avoid congestion, in a chat room, at a time only a few numbers of people can communicate, whereas a huge number of people can engage in the various aspects of a bulletin board community at a given time (Ridings & Gefen, 2004). 3.2 UseNet UseNet, one among the oldest computer network communications systems initiated in the year 1979 almost a decade prior to the development of World Wide Web. These newsgroups were developed as discussion forums which allowed the users to exchange user-generated content and were a prominent source of consumer information (Bickart& Schindler, 2001). UseNet permitted its users to communicate with each other with the help of a virtual newsletter (Hendricks, 2013); it was required to develop the newsreader clients, an antecedent to RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed readers which normally follow blogs and news sites and allow its users to post articles or posts to newsgroups. UseNet d idn't have an administrator or a centralised server which distinguished them from Bulletin Board Systems. Group sites like Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups practice a number of conventions given by the UseNet systems (Emerson, 1983). 3.3 Online Services Online services like Prodigy and CompuServe, considered to be the first real "corporate" attempt at accessing the Internet. CompuServe, developed in 1969 was the earliest form of internet and was a pioneer to offer chat service to its users. Its competitor, Prodigy offered a similar service at a much affordable price (Hendricks, 2013). They were followed by Genie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) launched by General Electric in 1985 which was a text base.

[Audio] 3 http://ssrn.com/link/ICAESMT-2019.html=xyz Information Systems &eBusiness Network (ISN) or synchronous conferencing" is created for group communication (Ritholz, 2010). Reaching the 1980s, with home computers becoming popular, social media also became more sophisticated and Internet relay chats, continued to be quite popular during the 1990's (Hendricks, 2013). 3.5 Early Social Networks In 1995, the social networking site Classmates.com was launched followed by SixDegrees.com in 1997. These sites were considered to be the pioneer recognizable social network sites in which the users could create their profile, list and surf their friends (Winder, 2007). Few features of SixDegrees were similar to a few dating sites which existed earlier for example AIM and ICQ buddy which allowed people to use individual features of SNS (Social Networking Sites). Six Degrees offered multiple features on a single site for the first time and it advertised itself as a tool using which the users may connect with each other and send messages. Although SixDegrees.com had several millions of users, it closed down in the year 2000. A number of service providers like Asian Avenue, Black Planet, and MiGente came up during 1997 to 2001, combining different features like creating profile, sending friend requests and identifying friends on their personal profiles (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). In the year 1999, Live Journal was launched in which people could mark others as their friends and invite them to follow their journals. In the same year Korean virtual worlds site "Cyworld" was launched followed by the Swedish web community "LunarStorm" with similar features like guestbook, friend list and diary pages (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). 4. Developments 2000 Onwards Various remarkable developments have been witnessed in the field of social media since 2000 onwards. 4.1 Social Networks The launch of Ryze.com in the year 2001 marked the next wave of social networking sites as it was more oriented towards business and helped its users to leverage their business networks (Festa, 2003). Technology started to catch up 2002 onwards when Friendster was launched which changed the game by giving its users control over whom they want to connect with rather than a computer managed environment (Winder, 2007). Founders of the popular sites viz: Ryze, Tribe.net, LinkedIn, and Friendster were closely connected with each other, believed that they will never become business rivals and would support each other (Festa, 2003). Ryze met an end as it could never attain mass popularity. Tribe.net concentrated on a niche; Friendster, the most popular site among these contemporaries, launched in 2002 to compete with a dating site Match.com also proved to be a disappointment (Cohen, 2003). Winder (2007) reported that Friendster expanded its services by providing more facilities to its users like control over whom they interacted with rather than simply providing them a computer-managed environment. According to Mew (2006) only those could join this site who were invited by any current user of Friendster. Friendster's popularity plunged with over 300,000 users leaving it due to technical and social problems. Out of the four popular networking sites, LinkedIn sustained successfully as a provider of business service and by assisting people to harness their social networks for jobs (Boyd, 2004). There was an influx of social networking sites 2003 onwards. Shirky (2003) social software analyst coined the term "YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service)''to all such sites. Facebook came into inception in 2004 as "Harvard only site" which later opened up for students for high school.

[Audio] 4 http://ssrn.com/link/ICAESMT-2019.html=xyz Information Systems &eBusiness Network (ISN) as it permits to snoop into other users' profiles, scrapbook and albums (Fragoso, 2006). MySpace gained popularity in the year 2003 leveraging on the rumour that Friendster is going to charge its users. As a result, the users joined MySpace as an alternative. As an added advantage, MySpace added features which distinguished it from others social sites first of all on the basis of user demand it is regular ly adding features (Boyd, 2006) and secondly by permitting users to personalize their pages. Teenagers joined MySpace en-masse in 2004. One of the differentiation features offered by MySpace was that users could customize their profile and provide their detailed information along with their interests; users could also download music from MySpace which has a special profile for musical artists (Natta, 2010). These individual sites became popular in specific regions of the world like "Friendster" got momentum in the Pacific Islands, "Orkut" before gaining popularity in India was in Brazil as the most popular site (Madhavan, 2007). "Mixi" became popular in Japan, "Lunar Storm" grew in Sweden, "Hyves" gained popularity in Dutch, "Grono" got famous in Poland, "Hi5" became popular in Europe, Latin America, and South America. "Bebo" became popular in Australia, New Zealand, and United Kingdom. QQ, the Chinese messaging service became popular worldwide by adding profiles and making friends visible (McLeod, 2006). "Facebook" gained popularity as a social networking site across several markets, viz: Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and New Zealand. On October 24, 2007, 1.6% share of Facebook was purchased by Microsoft and thus Microsoft getting rights to place international advertisements on Facebook (Stone, 2007). By the third quarter of 2017, monthly active users of Facebook had reached 2.07 billion (Statistica, 2017) as compared to July 2010, when it had 500 million active users (The Guardian, 2010), thus verifying the fact that the statistics of users of this site is on the rise. Instagram reached the count 500 million users in the first half of 2016 (Murgia, 2016).Besides these many social networking sites and social media platforms like Periscope, Minds, Gab.ai, Mastodon etc. emerged during past few years. Important milestones in the development of social media is given in the Table 1 below. Table 1: Summary of various important developments in the evolution of social media S.No Year Important Inventions/ Developments Description Name of Inventor(s)/ Founder(s) 1 1792 Telegraph A device of sending messages by visual signals, with the help of towers and pivoting shutters, messages were delivered much quickly than a horse over a long distance. Joseph Henry 2 1836 Morse code A way used in telecommunication for sending text as a series in two different signal durations with clicks, on-off tones, or lights that can be easily interpreted. Samuel F. B. Morse Pneumatic mail A device to send letters with pressurized air tubes. William Murdoch 4 1876 Telephone A communication device that allow two users to talk to each other when they are too far. Alexander Graham Bell 5 1895 Radio A device transmitting signals by electromagnetic waves. Guglielmo Marconi 6 1969 CompuServe The first commercial online service in.

[Audio] 5 http://ssrn.com/link/ICAESMT-2019.html=xyz Information Systems &eBusiness Network (ISN) accessed through the Internet. 13 1994 (First blog was created) link.net A website in which posts are published on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. Justin Hall 14 1995 Classmates A social networking service designed to help users to find their classmates. Randy Conrads 15 1997 Six Degrees A social network that permits people to create their profile and socialize with others. Andrew Weinreich 16 1999 Cyworld A South Koreansocial network service to build social relations among people. Dong-Hyung Lee Mixi An online Japanese social networking service. Kenji Kasahara QQ An instant messaging software service provide microblogging, voice chat software, music, movies, online social games, shopping. Shenzhen Tencent Blogger A blog-publishing service that permits multi-user blogs with time-sequenced entries. Pyra Labs LiveJournal A social networking service where users can keep a blog, diary or journal. Brad Fitzpatrick 17 2000 Lunar Storm A social networking website for teenagers from Sweden which is commercially advertisement-financed. Rickard Eriksson 18 2001 Ryze A social networking website designed to build connections between business professionals, specifically upcoming entrepreneurs. Adrian Scott 19 2002 Friendester A website that permit users to contact other members, share videos, photos, messages via networks. Jonathan Abrams 20 2003 (Social networking andBookmark ing sites appear) LinkedIn First network devoted to business is employment and business oriented professional networking service that helps employers to post jobs and job seekers to post their CVs in response via internet or mobile apps. Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, EricLy, Jean-Luc Vaillant Photobucket Foremost important photosharing site which is a media storage site that permits people to upload photos and video to member's personal account and share it with others. Alex Welch, Darren Crystal Tribe.net A social networking site for tribe (group) of friends. Paul Martino, Mark Pincus, and Valerie Syme. Delicious A social bookmarkingweb service that store, share, and discover webbookmarks. Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov Myspace A social networking website designed for collaborating network of friends, blogs, personal profiles, groups, music, photos and videos submitted by users. Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson, Jon Hart 21 2004 Facebook A social networkingwebsite that permits to send messages, create profiles, upload photos and videos by users who are registered on it and also promotes and facilitates interaction between friends, family and colleagues. Mark Zuckerberg Orkut A social networking site that enables its users to meet their friends both old and new ones and help users to maintain existing relationships. Orkut Buyukkokten Hyves A Dutch social networking site for meeting with friends. Raymond Spanjar and Floris Rost Van Tonningen Hi5 A San Francisco based social networking site..

[Audio] 6 http://ssrn.com/link/ICAESMT-2019.html=xyz Information Systems &eBusiness Network (ISN) 22 2005 Bebo A social networking website for fun activities. Michel and XochiBirch YouTube A video sharing platform that permits users to upload their videos and watch videos which are posted by other users. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim 23 2006 Twitter A Social networking and online news service on which people post and interact with "tweets". Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, BizStone, Evan Williams Spotify A music and podcast streaming platform pays royalties on the basis of number of artists' streams out of total songs streamed. Daniel Ek, Martin Lorentzon SlideShare A service that permits users to upload files privately or publicly in the form of PowerPoint, PDF, word etc. The uploaded slide files can be viewed on the site itself or can be linked to the other sites. Rashmi Sinha 24 2007 Tumbler A microblogging and social networking website that permits users to post content like multimedia etc. to a short blog. Users can make their blogs private and can also follow blogs of others. David Karp BizSugar A social networking platform for small businessman, entrepreneurs and managers that permits users to share content like articles, videos, blog posts, podcast and also permit users to view and vote on submissions done by other members. John Holsen 25 2009 WhatsApp A cross-platform immediate messaging system that uses Internet to share texts, images, documents, audio and video messages among users who have installed the app on their devices like mobiles, PCs and tablets Brian Acton and Jan Koum 26 2010 Pinterest A social network that permits users to visually share, getting information about their interests by posting images or videos to their own or others' boards and surfing what other users have pinned. Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra Instagram A photo and video-sharing social networking service. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger Viber A Voice over IP (VoIP) and immediate messaging app that permits sending and receiving of images, audio and video through mobile devices between users. Talmon Marco and Igor Magazinnik 27 2014 Periscope A live video streaming mobile app that permits sharing and experiencing live video streams direct from tablet or smartphone. Joe Bernstein and KayvonBeykpour 28 2015 Minds A federated social networking service having open source and it integrate the blockchainto provide the community with ERC-20 tokens as rewards for several contributions to the network. Tokens can be used by users for several purposes like endorsing their content or to crowdfundand tip other users for exchange of exclusive content and services by subscribing to them monthly. Bill Ottman, John Ottman, Mark Harding 29 2016 Gab.ai A social media website that permits its users to read and write English-language multimedia messages of up to 3,000 characters, called "gabs". Andrew Torba Mastodon An online self-hosted.

[Audio] 7 http://ssrn.com/link/ICAESMT-2019.html=xyz Information Systems &eBusiness Network (ISN) Note: The list of social media is very comprehensive. In the above table only selective, important developments have been captured. 5. Conclusion As evident from the developments that took place in social media over past years, we can say that the trend of these developments is likely to grow at a exponential pace in the future also. Newer types of social networking sites are connecting different types of individuals for different purposes. The usage of social media has seen immense growth in terms of users across the world including developed as well as developing countries. Usage of social networking sites has grown immensely over past decade. About 70% adults in America used minimum one SNS in 2017 (Pew Research Center, 2017). As estimated average person, in his or her lifetime, spends five years and four months on accessing social networking sites (Campbell, 2017). Smith (2017) observed that with more and more people joining internet, the number of Facebook users is also on rise. The usage rate is significantly increasing in countries like India and Indonesia; with massive populations and rapidly expanding internet penetration rates, these countries provide the platform of new Facebook users in the future. Livemint (2018) also reported that India has become highest audience country of Facebook, the popular social media platform and has crossed 241 million mark as compared to US where the number of active users of Facebook is 240 million. Thus, entire world now, has starting using some or the other form of social media; businesses are now largely dependent on social media for promotion of their products; consumers seek information from social media; different types social media cater to specific needs of different individuals and groups. As more and more people are becoming dependent on social media for different purposes, in the future also there is likelihood of emergence of even more sophisticated form of social media which will cover the masses across the world. Based on the available literature and trends, we can conclude that the times to come will witness even more developments in the field of social media which will take communication technology by stride. Studying history of social media can help us better understand just how much, and how quickly, the world around us is changing. REFERENCES Bickart, B., & Schindler, R. M. (2001). Internet forums as influential sources of consumer information. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 15 (3), 31-40 Boyd, D. (2004). Friendster and publicly articulated social networks. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1279–1282). New York: ACM Press. Boyd, D. (2006). Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. First Monday, 11 (12). Retrieved December 16, 2017 from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/ Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1), 201230. Retrieved December 14, 2017 from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html. Boyd, S. (2007). Scoble asks what is social media? Retrieved April 28, 2018 from http://stoweboyd.com/post/1339189186/scoble-asks-what-is-social-media Campbell, G. (2017). This terrifying infographic shows how much time we spend on social media. Highsnobiety (March 22, 2017), Retrieved April 28, 2018 from http://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/03/22/time-spent-on-social-media/ Chaffey, D. (March 28, 2018). Global social media research summary 2018. Retrieved April 27, 2018 from https://www.smartinsights.com/social-mediamarketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/ Cohen, R. (2003,.

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