While the precursors to today’s social media networks were predominantly used for leisure, some savvy marketers saw good opportunities to make use of chat rooms and the opportunities afforded by those forum groups that permitted it to promote their products and services using them.Ī late entry to the instant messaging scene that remains highly popular today is the audio-based and video-enabled Skype.
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However, the chat room genre eventually fell foul of enhanced sensibilities around the dangers, particularly for children, of mingling with strangers in such an environment, as well as computer security concerns arising from connections via chat-hosting clients and MSN was the first major provider to axe its thitherto highly successful free chat service in the Autumn of 2003, initially introducing a paid model that achieved a very poor uptake with its user base, and then swiftly pulling the plug on its service altogether. Friendships formed in chat rooms fed across into instant messaging networks. This was an enormously popular facility in the 1990s and early 2000s, with all the major providers of instant messaging services also offering their own networks of chat rooms themed around a bewildering array of different topics. Neither of these services included instant messaging, which was not felt to be necessary when the service providers already offered it through their dedicated applications.Ī third prong to the segmented social media scene of the earlier Internet years was the stand-alone chat room, essentially involving a rolling real-time print-out of comments typed by all users presently signed in to the room. This was followed by the simpler Yahoo Groups, each group offering just a single message board. One of the most sophisticated and flexible platforms was MSN Communities (1999) – renamed MSN Groups two years after its launch, but ultimately axed in 2009.
In general it was necessary to know someone’s personal identification (typically either an email address, or a screen name, sometimes known as a NIC) from other sources before adding that person as a contact using these services.įor much of their lifetimes, these dedicated personal instant messaging services coexisted on the Internet with networks run by some of the same parent companies that allowed users to set up and administer their own public or private groups centred around message boards but with varying degrees of other functionality. These were based on a simple, streamlined concept of building a personal social network for real-time conversations with individuals and small groups, and achieved an international user base in the hundreds of millions in their prime. Precursors to Today’s Social Media NetworksĪrguably the earliest examples of social media proper were personal Instant Messaging services such as ICQ (launched in November 1996), AOL Instant Mesenger or AIM (1997), Yahoo! Messenger (1998) and MSN Messenger (1999).
These conventional online group communications media had been around since the very launch of the global Internet and even, in more limited settings, before it. In this they differ from conventional Internet mailing lists, message boards and even chat rooms where all activity is public or to an audience selected by the moderator. We can narrowly define social media as Internet-mediated membership-based applications that allow members selectively to establish formalised personal connections with other individual members and send private messages to them or to personally selected groups of them.
Social media in one form or another have now been established for more than two decades, since the Internet was still in its infancy.
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