Celebrated annually on June 30th, Social Media Day is a holiday that commemorates social media and how it has been the biggest revolution in the history of human interaction since the creation of the telephone. Since social media’s earliest inception during the late 1990s, it has grown to become a global phenomenon that affects and influences the lives of millions of people. Regardless of whether people see this as a good thing or a bad thing, one thing is certain: social media is here to stay.

The History of Social Media

Social Media Day is a holiday that was first launched by Mashable on June 30th, 2010. They created this holiday to celebrate and recognize the impact of social media on worldwide communications. It’s a holiday that has been enthusiastically celebrated ever since.

The History of Social Media

Even though some people would argue that the telegraph was the first form of social media when it was introduced in 1844, we’re not going to go that far back to explore the roots of social media. Nor will we explore ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network created by the U.S. Military to connect U.S. universities over a proto-Internet in 1969. Instead, we’re going to start our history of social media with the network Six Degrees.

Six Degrees was a social network service that was initially created in 1997. It was the first site to be based on the social circle network model. On this site, members could post bulletin board items and send messages to some of the people in their group. This site would eventually be bought out by Youth Stream Media Services in 1999 but was shuttered in 2000. It would briefly come back up the following year before it was once again shuttered.

Other social networking sites would come online, and they too would use the social circle network model. These sites included Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, LinkedIn, XING, and Facebook. In 2003, MySpace was created and was the most popular social network by 2006. Facebook was created in 2004, and in 2005, YouTube launched, allowing people to upload and share videos. In 2006, Twitter was launched, and by 2010, 750 tweets a second were going out around the world. Today, there’s an endless variety of social media sites.

Celebrating Social Media Day

Celebrating Social Media Day shouldn’t be a problem for most people because they likely spend a considerable amount of time every day on social media accounts. And if that’s the case, then you might as well use the hashtag #SocialMediaDay to let everyone know that you’re celebrating this day to its fullest. No matter what a person thinks of social media or its influence on human society, it’s still a fact that social media has had one of the biggest influences on society of any technology released over the past 100 years.