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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