Being Cheryl: Social Media Marketing Strategist from Columbus, Ohio.

How did we get to a world with Twitter ? I have decided to chronicle the evolution of communication, from grunting to Twittering. Note: speculation about the motivations behind the development of specific technologies are entirely derived from a six-pack and have absolutely no basis. Dates and names are accurate.

About five thousand years ago, the Egyptians developed a form of writing, using hieroglyphics.  Before this people just grunted at one another. Jealous of the Egyptian’s pretty pictures, which they didn’t understand because they didn’t speak Heiroglyph, the Greeks decided to take written language further in 1775 B.C. by developing a phonetic alphabet, written from left to right. Other civilizations began to follow suit, developing their own alphabets, some of which, like Hebrew, were defiantly read right to left – stupid civilizations. In 900 B.C China developed the very first postal service with foot messengers. The Greeks launched their own postal service, using pigeons. Many “fowl” messages were transmitted. Many countries, or civilizations, or empires, or whatever the hell they were called that day, began to follow suit and  implement their own physical mail carrying systems while the development of paper as we now know it coming out of China, making it cheaper and easier to write out messages. Then this Guternberg fellow comes along and, sick of wrist cramps from copying hundreds of pages a day by hand, develops a printing press with metal moveable type. Mass production of messages was now possible and quick. Samuel Morse comes along in 1835 and invents a way to transmit messages electronically and the arrogant bastard names the process Morse Code. Alexander Graham Bell, not one to be shown up by Morse, invents the telephone forty years later.  Next sixty five years, radio tee-vee and film, this is a haiku. Sorry, I needed a break from dates and names, and there are way too many involved in the evolution of that stuff.

1951 the first computers begin to be sold commercially. “Computers” were black screens with white text that didn’t do much. In 1969 the drunken grandfather of the Internet, ARPANet, a military system to electronically submit and store information, was born. There were initially four computers connected through ARPAnet: UCLA , UC Santa Barbara, Stanford Research Institute and the University of Utah. As the network expanded, compatibility problems arose, resulting in a more efficient set of transfer protocols. 1971 brought about the first preliminary e-mail message through ARPAnet. The first home computer, made by Apple, was released in 1976. It wasn’t nearly as pretty as the aluminum Apple I’m typing this on. The first PC is released in 1981 by IBM and laptop computers were developed. And hallelujah, in 1994 this crazy concept known as the world wide web was opened up and the Internet was born – I’ll refrain from making an Al Gore joke.

Social networking websites can be traced to SixDegrees, founded in 1997. SixDegrees allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and surf Friends’ lists. Each of these features existed before, but SixDegrees was the first to combine them in a single platform. SixDegrees was shut down in 2000 – with Internet usage not yet widespread and little actual interaction available on the site other than accepting friend requests, it was unable to sustain itself. Niche networks like BlackPlanet and AsianAvenue came next, followed by Ryze, a business networking tool. While Ryze itself never acquired vast popularity, it spawned some of the earliest and biggest social networks, including LinkedIn and Friendster.  A wave of sites including MySpace, Last.FM, Flickr, Ning and YouTube came in the few years that followed, along with the release of Facebook as a college-only network. Social media remained an almost underground concept for most people, however, until News Corporation purchased MySpace in July 2005 for $580 million, garnishing worldwide media coverage.

Since then, profile-based networks like Facebook, which opened to high school and corporations late 2005 to early 2006 and became open to everyone in late 2006, have grown tremendously, with Facebook currently boasting over 175 million active users worldwide. Blogging grew steadily from 1999 through platforms like Blogger and LiveJournal. Popularity of multimedia sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr skyrocketed. And with all this, the 2006 formed network Twitter, a simple micro-blogging platform, grew a staggering 752% from 2007 to 2008, attracting national networks like CNN and celebrities like Shaq and Britney Spears. And of course, me.

Cave drawings were easier to keep track of.

EDIT: It appears this post inspired a cartoon by Mike Keefe of the Denver Post!