General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Thank God Facebook is down [View all]Celerity
(43,349 posts)The day Fuckerberg opened pandora's box and made FB available to all people 13 years old and up. Before that you needed an approved institution email to join.
Twitter's full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference March 9th to March 13th. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000.
Then, the enabling event, the iPhone (and thus all its eventual competion) launched the age of the truly mass market, tech laden smartphone on June 29th, 2007.
The 2007-2008 US election campaign was the first one that had real social media effects on it (Obama team especially) but it was still a fraction of what it is now.
Much later, October 6, 2010, the Instagram iOS app was officially released through the App Store.
You now have all the giants launched (obviously the launches of YouTube on April 23, 2005 and Reddit on June 15th, 2005 already existed) and smartphones to drive them. MySpace was never truly weaponised, and was crumbling to dust by 2009 anyway (due to FB).
Social media combined with near absolutist implementations of the 1st Amendment, plus a complicit federal government caught in the throes of regulatory capture, have been, are, and will be synergistically combining to form a cyber national suicide pact I well and truly fear.
Facebook Expansion Enables More People to Connect with Friends in a Trusted Environment
https://about.fb.com/news/2006/09/facebook-expansion-enables-more-people-to-connect-with-friends-in-a-trusted-environment/
PALO ALTO, Calif. Sept. 26, 2006 Facebook, the Internets leading social utility, today announced that it has expanded to enable everyone to connect with their friends and the people around them. People can now join one of more than 500 regional networks to share information with other people on Facebook and take advantage of the sites industry-leading privacy controls.
Previously, a supported .edu, .com, .org, .gov or .mil email address was needed to register on Facebook. While prior expansions enabled more people from schools, companies, non-profits, and government entities to register for Facebook, this latest expansion makes it possible for anyone with a valid email address to join Facebook and interact with their friends and people in their region. New users are still required to prove affiliation to access an existing college or work network, and are also asked to validate their mobile phone number to verify their account.
We are expanding to respond to the requests of millions of people who want to be part of Facebook, but havent been able to until today, said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, Facebook. About one-third of Facebooks college users have already graduated and are now interacting with more people outside of their schools and work environment.
Consistent with Facebooks unique network structure, peoples profiles are only accessible to other people in the same network and to confirmed friends. Facebook has launched additional privacy controls with this expansion that allow every user to: Block other users in specific networks from searching for his or her name. Prevent people in those networks from messaging, poking and adding him or her as a friend. Control whether his or her profile picture shows up in search results.