I was reviewing an email from a colleague earlier. The purpose of the email was to describe me to his boss, in an effort to land me a job with his web company. In it he said, “Ben’s been involved in social media since the beginning – myspace , facebook” I got to thinking, I was certainly involved with Myspace since its beginning, and I was sending harassing emails to Facebook before they would allow open registration. But this wasn’t the beginning of social media. Perhaps the beginning of the phenomenon and the catch phrase, but not the beginning of social media.
So where did SM get it’s start?
I have fond memories of using ICQ (I seek you) when I was just a young lad. I would say around 1996 ICQ was the favorite past time of my extra cool friends and I. I had a 14.4k modem, and I swear the tones it made are burned into my brain to this day. Even then, 14.4k was slow, and boy did I envy my friends with the 28.8’s. File transfers were LOADS of fun on ICQ. Back then, something had to be well worth it to send it over the PoTS. (Plain Old Telephone System for the uninitiated) So ICQ was the true beginning of Social Media, not Myspace.
WRONG
ICQ was groundbreaking. There is no denying that. But still, before that, I remember using my SUPER OLD Tandy to log on to a host of BBS’s. Yes, you Kennebunk residents probably remember CyberTours. This was before them. I’m talking more like Oregon Trail days.
Radio Shacks Pride and Joy of 1989
A B.B.S. (Bulletin Board System) was a group of people, relatively local, who could dial into a specific phone number where a server resided, and share information with each other. We could post info about items for sale. We could chat. We could even share files! Yes the B.B.S. is most certainly the original Social Media Site AND P2P file sharing service.
So, to all my friends on Myspace, Facebook, twitter, AIM, ICQ and the literally hundreds of other Social Media communities out there, show some respect! Next time Myspace copies Facebook, and Facebook copies twitter, and you all launch a half hearted campaign against the unoriginality, forget about it! We may be leaps and bounds farther now, but all of them built their ideas from the B.B.S. !
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