The Social Media Marketing Book

History

One of the earliest media-sharing sites, IFILM.net, was launched in 1997 as an online collection of short videos where users could also submit their own work (see Figure 5-1). Back then, video was streamed using browser plug-ins such as Windows Media Player, QuickTime, and RealPlayer, and most people had dial-up connections, which made watching videos a very slow process.

In 2002, Flash MX was released, and the web video we know today was made possible. Now you no longer needed to download a special streaming video player; MX introduced the ability to include and play videos within a Flash file. Sites such as YouTube, which was launched in 2005, were suddenly possible.

In 1999, three photo-sharing communities were born. Ofoto, Shutterfly, and Webshots allowed users to upload their pictures and share them with the world. Before these sites (and even after them), you had to use a host such as Geocities or Angelfire to upload your photos to your home page via FTP.

Spawned by the rise in popularity of MySpace, photo-sharing sites such as Photobucket and ImageShack were launched in 2003 with the idea that people should be able to upload their images there and then display them on their profiles. Social media sharing didn't really hit its stride until 2004, when Flickr was launched, combining easy photo uploading with tagging and social networking functionality (see Figure 5-2 for examples of tags).