Social Media Rewind: Then and Now
Meredith Darling | @merdar
Are you invited?
What: The I Feel Old Club. When: Right now. Where: The nearest bar. Who: Everyone that recognizes this screenshot: 
What makes the social media industry so exciting is that it is constantly changing. Exciting and frustrating, that is. Frustrating because it is almost impossible to keep up with. As social media managers we have to hope we're the lucky ones randomly chosen in the first round of rolling out social updates. Let's take a journey through the changes of our most loved platforms.
Maybe this is news maybe it isn't, but the first tweet sent by Jack Dorsey was "just setting up my first twttr". No spelling error there. Thankfully, the name was changed to Twitter within the first six months. Back in the day (I am qualified to say that as long as I'm talking about social media) there was no character limit. Anything over 160 characters what split up into separate tweets (or twttrs? twtts? ugh so glad they added vowels). Then came Jack's tweet:
"One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters."
Let's hope so, or else what are we doing there? And FYI that tweet was only 65 characters, I feel like there's a lost opportunity there. 
Remember when the only photo on your Facebook page was your profile picture? No? I guess everyone is already at the bar... To sum it up, the Facebook (The Facebook) you know today was not the Facebook many of us were first introduced to. There were no photo albums, no people who weren't enrolled in a university (and only select universities at that), no companies, no games, no apps, no chat. In fact, I remember when status updates were introduced and a friend of mine posted on Facebook how ridiculous they were**. It loosely said "This is so stupid. This is the same thing as an Away Message." Away Messages of course refer to AOL IM. I wonder what ever happened to IM... Compare the below image to the one at the beginning of this blog. 
**Back in the day, the only thing on your profile page was your wall- where other people could write. Your homepage was similar to the first photo in this article. To find your friends, they were listed in alphabetical order on a separate page or on your profile page by what school they went to. To those of you that didn't know this information, shame on you for making me feel old. And don't you dare ask me who that person is in the upper left corner.
Let me begin by saying LinkedIn was launched before MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter in the living room of co-founder Reid Hoffman. Why is it that all the best sites/products/ideas start in someone's living room/garage/basement? With 9 years behind its belt, LinkedIn has definitely been through some changes. It seems like almost every day there is a new feature, button, or layout. Major changes since its launch include applications, polls, status updates, and groups. LinkedIn gained 4,500 users in its first month and now users join at a rate of two people per second with over 175 million total users as of August 2012. 
