INFOGRAPHIC: Is Social Media Really 10 Years Old?

Okay, social media isn’t just 10 years old, but the social media that most of us know today turned 10. That would be Facebook, the name most of us think of when we hear the word “social media.” We have seen Facebook grow dramatically in the decade since it was first launched, but what does Facebook’s growth mean for other social media giants and newcomers? The infographic below, sourced from WhoIsHostingThis, lays out not only the history of the Internet’s growth, but also the history of some of the most commonly known names in social media today.

As the infographic shows, Facebook might be the biggest name in social media right now, but they aren’t the only name. Nor were they the first name, as you’ll see: LinkedIn was actually launched the year before Facebook’s launch. A number of other social media outlets have launched since then, and have seen varying degrees of success. Twitter, for example, launched in 2010 and quickly climbed to 200 million users by 2012. Pinterest, the social media photo sharing page, started off with just 200 users after its first 4 months, and climbed to 48.7 million users by 2013.

Of course, social media outlets don’t always succeed. For example, Apple’s Ping lasted just two years, and never really caught on. MySpace, which was bigger than Facebook at one time, failed to keep up with the technology and has been relegated to a site for discovering music and videos instead of the social media giant it once was.