I’m working on a history of social media platforms. I aim to trace out the evolution of the specific platform features that we take for granted today (groups, profiles, “interests”, etc).
Although there do exist a few histories of social media, they are shallow and don’t cover platform details in depth.
Do you know of any computing blogs/magazines/personal blogs or even historians/people who might have information that I’m looking for — specifically, details about the platforms themselves?
Thank you HN :)
EDIT: if there are any older internet users reading this, I would be really grateful if I could ask you a few questions about this! (email, Zoom, whatever works)
* Posts could have multiple access levels: public, private, friends-only, and a custom friend group. This was somewhat annoyingly intertwined with the list of who you followed (your “friends”) but it was pretty powerful and easy to manage. Public and private spheres were seamlessly integrated in one account on one service instead of spread across multiple accounts with half-assed privacy measures.
* Long-ass posts and long-ass replies. Something like 64k was the limit. Replies were threaded. Complex conversations making subtle distinctions were easy to have.
* MULTIPLE USER ICONS. Everyone has dropped this and it was great. You could choose a particular icon for every post and comment, or let it be whichever you said was the default. Icon choice could mean a lot of things: it could apply an emotional layer, it could designate multiple characters in a role play account, symbolize projects, whatever. It was fluid and wonderful.
* Seamless e-mail integration. Replies to your posts/replies showed up in your email client. With a reply form right there in it, complete with user icon drop down and a “reply” button that would POST the form to the site. You could keep the conversation going without having to switch to the web browser. This was back before e-mail had become pretty much useless due to the volume of spam.
* Just the people you follow, in chronological order. Not notable at the time, this was what everyhing with any conception of a central agglomeration of everyone you wanted to watch did. There was no “algorithm” to optimize for user engagement time and ad views. That shit needs to die.
* oh and it did RSS too, you could follow any external site via a slightly kludgy method of creating a special account that mirrored an RSS feed, and that showed up in your friends page along with all the LJ accounts you followed
And then it got sold and went through multiple hands before ending up as a Russian site where being gay is illegal.
Nobody talks about it any more. Probably because its glory days coincided with GenX being young adults with the time to write lengthy essays about their lives (and to share dumb personality quizzes about their Hogwarts house). And GenX doesn’t exist any more, we’re all either Boomers or Millenials depending on which side of 1973 we were born on, and our own weird moments of cultural relevance are forgotten.
I don't have a definite answer but a few vintage points and directions in which you can start your journey and find more stuff from there
- https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/
If you are searching for Pre Main stream internet, you can start with BBS Documentary
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1k...
If you are looking for collaborators on this project then, I'd love to join and make this a thing (:
I've been trying to wrap my head around what it must have been like at the time.
However, historians don't tend to care about specific technology features, so I suspect you may need to treat this more as a journalistic effort than a historical effort -- emphasis on interviews, press releases, user manuals to build up a timeline.
Definition-wise, PLATO is an interesting case and is a useful test of whatever definition you choose to use. PLATO was a multi-site, multi-user education platform, but featured messaging, chat, and multi-user games. You can access a running PLATO system (https://www.irata.online/) and there are a few books that detail the development and user experience.
Nettime archives dates back to Oct '96. Mostly net art, but plenty of discussions around "user generated content":