In less than a decade, a number of different types of social media have evolved, with multiple platforms for the creation of user-generated content. European researchers Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein identify six categories of social media on the Internet: blogs, collaborative projects, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds.

Blogs

Years before there were status updates or Facebook, blogs enabled people to easily post their ideas to a Web site. Popularized with the release of Blogger (now owned by Google) in 1999, blogs contain articles or posts in chronological, journal-like form, often with reader comments and links to other sites. Blogs can be personal or corporate multimedia sites, sometimes with photos, graphics, podcasts, and video. By 2012, there were at least 182 million blogs, the most common topics being personal accounts, movies/TV, sports, and politics.¹⁴ Some blogs have developed into popular news and culture sites, such as the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, Gawker, HotAir, ThinkProgress, and TPM Muckraker.

Blogs have become part of the information and opinion culture of the Web, giving regular people and citizen reporters a forum for their ideas and views, and providing a place for even professional journalists to informally share ideas before a more formal news story gets published. Some of the leading platforms for blogging include Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Weebly, and Wix. But by 2013, the most popular form of blogging was microblogging, with about 200 million active users on Twitter, sending out 400 million tweets (a short message with a 140-character limit) per day.¹⁵ In 2013, Twitter introduced an app called Vine that enabled users to post short video clips. A few months later, Facebook’s Instagram responded with its own video-sharing service.

Collaborative Projects

Another Internet development involves collaborative projects in which users build something together, often using wiki (which means “quick” in Hawaiian) technology. Wiki Web sites enable anyone to edit and contribute to them. There are several large wikis, such as Wikitravel (a global travel guide), WikiMapia (combining Google Maps with wiki comments), and WikiLeaks (an organization publishing sensitive documents leaked by anonymous whistleblowers). WikiLeaks gained notoriety for its release of thousands of United States diplomatic cables and other sensitive documents beginning in 2010 (see p. 514 in Chapter 14). But the most notable wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia launched in 2001 that is constantly updated and revised by interested volunteers. All previous page versions of Wikipedia are stored, allowing users to see how each individual topic develops. The English version of Wikipedia is the largest, containing over four million articles, but Wikipedias are also being developed in 284 other languages.

Businesses and other organizations have developed social media platforms for specific collaborative projects. Tools like Basecamp and Podio provide social media interfaces for organizing project and event-planning schedules, messages, to-do lists, and workflows. Kickstarter is a popular fund-raising tool for creative projects like books, recordings, and films. InnoCentive is a crowd-sourcing community that offers award payments for people who can solve business and scientific problems. And change.org has become an effective petition project to push for social change. For example, in 2012 a high school student from Michigan began a campaign that gained more than 500,000 signatures to persuade the MPAA to change the rating of the movie Bully from R to PG–13 so younger people could see it.

Content Communities

Content communities are the best examples of the many-to-many ethic of social media. Content communities exist for the sharing of all types of content from text (fanfiction.net) to photos (Flickr and Photobucket) and videos (YouTube, Vimeo). YouTube, created in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006, is the most well-known content community, with hundreds of millions of users around the world uploading and watching amateur and professional videos. YouTube gave rise to the viral video—a video that becomes immediately popular by millions sharing it through social media platforms. The most popular video of all time—a fifty-six-second home video titled “Charlie bit my finger—again!” has more than 533 million views. By 2013, YouTube reported that one hundred hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, and it has more than one billion unique users each month.

Social Networking Sites

Perhaps the most visible examples of social media are social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Pinterest, Orkut, LinkedIn, and Google+. On these sites, users can create content, share ideas, and interact with friends.

MySpace, founded in 2003, was the first big social media site. In addition to personal profiles, MySpace was known for its music listings, with millions of artists setting up profiles to promote their music, launch new albums, and allow users to buy songs. Its popularity with teens made it a major site for online advertising. That popularity attracted the attention of media conglomerate News Corp., which bought MySpace in 2005. But with competition from Facebook, by 2009 interest in MySpace was waning, and News Corp. sold it in 2011.

Facebook is the most popular social media site on the Internet. Started at Harvard in 2004 as an online substitute to the printed facebooks the school created for incoming first-year students, Facebook was instantly a hit. The site enables users to construct personal profiles, upload photos, share music lists, play games, and post messages to connect with old friends and meet new ones. Originally, access was restricted to college students, but in 2006 the site expanded to include anyone. Soon after, Facebook grew at an astonishing rate, and by 2013 it had 1.15 billion active users and was available in more than seventy languages.

In 2011, Google introduced Google+, a social networking interface designed to compete with Facebook. Google+ enables users to develop distinct “circles,” by dragging and dropping friends into separate groups, rather than having one long list of friends. In response, Facebook created new settings to enable users to control who sees their posts.

Virtual Game Worlds and Virtual Social Worlds

Virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds invite users to role-play in rich 3-D environments, in real time, with players throughout the world. In virtual game worlds (also known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic, players can customize their online identity, or avatar, and work with others through the game’s challenges. Community forums for members extend discussion and shared play outside of the game. Virtual social worlds, like Second Life, enable players to take their avatars through simulated environments and even make transactions with virtual money. (See Chapter 3 for a closer look at virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds.)