More memorable events related to social media. And yes, that really happened!
2007
May 2007: SECOND LIFE. Sweden became the second country, after the Maldive Islands, to open an embassy in Second Life, the virtual world developed by Linden Lab. The Swedish Institute, which promotes Sweden’s image and culture, runs the embassy. More countries followed suit, including Serbia, Estonia, the Philippines, Albania and Israel. The embassies host virtual discussions and lectures about their countries.
June 23, 2007. WOWHEAD.COM: The World of Warcraft search database sold to Affinity Media for $1.5 million. The site functions as a user generated database that relies on the players themselves to upload information through a client side program. Users can add comments to the database items and discuss game-play in a moderated forum.
July 2007. SECOND LIFE: Linden Lab announced a ban on in-world gambling in Second Life. The company feared that new Internet regulations on gambling in the real world could affect SL if gambling continued. The ban was immediately met with in-world protests and aftershocks of the collapse caused severe liquidity problems for virtual banks.
August 2007. SECOND LIFE: A $750,000 Second Life bank, Ginko Financial, collapsed due to a bank run triggered by Linden Lab’s ban on in-world gambling. The collapse reduced the SL economy by 50 percent and aftershocks caused severe liquidity problems for other virtual banks in SL. All banks without real-world charters closed or converted to virtual joint stock companies by January 2008.
August 2007. YOUTUBE: Instructional videos become popular on YouTube. In August 2007, hip-hop artist Soulja Boy released a video teaching viewers how to dance to his song “Crank That (Soulja Boy).” In September 2007, the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the popularity of instructional dance videos on YouTube increased.
August 21, 2007. BLACKPLANET.COM: President Barack Obama became a member of Blackplanet.com (an online social networking site targeted at African-American users) and generated over 200,000 friends within weeks, more than he had on Facebook and MySpace. As of August 2010, President Obama has over 400,000 friends on the site.
September 2007. MYSPACE: Four men, one from Pennsylvania and three from Arizona, were arrested for allegedly buying raw steroid powder from China to make steroids in home laboratories and sell through MySpace.
December 2007. WORLD OF WARCRAFT: A 12-year-old Norwegian boy saved his sister using skills learned in World of Warcraft. When Hans Olsen and his sister encountered an angry moose in the wild, Hans distracted the moose by taunting it, a technique used in the game to get monsters to attack you instead of others. He then feigned death so the moose would leave him alone. Hans Olsen attributed his sister's survival to the things he learned in World of Warcraft.
2008
January 22, 2008. WORLD OF WARCRAFT: Blizzard Entertainment announced that WOW had reached 10 million players worldwide, with 2 million in Europe, 2.5 million in North America and 5.5 million in Asia. If all the WOW players made up a country, it would be the 90th most populated country, before Haiti but behind Sweden.
February 18, 2008. WORLD OF WARCRAFT: A couple’s marriage in California ended in part because of her husband Peter’s addiction to WOW. His wife 28-year-old Jocelyn, an employee at Blizzard, brought the game home for him and he became addicted to it, and his wife felt he was ignoring his home and family. They were divorced after 6 years of marriage because he would not give up the game.
April 2008. BLACKPLANET.COM: Radio One acquired Blackplanet.com and sister sites MiGente (niche-oriented social media site targeting the Hispanic community) and AsianAve ( social media site targeting the Asian community) from Community Connect for $38 million.
April 9, 2008. FLICKR: Flickr Pro users gained the ability to upload videos, limited to 90 seconds and 150 MB. On March 2, 2009, the site began to allow Pro users to upload HD videos and free users to upload regular videos.
June 18, 2008. REDDIT: The creators of Reddit turned the site into an open source project, allowing users to have more control on the site. With a few exceptions, all of the coding and libraries that had been written for Reddit became available on another site called Fixxit.
July 3, 2008. SCRIBD: President Obama became a member on Scribd, making him the first president to have a profile on the site. He has published 47 documents since opening his account, and as of September of 2010 has over 460,000 subscribers. During the 2008 presidential campaign, his profile served as a resource for documents and official statements related to his policies and campaign.
November 2008. YOUTUBE: YouTube, MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment and CBS reached an agreement to allow YouTube to feature full-length movies and television shows from these companies, such as Star Trek, Beverly Hills 90210, and MacGyver. YouTube agreed to allow advertisements within the companies’ video streams.
November 20, 2008. EHARMONY.COM: The online dating site agreed to allow same-sex matches through the site after New Jersey resident Eric McKinley filed a complaint against the company in 2005. He tried to sign up on the site but it did not have an option for men seeking men.
December 14, 2008. BLACKPLANET: The site was hacked. Five hundred posts titled “White Power” were posted in the Forums section. The incident raised concerns about the security of users’ personal information.
2009
January 2009. FACEBOOK: Burger King created a Facebook application called “Whopper Sacrifice” that gave users a coupon for a free Whopper if they deleted 10 Facebook friends. The names of the “sacrificed” friends showed up on the user’s newsfeed, which all their friends can view.
February 2009: SECOND LIFE: Linden Labs reported that about 64,000 users made a profit in Second Life selling virtual goods, renting land, and offering other services. Of those users, 38,524 made less than $10 and 233 made more than $5,000. In March 2009, a few SL entrepreneurs made more than $1 million per year.
February 2009. TWITTER: A man from Newcastle, UK decided to see if he could travel to the other side of the world in 30 days using the kindness of Twitter users to help with transportation, donations and housing, without planning his trip any more than three days in advance. He traveled from Amsterdam, across Europe, to New York, then Los Angeles (where he met Liv Tyler), and concluded his trip in New Zealand.
March 23, 2009. PLAYSTATION: Playstation Home released Xi, a game that required users to look for clues in real life in order to advance the story. Players had to solve puzzles, riddles, and answer questions. The hints were updated daily, requiring constant user participation. About 5 million users played the game for the 12 weeks it lasted. Tracking game information through real-life locations, websites, and advertising.
May 2009. MUBI: The online “movie theater” Mubi formed an alliance with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation. The site promoted and featured online streaming of many of the foundation’s newly restored films.
May 2009. SCRIBD: Scridb launched an online bookstore feature, allowing users to purchase new, exclusive or hard-to-find works, as well as continue to access free documents. The Scribd Store offers a revenue-sharing agreement, giving sellers 80 percent of the revenue, with prices set by the sellers.
June 2009. E3: Beginning in June 2009, a live broadcast of the yearly Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) allowed PlayStation users to watch the expo live from San Francisco through PlayStation Home. Users could view new technology and games from home.
August 6, 2009. TWITTER: A two-hour Denial of Service Attack saturated the site with so many fake requests that the site was unable to return legitimate ones. After the site fixed the problem, users talked about the outage by using the hashtag “#whentwitterwasdown”.
October 2009. TWITTER: “RIP Kanye West” became a Trending Topic on Twitter, with rumors spreading that West had been killed in a car crash. The rumors proved to be untrue.
November 2009. YOUTUBE: Music manager Scooter Braun discovered Justin Bieber after viewing the teen’s YouTube videos of himself singing. Beiber’s Nov. 17, 2009 debut album “My World” became certified platinum in the U.S.November 2009. CollegeBlender was founded. It is a college (student/alumni/faculty) blogging network with advanced commenting tools, an iframe toolbar, open discussion forums, and sections for campus-specific tweets. Users can rate, comment, and tag blogs without limitations, while interacting with all colleges throughout the country. It also includes subcategories from specific topics that interest college life such as: art, design, entertainment, news, sports, etc. An RSS live feed allows users to view updated blogs, the most active users, the more recent users, and more. Users must have a college email to join.
November 18, 2009. EHARMONY: In its advertising, the site misrepresented how many of its users met their spouses through the site. The site presented its statistics as yearly, but numbers used for advertisements actually represented a three-year period.
June 2009. EHARMONY: Members with paid accounts had access to more information than members with non-paid accounts. The site matched paid members with non-paid members, leading to questions about the validity of online matches.
See Part 1 (2003-2006) and Part 3 (2010) of this series.
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