Sliced Bread and Social Media Featured
- Written by Jason Feinberg
- Published in Tech Articles
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W hat is it about social media, particularly Facebook, that has attracted more then 750 million people? Is it because it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread? I don’t think so. But let us examine it for what it is.
Prior to the invention of the automatic breadslicer, imagine this, people had to slice their own bread. Prior to this, people had to buy their own unsliced bread and before that, they had to make their own bread.
When the first bakery opened did people say, this is the greatest thing since making my own bread? Perhaps, but the phrase certainly didn’t catch on or it quickly dissolved once it came pre-sliced and packaged.
So, why all the hype with facebook? Social media has been around since the invention of the Internet, albeit in different forms. First there was email, then Usenet groups, then chat groups and so on.
But in 1994 came geocities. What’s that? Geocities (originally Beverly Hills Internet) was what facebook is today, sort of. And it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It allowed users to select a city in which to place their web pages based on the category of their content. Geocities had 38 million users and remained functional for ten years after Yahoo purchased them. Today, it is still available in Japan.
Of course, if you owned a Macintosh back then you were introduced to a little program called eWorld that for Mac users was the greatest thing since sliced bread. eWorld created a social media network between Mac users. This did not last because Apple could not reach a deal with Quantum Computer Services to bundle their own software. Quantum? Oh, you may know them better by the newer name, America Online.
Remember AOL back when AOL came on a CD in the mail with samples of tide? AOL was the greatest thing since sliced bread It was similar to eWorld in the way that bundled everything you needed on the Internet into one location. But even AOL couldn’t contain the web and soon people realized they didn’t have to pay to use the Internet. At its peak, AOL had about 30 million subscribers. Today, just over 5 million.
AOL also launched a neat little application, soon followed by MSN and Yahoo called Instant Messaging.
It was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
You didn’t have to email any one. You could just type in live text, click send and the other person would see that text instantly. (And just think, someday we would have a telephone).
In time, AOL would be capable of sending files and supporting both live audio and video.
Then came the year 2000. Y2K didn’t quite have the impact of world destruction that everyone anticipated but instead the so-called bubble burst and all of the dot com would- be’s and has beens and ones that were soon-to-be’s were all but wiped out. I guess in someway it was like clearing the playing field. Who knows what some of the companies were working on, that failed before they even started.
In 2002 what looked like a new concept was started. It was called Friendster and you guessed it, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. One in 126 Internet users at the time belonged to Friendster. In its first three months they had 3 million users. How is this possible? What do you mean you don’t remember Friendster? Well, it was only a year later that the next best thing came about. It was called MySpace…
And it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Myspace allowed people to be themselves and completely customize their own pages or their own space. What was most impressive was Myspace was coded in about 10 days. However, it appears they either did not anticipate the growth or the 10 days of caffeine fueled programming may have left out some important code that allowed the site to crash. In either case MySpace would grow to over a quarter of a billion people before the next best thing.
It was now 2004 and what started out as a way to rate the hottest girls evolved into what can only be described as, dare I say it, the greatest thing since sliced bread. Are you seeing a pattern here? Oddly enough, for something that garnered a major motion picture, there were no facebook action figures, facebook posters, and facebook soundtracks. In fact facebook is missing some of the features of the past social media sites. But they have achieved enough users to be the equivalent of the third largest country.
In order of grandeur, Twitter hardly seems befitting to follow Facebook but it is what came next and I would hard-pressed to say, it’s the greatest thing since blah blah blah, however, people do think this even if it has less users then myspace.
The point here is there are only so many times and so many ways you can slice bread. Are the slices different or was it the bread? Is this invention, innovation or simply modification?
If I create a website similar to Twitter but I allow users 150 characters instead of 140, haven’t I built a better product; Or if I add that one new feature that twitter doesn’t have?
If I created a Facebook style site but made it simpler with more vibrant colors with integrated audio and video, then have I built a better mouse trap that grows to over a billion users in its first year?
In both cases while I am sure there was innovative programming and pushing the envelope I’m failing to see something tangible. Something real.
Where does this end? At some point people will get tired of moving from place to place. People like to remain in place yet need to be stimulated. We have become dependent almost unnecessarily so on social media. We have always had the tools to communicate and the tools to do that instantly. Radio, television, and the telephone were all inventions long before social media. And while there have been improvements to each, not one product brand has stood out since. Additionally, with those improvements, none of them has replaced the other.
Someday the next best thing will replace the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. I just hope at some point someone asks are these things really the greatest thing since sliced bread or did we just make them as easy as pie?
