Development of Social Media Forms: An Overview
The Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project has been examining the Internet's impacts on society since 1999 and began reporting on social
media in 2005. A fall 2009 Pew survey reported that 79% of American adults used
the Internet, and of these, 59% reported use of at least one social networking site.
Among Internet users, Facebook was used by 92%, Myspace by 29%, Linkedln by
18% and Twitter by 6% (Hampton, Goulet, Ramie, & Purcell, 2011). In tenns of
the history of social media, both blogs and social networking sites were the first
types to emerge and together account for roughly 25% of all Internet use (Nielsen,
2011). Pew generally does not rank social media websites. Available rankings
usually reflect a website's registered users and/or website traffic. Just as the
population of social media websites changes constantly, the data on the rankings
of all social media websites is highly variable due to both change in the population
of the websites and the variety of methodologies employed to gather the data