Bits and Bytes OnLine: The stone pillars of social media

Do you have a favorite social media website?

It was surprising when a new survey published by our friends at Pew Research stated seven out of 10 Americans do not participate in online social media websites.

For those of us who do, the name of this highest-rated social media website by Pew will not surprise too many folks; Facebook.

Facebook dominates the online real estate market with 2.8 billion active users.

In 2004, Facebook’s website URL (Uniform Resource Locator) first appeared on the internet as Thefacebook.com.

Facebook purchased the Facebook.com domain name Aug. 23, 2005, for a reported $200,000, and switched to it.

Facebook owns 78 companies, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram social media platforms.

They also control company ownership in software marketing, search engines, language processing, virtual reality, mobile commerce, tracking/monitoring applications – you get the idea, they possess a lot.

I have been a registered and active user on Facebook since Jan. 31, 2009.

Some folks do not look at Facebook in a positive light, and I can understand it.

The Facebook political forums can, and do get very heated. So, I instead choose to participate in groups such as Fans of Laurel and Hardy, Apollo Spacecraft History, 1970s Memories, Boxing Knowledge, Vintage Ads, and of course, Star Trek The Original Series.

Friends of the Luce Line West is another Facebook group that posts photos and information about the 63-mile-long Luce Line hiking, biking, equestrian, and snowmobiling trail.

The main reason I stay on Facebook is that it provides an effortless way to share videos and photos, and communicate with many of my siblings, kids, relatives, and friends who are also members.

In a way, the “virtual community” nostalgia from the pre-web days still lives on through our participation in social media websites.

YouTube, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, makes up the other online social media pillar with 2.3 billion users.

The first video was uploaded to YouTube April 23, 2005. It was “Me at the Zoo,” by YouTube co-founder Karim.

Karim filmed his 19-second video at the San Diego Zoo in front of a corral containing a few elephants.

“All right, so here we are in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really, long trunks, and that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say,” commented the 25-year-old Karim during the video.

As of this writing, Karim’s “Me at the Zoo” video has received 171.5 million views and 11 million comments.

In November 2006, Karim, Hurley, and Chen sold their interests in YouTube.

Those making offers included Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft, and Google.

YouTube accepted the final offer from Google.

The Denny’s restaurant, near YouTube’s headquarters above a pizza and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, CA, is where the Google and YouTube folks signed the deal while sitting in a booth.

Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion Nov. 13, 2006, which today would be around $2.2 billion.

YouTube is now estimated to be worth $170 billion, which is a pretty good return on Google’s initial purchase price.

At the time of the YouTube acquisition, Google operated an online video service at videogoogle.com. This website went online three weeks before YouTube was founded.

Google shut down video.google.com Aug. 20, 2012.

Each day, YouTube receives 720,000 hours’ worth of video uploads, and people watch an estimated five billion videos.

Google has a market cap (capitalization) value of $1.65 trillion.

In June, Facebook joined the trillion-dollar club as its market cap value reached $1.06 trillion.

Amazon has a reported market capitalization value of $1.68 trillion.

And yes, there are technology companies with a market cap of over $2 trillion.

Apple Inc. reached a value cap of $2.1 trillion July 31, 2020, and this month, Microsoft’s market cap value will also be $2.1 trillion.

Twitter receives a lot of publicity. Therefore, one would think it would rank right up there with the other two social media pillars; however, it currently has just under 200 million active users worldwide.

In case you were wondering, Twitter has a market cap of $55.2 billion.

Facebook and YouTube are today’s social media stone pillars and will probably remain so into the foreseeable future.