2005: social media?

About five years after its launch, last Sunday evening, You Tube announced that they are now receiving two billion hits per day. On their official blog they wrote:

Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself. [Link to full post]

Not only is the two billion milestone noteworthy, but the fact that the site is five years old is also well worth noting.

There’s a good argument that 2005 was the pivotal year in the shaping of the Internet as we know it. You Tube was founded, Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook up to schools across America, and Yahoo acquired two year-old Del.icio.us and one year-old Flickr.

For the sake of nostalgia, here is what some of these websites looked like back then, five years ago.

• You Tube

Billed rather simply as a digital photo repository back in 2005 – their logo has hardly changed a bit in the last five years. The homepage design obviously owes quite a bit to Google’s, who, in any case, bought the site in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.

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• Google

In 2005 Google was already looking fairly grown up and confident. Very few changes were made to this minimalist homepage design until just a few weeks ago.

You’ll spot here that back then Google were busy promoting Froogle, their price comparison service which was later rebranded as Google Product Search.

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• Blogger

In May 2005, blogger was already six years old. Therefore it predates Web 2.0 and is one of a few notable survivors of the Dot Com Crash in 2000. It had been acquired by Google in 2003 and by the time of this screenshot it was by far the most popular blogging software available.

In May 2005 they launched Blogger Mobile, which allowed people to blog by text message –making them, by my reckoning, just about two years too early.

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• WordPress

WordPress would supplant Blogger in popularity over the next few years. It’s interesting to note, however, their reasons for encouraging people to use their software. ‘You can stop sending mass emails to everyone’, ‘You can archive your thoughts’ and ‘Why the heck not?’

Indeed.

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• Facebook

Facebook has retained this familiar feel from the start, but its evolution has been a little more complex than most.

Back in 2005 there were two Facebooks, one for people in college and one for people in high school. All the dots would be joined up over the next year as it began the march that would see it become the most popular site in America.

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• The BBC

Back in 2005 I had never written a blog, had never used Facebook and only seen a handful of You Tube videos, but I was already mildly addicted to the Internet. And from a sunny Madrid and a fitful Internet connection, the BBC’s official site was where I spent most of my time.

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• The Guardian

And 2005 was a time before guardian.co.uk existed. Back then it was known as the Guardian Unlimited – a website that promised such things as ‘All the headlines from today’s first edition.’

From that I suppose you can summise that the website was still being considered as some kind of digital reflection of the newspaper – and not really a strong publication in its own right.

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• Flickr

Flickr now hosts more than four billion images and is the most popular image sharing site on the web. Back in 2005 PC World were offering them some kind words:

‘Cutting edge real-time photo sharing’, they said. They were right.

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• And in 2006 … Twitter

Twitter didn’t exist in 2005 and it wouldn’t appear properly until more than a year or so later. Therefore it’s just tagged on to the end of this post. It’s a good demonstation of  just what can be done in four years with a scruffily designed website, a clever idea and a willingness to stick with your logo through thick and thin.

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Top image credit: TonVC on Flickr

Screen shots pulled out of the Way Back Machine