A Brief Cartoon History of Social Networking

To celebrate the opening of their San Francisco Command Center and the 75th Anniversary of The Advertising Research Foundation in New York, the high-tech social analytics company PeopleBrowsr commissioned a brief cartoon history of social networking.

The beautiful artwork by artist Adam Long are like postcards from the past, commemorating some of the notable events that have led to our present social networking culture. These include:

• The Notificator, a message vending machine at British railway stations
• CompuServe, the first computer time sharing service
• CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), a computerized answering system born in the Chicago Blizzard of 1978. It survives today as chinet.
• The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee
• Q-Link, the predecessor to America Online, that connected Commodore computers together (see the 1986 promotional video).
• The 2003 launch of social network systems on the Web, notably Friendster, MySpace, and LinkedIn
• Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp, a hand-picked curation of interesting people coming together for a conference with no set agenda
• The launch of Facebook, which in 6 years would eventually get to 500 million users in July 2010
• Dell Hell, the name given to Dell’s poor customer service
• The launch of Twitter, which just celebrated it’s 5th birthday, and its coming out party at SxSW in 2007.
• A Burger King employee takes a bath in a BK sink, demonstrating to businesses that there is no controlling a brand anymore.
• The Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno met an early death. Twitter buzz is credited. Twitter is also assigned importance in international politics, with the U.S. State Department urging the service to postpone a scheduled maintenance to keep Iranian protestors tweeting.
• The “United Breaks Guitars” trilogy chronicles the poor customer service of United Airlines. Later, Southwest gets a tweetful from filmmaker Kevin Smith, who was deemed “too fat to fly.”
• NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer tweets from space
• Japan’s win over Denmark in the 2010 World Cup sets a record with 3283 tweets per second (tps)
• Charlie Sheen sets a record as the fastest Twitter account to reach 1 million followers.
• Rebecca Black’s video, “Friday,” is at the moment is approaching 38 million views (the artwork pegged it at 18 million) despite being widely panned

The Command Center opened last month with Tim O’Reilly, Brian Solis and others speaking on social media. PeopleBrowsr recently released ReSearch.ly, allowing access to 1,000 days of Twitter data and creating a focus on collective memory.