social media, a form of communications on the (such as on for and microblogging) through which users share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos). and social media are overlapping concepts, but social networking is usually understood as users building communities among themselves while social media is more about using social networking sites and related platforms to build an audience.What do you think? Explore the ProCon debateThe earliest forms of social media appeared almost as soon as could support them. E-mail and chat programs debuted in the early 1970s, but persistent communities did not surface until the creation of the discussion group in 1979. USENET allowed users to post and receive messages within subject areas called . USENET and other discussion forums, such as privately hosted (BBSs), enabled individuals to interact, but each was essentially a closed system. With the release in 1993 of the Mosaic web , those systems were joined with an easy-to-use graphical interface. The architecture of the made it possible to navigate from one site to another with a click, and faster Internet connections allowed for more multimedia content than could be found in the text-heavy newsgroups.The first companies to create social networks based on web technology were and SixDegrees.com. Classmates.com, founded in 1995, used an aggressive pop-up campaign to draw web surfers to its site. It based its social network on the existing connection between members of high-school and college graduating classes, armed service branches, and workplaces. was the first true social networking site. It was launched in 1997 with most of the features that would come to characterize such sites: members could create profiles for themselves, maintain lists of friends, and contact one another through the site’s private messaging system. SixDegrees.com claimed to have attracted more than three million users by 2000, but it failed to translate those numbers into and collapsed with countless other dot-coms when the “” burst that year for shares of companies., Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks. [1][2] Common features include: [2] The term social in regard to media suggests platforms enable communal activity., Social media are communications on the Internet (such as on websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)..