The Social Media Marketing Book

History

The first social bookmarking site, ITList, launched in April 1996, and from that point until the pop of the first dot-com bubble, a plethora of sites offering public and private online storage of your favorite links emerged. However, most of them died in the late 1990s.

In 1997, Slashdot was launched as a place where users could submit links to technology stories. It became enormously popular, and was the first social media site to wield server-crushing amounts of traffic, known as the Slashdot Effect, when a link was posted to its home page. Two years later, a site called Fark was launched to serve a less technical and more irreverent niche. Shortly after its launch, Fark expanded to allow readers other than the site's owner to upload links.

Figure 6-1. Sphinn is an example of the numerous niche social voting sites on the Web.

Social news and bookmarking reached its widest audience with the advent of Delicious in 2003 and Digg in 2004. Digg relies on the wisdom of its audience to filter the most interesting articles from the thousands that are submitted every day.