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So what was going on around social media right this second 5 years ago? MySpace was America’s no.1 website. YouTube was still a starter. Facebook was used only by high school and college students. What’s “mobile”? No idea at all until the launching of iPhone one year later. And “widgets” was not popular until 2007.

And what are the pictures now? Facebook will soon replace Google as the most visited website. Its “Like” buttons are like money to publishers. iPhone and its applications are on demand.

How did we get to this point? Here’s a quick look back at the last five years in social media.

The News Feed Unites All

In late 2006, Facebook introduced the news feed – a controversial concept at the time (incidentally, there are many parallels between it and Facebook’s most recent privacy issues) that has since become perhaps the most important and oft-imitated feature in social networking. It’s hard to remember life before the news feed, but it consisted mostly of visiting your friend’s profiles, making wall comments and perhaps maintaining a photo gallery. For Facebook, this innovation (and a lack of innovation by then leading social network MySpace ) is the one that established the service’s utility and has been at the heart of its expansion since – showing you at a glance what your friends are up to on Facebook and around the Web. Nowadays, whether it’s Twitter , Foursquare , Flickr or yes, MySpace, the experience very much centers around seeing the most recent updates from your friends, in reverse-chronological order.

Video Emerges as Social Media’s Perfect Compliment

In February 2005, YouTube was born. By December of the same year, it became the most visited video website. By July 2006, it served a hundred million video views. Just when YouTube had its 18-month birthday in October, it was bought by YouTube for $1.6 billion! YouTube claimed its crown for being the most innovative social media of the last 10 years at the end of 2009, serving as a hub of various kinds of tutorial given by gurus of different domains to gibberish talk by anyone with a video camera.

Social Networks Spread Their Wings

At the beginning of 2008, social platforms started competing over users’ ID. Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and MySpace were launched one after another, hoping to see users’ profiles across the Internet. The Facebook Open Graph successfully attracted millions of websites to add its plugins while Twitter and MySpace formed alliance with Google Friend Connect, connecting similar numbers of sites.

Mobile Makes Social Indispensible

Social media is no longer operated in the desktop or laptop setting. After 10 years of speculation and the introduction of smartphones in the last few years, social media finally became mobile.

Research says that, excluding the downloading of applications, 30% of users visit social networking websites on their smartphones.

Thanks to increasing mobile broadband speeds, video is also going mobile. YouTube now serves up 100 million videos to mobile devices each day, and with more and more new phones offering video capture capabilities, we’re also seeing smartphones become an important part of content production.

Up Next Is…

Now that we’ve established where we are – a social ecosystem that’s moving beyond the walls of individual sites to mobile devices and third-party applications – the question is: what’s next? Over the next month, we’ll be exploring some of the past five years more in-depth, and concluding with a look at what the next five years hold. Stay tuned to Mashable as we celebrate our five year anniversary!

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categories: social media, history, background, review, future, development, improvement, documentary, 5 years, facebook, twitter, flickr, myspace, connect, connection