Mediaboss Marketing

All of these sites allow users to create and share content with an audience the essential media element that email is missing. On all sites, there are methods of connection and building a network: Facebook friends, followers on Twitter and connections on LinkedIn. In many cases, you will not have met all of these connections in real life (although that is less true in the case of Facebook friends), so followers can often represent more of an "audience"than being actual collaborators.

Social media is also closely associated with "Web 2.0" the concept of the "second stage"of the web popularised by Tim OReilly and Dale Dougherty. In the first stage of the web, users were limited to passive viewing of content; for example, they would go to a website and be able to access its information, but not be able to interact with it.

With Web 2.0, the Internet is thought of as a platform in itself, where people are essentially building applications within it. The more people collaborating, the better the applications get, and where users are able to interact with the content and create their own.

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What is social media and how did it grow so quickly? - Telegraph.co.uk