If we’re counting forums as the as forerunners to social media, then I’m going to say that Usenet was my first experience. I was a huge gamer and when the Sega Dreamcast was due to be launched on September 9th, 1999 (I will remember that day for ever) I was an active member of the Dreamcast group. It was a place for people to share their thoughts, post pictures, network and talk about a common interest. It was social and there was media. It was social media in my opinion. Everything was limited by connection speeds and capabilities of browsers but I think it paved the way for what we have today.

But I do remember getting Facebook in 2006 and being confused by the whole concept. I thought it was dumb (you want to post pictures and make friends with people you don’t know?). At the encouragement of friends I signed up using my university e-mail, which you needed in those days, and started friending people. I even met a girl that would later be my girlfriend on Facebook. She just got an account and thought that she should add everybody at our university as a friend. I received the friend request and assumed I should know her because I didn’t think people added strangers to Facebook. After chatting back and forth I realized I didn’t know her but we eventually met and dated. We are not together any more but it’s a good story!

Facebook groups have replaced Usenet groups but the concept is the same. People want to share what they know and experience with other people who are interested.

I recall being in middle school when AOL Canada CDs would come in the mail offering you a free 3 month subscription for internet services. At this time, I had an AOL account with the pen name “soccerpal”. Yes, I used to play a lot of competitive soccer, hence the name. I would participate in chat rooms which was really the first of my social media experiences. People within the chat room would exchange information with updates daily on topics from school related issues to soccer plays and much more. Just like the above post, my MSN name has always reflected a quotation, update of what I am doing, or other tidbit of information. Then when I was in highschool a friend of mine tried to get me to use Facebook. After researching it a bit, I set up an account. It wasn’t until first year university that I really got into it. At this point, it was a great tool to keep in touch with friends abroad. From there my experiences have flourished with social media.

It was roughly in 2000, in my late elementary school days that I became introduced to Forums and Messaging Boards. I too was also an avid gamer, who was obsessed with learning as much as I could about my favourite video games, and it was at this same time I became an active member of a forum board, coincidentally also Gamefaqs.

Two years later I was introduced to the closest thing to social networking after forum boards and blogs…Friendster and AsianAvenue. Yes, yes, I’ll admit, I was member and joined the sites to see what the big fuss was about. Word of theses sites was spreading like wild fire in my high school, but I didn’t find either to be engaging. It just didn’t offer anything that caught my attention. It was just a personalized websites with some fancy pictures and layouts (if you knew what you were doing), and at times, you had to wait forever for a page to load.

Fast forward to late 2005, in my first year of university where I joined Facebook. This is the site that made me become obsessed with social media as everything was easy to use and very user friendly. To connect with friends in an easy manner, share photos and videos, and just goofing around writing on people’s walls, it made the social media experience much more engaging and intriguing. I was originally conflicted and opposed to the site becoming mainstream to the public, rather than being exclusive to post-secondary school students, but it was only a matter of time…

@Matthew Michell: I think I still have one of those AOL CDs sitting in a box somewhere at home.
@James & @John: Nice to meet some fellow gamers!

For some Internet nostalgia I recommend http://www.waybackmachine.org

For example: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/19990508070818/http://www3.yahoo.com/

I guess the fruit does not fall far from the tree. I am also a gamer myself. Haha. Anything from Ultima Online to Counter Strike and World of Warcraft. Pretty addictive stuff, isn’t it? Lol. Forum would be almost like bibles, I guess they still are. Well, but I think my first social media experience would be those corny /creepy animated PPT presentations you would receive by email and was supposed to send to another 10 friends or something bad or lucky would happen to you. (would that count as social media already? haha) Unfortunately my mom used to love those! OMG! I could never understand that, how was that possible? And I would receive the same thing over and over again from my aunts, cousins, etc. During those times I used to call her a freak.

As time went by, like some genetic stuff, her freakiness started to hit me I. I would try anything on-line who would promise some connections with some different people. First of all messengers: mIRC, ICQ, MSN. Then blogs, I’ve tried two or three different ones. Then communities: myspace, orkut, flickr, youtube, even second life and voila, I was a freak too.

Luckily I was able to pull the plug and shut everything off for a while. Not that much with games though, but I’ve learned to manage that. Then the freak became cool! So I started again with facebook, ok, I can deal with that. Linkedin, ok, I might need that. Twitter. Oh, oh, that might be too addictive. But still, if wasn’t for those, I would not be writing here today, so, thank you social addictive world.

Ps. If anyone has any of those animated PPT, please send to me! I would love to send it to my mom, watch her go crazy and see the world to know the latest hit on viral! hahaha

My first social media experience was probably, embarrassingly enough, the website meetmeinto.com. It was a social networking website that was widely by my fellow High School students. We all used it for a few months until bigger and better things came along— namely Facebook. Now, I am an avid consumer and producer of social media, I love blogging, reading forums, tumblr, Wikipedia, etc., but I still pale in comparison to some of my friends. Recently, I have been coerced into playing Starcraft II, which was interesting, but what really fascinated me was the strength of their online gaming community. There are daily videos, suggestions for Blizzard (Starcraft’s developer), discussions of the games, live tournaments, etc. A tight-knit community has been build on social media, it has a powerful voice with regards to the quality of Blizzard’s games, which in turn allows Blizzard to listen to their consumers and perfect their product. I bring up Starcraft because I think it shows how far social media has come and the potential it has, having become a viable vehicle for communication and interaction between a variety of actors.

I consider my first social media experience to be a while back, by the time I was about to graduate. My girlfriend at the time was coercing me into creating my own account and joining this new on-line community known as MySpace. At the time I was only interested in blogs and forums belonging to current tv shows and movies, it took some adjusting before I could feel comfortable with it as I didn’t always like to post my personal information somewhere that everybody could see it.

I while later I also joined facebook, mostly to keep in touch with old and current school buddies. I felt it was pretty cool considering how hard it is to keep in touch with people after everyone goes their separate ways. Nevertheless because of its limits I kept favoring MySpace because of all the possibilities it could offer, such as customizing the background and adding music to my profile. It was the closest thing to becoming an on-line celebrity, I now celebrated and shared who I was, what I liked and what I did, and managed to make even more friends in the process.

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