- Social media has evolved from early bulletin board systems (BBS) and newsgroups in the 1970s-80s to the rise of instant messaging, blogs, social networks, and user-generated content in the 1990s-2000s. - Key developments include the first use of emoticons in 1982, the limitations of BBS leading to the rise of the internet, the introduction of instant messaging with ICQ in 1996, the launch of early social networks like Friendster and Myspace, and the growth of microblogging and social aggregation. - More recent trends have focused on social graphs, open platforms, semantic web, hyper-syndication of content across different contexts, and the integration