Galleries. Facebookers Watch 150 Years Of YouTube Videos Daily. Hackers and hippies: The origins of social networking. 25 January 2011Last updated at 08:16 By Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent, BBC News The first Community Memory terminal at Leopold's Records in 1973 People that have been to see last year's blockbuster The Social Network, could be forgiven for thinking that the rise of sites like Facebook started just a few years ago. But to find the true origins of social networking you have to go further back than 2004. In a side street in Berkeley California, the epicentre of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, I found what could well be the birthplace of the phenomenon.
Standing outside what was once a shop called Leopold's Records, former computer scientist Lee Felsenstein told me how, in 1973, he and some colleagues had placed a computer terminal in the store next to a musicians' bulletin board - of the analogue variety. They had invited passers-by, mainly students from the University of California, Berkeley, to come and type a message in to the computer. "We were wrong. Network crisis. FOURSQUARE: We Grew 3,400% Last Year, Here's What It Looks Like. Americans Spending More Time on Twitter. The amount of time online Americans spent tweeting and reading tweets on Twitter grew an estimated 18.9% in 2010, while the number of US online adults paying a monthly visit to the microblogging site fell 14% during the same period, according to data from Experian Simmons DataStream.
As of November 29, 2010, 8.25 million adults had made at least one visit to Twitter during the previous 30 days, down from 9.54 million adults who had done so during the same period a year earlier. However, on average, Americans spent more time on Twitter in 2010—roughly 21 minutes—from an estimated 1 hour and 51 minutes in November 2009, to 2 hours and 12 minutes in November 2010. Among those who use Twitter, however, visit frequency has increased, while the duration of visits has fallen: Visit frequency: Users visited Twitter 10.0 times per month as of late November 2010,up 37% from 7.3 times per month a year earlier (blue lines on chart below).
Big Data in Real-Time at Twitter.