I’ve been making and updating my social media timeline for a number of years now. And, I share the image widely whenever anyone needs to use it. Without fail, I get emails every few months asking what the platforms are what as the image only has the logo over a date. I have kept details of which logo is which in the Photoshop file I create the image in, so I can go get that for people and pass it along. Though, I have been wanting to create a different way to interact with the timeline for a while now.
It’s never going to be a perfectly complete timeline. There are so many social platforms that come and go across the world. I try to update it at least once a year, but in reality it’s as good as I can make it, and I can only add in things as I learn about them, do my research, and go through the iOS App Store. I did, this time, pull in data from my history of social media pages, so there are around 159 platforms included here; mostly Western, but also with some of the big hitters I know of from other parts of the world.
The interactive timeline above was created from the image that I pulled into a spreadsheet that records name, launch date, a bit of info about it, is it live or not (something I decided not to include in the timeline above as these things fluctuate and updating would require a fair bit of time to keep it continually current), thematic groupings, the app logo.
To use it, you can scroll along the x axis, and partially tilt along the y axis, but not for the full 3d rendering - that made it really hard to see. Clicking on a year pops up each platform from that year with labels. Each platform can be clicked to get a pop up with the theme, a little bit about what it is, and the logo icon. You can also toggle on and off ALL platforms. All the themes are colour coded and the platform nodes match these. You can toggle a theme on and off to see all of them across the spread of years too.
Essentially, it’s just a fun way to visualise the timeline, and I hope it's useful.