In a previous post, I talked about one of the earliest forms of content sharing – the Email a Friend button. Obviously since then content sharing has evolved significantly. Here are list of content sharing milestones that paint a picture of how content sharing has evolved from its early days:

Bookmarking:
According to the Wikipedia, bookmarks have been incorporated since the debut of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, and soon appeared in most other web browsers. With bookmarking, users started to save links to web content, including articles, locally as bookmarks or favorites.

Email a Friend Button:
Provided basic functionality that allows a user to share a news article or piece of content with a friend or acquaintance via email. This functionality is still a popular way of sharing content, especially news articles and other types of content.

Social Bookmarking:
Social bookmarking, the concept of shared online bookmarks, was really popularized by Delicious in late 2003, which pioneered tagging (although it existed before then). After Delicious, social bookmarking really exploded as dozens of new social bookmarking sites start to appear on the horizon, including Furl, Magnolia, Reddit, Newsvine and many other.

Social Networking:
Social networks, as we know them today, really started with advent of companies like Ryze, Friendster and off course, MySpace. Although some would argue, and rightfully so, that networked online communities existed long before these companies made their appear, the term itself and the idea of full fledged communities that allowed users to interact share content, music, and video was really ushered in by this trio.

Community-based Popularity:
Pioneered by Digg, community-based popularity involved ranking or rating news articles and websites submitted by users, and then promoted them based on how users rated them.

Sharing-based Popularity:
The idea of rating news articles or other content based on how many users actually share them with friends, as opposed to simply rate them. I have argued that sharing-based popularity is actually a better measure of a content’s true popularity than bookmarking-based popularity used by sites like Digg and Delicious. Grouptivity has been a pioneer and proponent of this form of community-based popularity.