Though Social media has been around for almost a decade now, 2011 is when it seems to have come of age. It is no longer the place where cool kids meet over to discuss about lovely cats. Social media is significant enough to cause revolutions and topple governments. Let us look at some of the major social media events of 2011.

Arab Spring

The biggest event of 2011 is the Arab Spring. It all started on 18th December 2010, when a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire. While in the past, this could have been relegated to a small 3 line note in a local newspaper, social media took it to ignite fire. And from Jan 2011, this fire started spreading massively due to the virality of the social media. By 14th January the Tunisian President had to flee his country. Within days it spread eastward and Egyptian President had to quit on February 11 after a desperate attempt to cling to power. The most power dictator in the Arab world – Libyan leader Gadaffi was thrown in August.

Google+ and the battle for social media

On June 28, 2011 Google joined the battle with Facebook in Social media. Even though Google had Orkut before, this was the first serious attempt by Google to challenge the status quo in social media. They brought a clean interface, long post sizes, video hangouts with friends and a way to group friends to target posts for them. Soon Facebook and Twitter joined the battle too. Facebook brought Timeline, video chats, friend subscription like Twitter and real time tickers to monitor your friend activities. The users had a great time with the flurry of features.

Occupy wall street

Inspired by the protests in Arab world and helped by social media, on September 17 protestors started to occupy Zuccotti park near Wall Street in New York to protest against banks and government’s preferential treatment towards them. It all started with a blog post in June by a Canadian based small anti-consumerist foundation. Within 2 months the movement spread all over the world, with the slogan – “We are the 99%” echoing in all major business centers in the world.

Kolaveri Di

Until this year, viral social media entertainment was mostly restricted to the developed world, especially the US. India had no real Internet celebrity and main stream media was calling all the shots. That was until November 16, when a small time actor in South India, Dhanush launched a music video for his upcoming movie. What appeared as a simple youtube video upload and seeded in Facebook by a small marketing company became instantly viral. In just one month whole India was engulfed by the song with 20 million plus hits in just Youtube and variety of imitations. Though, the video has not gone much outside India, in terms of sheer numbers the video reached it must be one of the biggest hits ever.

Wikileaks shaking governments

In late November 2010, Wikileaks – a nonprofit social media organization, produced 200 documents from US diplomatic cables – US diplomat insider analysis on various governments and events – sent to 5 major newspapers in the world. By the start of this year the leaks got enormous momentum and over 25000 diplomatic cables were leaked and governments across the world were shaken.