Who Invented the "Like" Button?

12/27/21 • 10 min

Every major social media platform has a "like" button. It's a core part of Internet culture and a simple measuring stick to determine how popular a piece of content is. But even though it seems obvious today, it wasn't such an obvious way of judging content in the early days of social media.

In this special holiday mini-episode of Web Masters, Aaron shares the story he learned from Jakob Lodwick, founder of Vimeo, about where the "like" button came from and why it worked so well.

In this special holiday mini-episode of Web Masters, Aaron shares the story he learned from Jakob Lodwick, founder of Vimeo, about where the "like" button came from and why it worked so well.

Previous Episode

Milo Medin - @Home: The Farm Boy Who Gave the World Faster Internet

If you're reading this, chances are you'e connected to the Internet all the time. But that wasn't always the case. In the early days of the Web, people would dial into the Internet using their phone lines, do what they needed to online, and then turn off their connections.

That began to change when internet service providers began offering faster, always-on broadband connections separate from people's phone lines. But those faster connections wouldn't have been able to go much faster until one man figured out how to bring the Internet closer to end users. His name is Milo Medin, and he helped found a company called @Home, which introduced cable Internet to the consumer market.

@Home didn't last long, but the infrastructure Milo developed is still the infrastructure we all rely on today for high speed Internet. Find out how -- and why -- he did it on this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Next Episode

Jacob Lodwick @ Vimeo: The Filmmaker Who Pioneered Online Video Sharing

Video streaming is a relatively recent addition to the Web. That shouldn’t surprise anyone with even a cursory knowledge of how the Internet works. Compared with things like text and images, the storage and bandwidth required for online video is obviously significantly higher, and it took a while for the Internet’s infrastructure to be able to handle the larger data loads.

But storage and bandwidth limitations weren’t the only issues. Digital video recording devices are also relatively new. Sure, just about everyone reading this article can easily pull out a phone and start filming high definition video within seconds, but, less than 20 years ago, that wasn’t the case for all but a relatively few video enthusiasts.

One of those enthusiasts was Jacob Lodwick, founder of Vimeo. He’d just graduated college on the East Coast and was heading to San Diego to work on a different startup, and one of his close friends asked him to share updates about life on the West Coast. He decided to share those updates using video, inadvertently helping create the online video sharing industry.

In this Web Masters episode, you'll learn about the origins of online video sharing, the relationship between Vimeo and YouTube, as well as how the platforms grew into having different audiences and purposes.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.