Once upon a time, there was no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube. Our lives did not revolve around a stream of status updates, tweets, videos and filtered photos. That was just 10 years ago. Since Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in his Harvard dorm room on Feb. 4, 2004, we've seen social media evolve from a fad to a phenomenon that has triggered a paradigm shift in the way the world communicates. It has empowered individuals to voice their opinions and concerns and share content on their mobile devices in ways no one could have imagined. Along the way, geopolitics and the world of business has been radically transformed. We saw the dramatic impact social media wielded four years ago. It was a tool that helped spark the Arab Spring—a democratic civil uprising in the Middle East that began in Tunisia in December 2010 that helped force rulers from power in such countries as Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Thanks to Twitter and other social media, people were able to protest and raise awareness in the face of repression. The revolution continues. No doubt, the power of social media is exponential. Numbers tell the story. Today there are 1.3 billion active Facebook users, with 82 percent of them coming from outside the U.S. and Canada. Twitter boasts 270 million active users that send 500 million tweets per day. And each day, 4 billion videos are viewed on YouTube (that's 46,296 per second) and 60 million photos are uploaded on Instagram. The trend has helped these tech disruptors go public at hefty valuations. Facebook, for example, went public in 2012. At the time, it was the biggest in technology and Internet history, with a peak market capitalization of more than $104 million. At press time it had reached a whopping $206.4 billion. Fast-forward to the future, and we should see global social media usage continue on its upward trajectory. In just four years, eMarketer projects it will nearly double by 32.7 percent. By then 2.44 billion of the world's population will be on social networks. While estimates through 2039 are not available, experts agree that by then, use of social media will be ubiquitous and integrated into our daily lives in a multitude of ways. It is expected social media will be integrated into wearables that track our habits, and virtual experiences will be part of the package. The challenge will be coping with the massive amounts of data that will deluge the masses.